[Khida's Scrapbook] The Curve of the Wind

[Khida]

I hear you there! Half of my "discipline", I think, is actually self-competition. If no external bar exists, I will make one up. And then -- see tail end of original post above -- I'll want to do better than that once I've reached it. If there is an external bar and it's just plain out of my likely reach (like NaNo, at present), then it has zero motivational power for me. But anything that seems like I can reach it... I'm apt to go for. (Which has resulted in me taking on way too many things in lab/analysis... but that's a whole other story.) I do well with accountability, also -- or rather, my own perception thereof. Not necessarily that someone else is making sure I meet goals... but if I have said to others that I'm going to do XYZ, that's a whole other level than just saying it to myself. So that can be a useful trick. Or a trap.

[Khida]

Apologies to all of my thread partners -- I got rather consumed by RL the past couple of weeks. I'll be catching up on the many posts I owe over the next few days and should be more present from here out.

[Timshel]

You know, I was once excited to thread in Ahnatep. Then no one ever responded.

...

Kidding, of course. Hope you're hog-tying that dissertation. To keep things relevant, here's an interesting paragraph on writing:

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

[Khida]

Advanced Science and Portability ...and a small rant. First, some background information. As I've probably stated earlier in this scrapbook, I'm a graduate student in genetic research. My lab is currently being moved from the university campus to a newly renovated space downtown -- not because we wanted to go, mind you. I could give a whole different rant on that; I won't. In any case, "my lab" is part and parcel of a larger center, which includes probably a dozen faculty and a core facility with expensive high-tech instruments. The whole center is moving, in two parts; I'm one of the (un)lucky ones slated for the first half of the move. Which happens next week... unless the architects haven't by then finished fixing the wiring they mucked up. ...I could write another post about the architects, and I didn't even have to deal with them directly. Let's just say it's no real surprise they basically threw the electrical plans out a window. Anyway, after most of a year spent planning and preparing for this move, now we're all actually doing tear-down and cleaning of the lab space. The large and expensive equipment, we're having the manufacturers' field reps come in to deinstall and box up. They also will handle the reinstall on the other side. But everything else gets wiped down, disinfected, and organized (though thankfully not boxed) by us labrats for the movers to haul -- from the benches to the tabletop centrifuges to the -80 C (-112 F) freezers. We have a lot of -80 freezers. And -20 C (-4 F) freezers. And fridges. Not to mention everything else. That's a lot of cleaning, even when you don't touch the insides. So while I was immersed in near-mindless moving preparations today, I got to thinking about genetic labs, their equipment, and certain genres of novel/movie and the 'secret renegade science lab' such media features. There's one case in particular which has always rubbed me the wrong way. I like the book it's in quite a lot, and I am very amused that said secret lab starts out in a town within shouting distance (for rural definitions thereof) from my own hometown. But... a full-featured lab with advanced genetic sequencing equipment, tucked away in a defunct restaurant in an abandoned town? Where at one point they just pack everything upand disappear in a couple of days, if not overnight? ...right. I can suspend disbelief on a lot of things, especially when I'm already halfway into a book I otherwise very much like, but... this point was difficult, even before I got involved in actually relocating a major lab facility IRL. Now... So very much of our equipment requires individual circuits and draws absurd amounts of power. Arranging things so power is available where it needs to be isn't the given one might expect. Quite a few instruments, especially the most advanced (and expensive), really need to be installed by dedicated professionals if they're going to give data worth anything. Several things need to be isolated from everything else -- the aforementioned sequencer in particular cannot be subjected to vibrations while it's in operation. As in, 'do not even touch the table'. Irony there is that our sequencer is a miniaturized version most akin to what a hypothetical secret lab would be likely to have. Some equipment doesn't really handle power interruptions gracefully -- we'll all have our fingers crossed desperately hoping our freezers come back to temperature when they get plugged in at the new space. Even new ones can just go 'pfft' if you're not lucky. I could go on, but I'll wrap this up. A fictional renegade scientist can cut corners that my real-life lab won't and can't -- but only by so much and still get that plot-driving data. Near-future advances in technology can plausibly knock the finicky requirements down a bit -- but only so far, when you're talking near future. When it comes down to it, at a certain level of research, there's very much a trade-off between the experiments a lab can perform and their ability to pack up and relocate on a moment's notice. It'd be rather more pleasant if we could just go and be done in a day or two!

[Khida]

Activity, Again See prior post about lab move, involved nature thereof. It's still an ongoing process. As of yesterday, the moving company has finally been packing and moving the equipment and general (non-chemical) supplies. While our lab manager is in the new building overseeing placement of things, I seem to have volunteered myself into being coordinator on the source side -- directing the lab people around, giving the movers assignments, finding all the things that got overlooked, making sure all the equipment is taken out right, double- triple- and quadruple-checking, etc., etc. It's no end of amazing how much stuff is still coming out of the woodwork... even after three different 'lab purge' events this year. So at the end of the day, I'm worn out, kinda sore, and entirely depleted. I owe a bunch of posts and a few PMs, I know; hopefully everyone I owe can bear with me a little bit more here. Tomorrow will finish up the moving, and then we take a day to clean all the dusty corners, and then the lab part is completed and I am free... of this, at least.

[Khida]

And... more apologies. But when it rains, it pours -- both figuratively and literally. I've had two separate water-leakage crises. More metaphorically, somewhere in all the busyness of the lab move, I picked up a bug from someone. It literally laid me out flat for a week, and my recovery has been a rather slow seep, not the elastic bounce which is more typical. Which is rather concerning. I have vacation coming up in nine days, at long, long last -- but only two weeks of it, and the Year of the Dissertation looms nigh. Coming into that flat, with respect to energy and drive, really doesn't bode well... With regards to Miz... My goal this next week is to catch up on my current post and message debts, and over vacation get as many threads done as I can. In the longer term, I expect I will be less active than my 'norm', but I'm going to aim for more consistently active than I've been over the last three months. Fewer total threads, in other words, but hopefully evening out the boom-and-bust cycle I seem to have been following lately.

[Khida]

*looks at last post* Yeah, that didn't happen...

I haven't been active for a (long!) while, and I'm sorry for that; I'm also grateful beyond words to my thread partners for being patient with this, though it's meant postponing quite a bit. The last 10 months or so have been a headlong, pedal-to-the-metal charge towards the end of my graduate education. (This might seem a long time for a 'headlong charge', but I have five not-exactly-overlapping projects. It adds up.) I'm frankly glad I don't have to count hours put in; the tally would be sorely depressing. "By the way, your funding is running out; wrap everything up" is quite enough by itself...

I'm not quite done yet, which also means I'm not fully back to Mizahar. My thesis goes in this week, my defense is in two weeks. Then I have a month to finish up at my current lab, and a few weeks to prepare for a cross-country move. And the move itself. All told, I probably won't resume threading in the present until Fall, but in the meantime I'm going to work on picking up the pieces of my plots, clearing out the cobwebs, and hopefully moving along some stalled threads. The immediate to-do list looks something like this:

• OOC regrouping; plotnote and CS updates
• finish the lore article I have 75% done...
• grading
• resume Khida's stalled threads
• flashbacks on Khida and Eleret

I'm prioritizing Khida, obviously; her activity currently affects the most other players. Eleret takes second because she's committed to the Syka quest. My others are in positions where they can hold, and I expect to let them do so for a little while longer.

[Gossamer]

I'm glad to see you back, even if its a gradual reintroduction. Your writing is always lovely to read and I think when you write you bring the best parts out of others as well.

[Khida]

Oh, thank you! It means a lot that you think so.

[Khida]

I have successfully defended my doctoral dissertation.



...and I think that says everything which needs saying about my day.