Frustration

For the past week I’ve felt very frustrated and I’m not really sure why.  I think it is because for the past 4 solid months (minus the one week hiatus while I was on vacation) I’ve been doing ridiculous amounts of work and running a lot of experiments and now that I’ve defended my Masters I’ve sort of hit a wall where I’m figuring out what needs to be done next and preparing to submit a paper for publication next month.  I think I have all the data I need to submit, based on the other papers by researchers in my area and what is included in their characterization papers, and it’s all written, I just need to extract it from my thesis and organize it into publication structure.  I think I could do this in a fairly reasonable time frame, probably before I go to Jazz Fest, but I want to meet with Monty to make sure he’s on the same page.  I feel like I know how I want my research papers to be structured but I’m not sure how to make sure they line up with his expectations other than to just ask (although that makes me a little worried about what I might hear!)  I also want to know what he expects of us before we prelim because all he has specified to date is that we have to have a first author research paper.  I already have one paper, but it’s a review paper, so by the end of the summer (fingers crossed) the paper I’m preparing will be submitted and accepted so that I’ll be able to prelim in the November/December time frame.  I’m not sure how this fits into the Monty grand scheme of things…

I’m tired of reading, but there are several things with my work that I am thinking about tweaking but each one requires a ton more background reading.  Since I’ve been doing so many experiments lately it feels weird to now spend like 80% of my time reading and only 20% on experiments, but I can’t do the experiments until I read so… sort of stuck where I am.  This perceived drop in productivity also makes me feel really guilty about going on some of my weekend trips coming up, and I feeling really weird about taking off because I feel like I should get a bunch of work done, and have a bunch of data to analyze so that when I go on the trip it’s a slight pause between the experimenting and the subsequent data analysis.  Instead I feel like I’ll be leaving my reading and coming back to more reading, not like I “earned” the weekend by getting a lot of results.

I’m not sure why I put this crazy pressure on myself -- yes I want to finish my PhD in a reasonable amount of time and if I’m here for 6 years it’s not the end of the world, but I’d like to graduate in May 2013.  When research is going smoothly I feel like this shouldn’t be an issue, but when I’m sort of mulling things over it feels like I’m going to be here forever.  I’m not really in a hurry to leave because I love the people here and Keegan has a good job in Raleigh, but it sort of feels like all the big things that come with being married and growing up (having kids, buying a house, etc) get put on hold or at least are very difficult to finagle and afford when you’re in school.

Other areas of my life are less frustrating though (yes, I have other areas of my life than school!  Sort of.)  Keegan and I have been spending a lot of time with his friends from undergrad and it’s really nice to get out and do things with people our own age that we don’t see at work.  In fact, one of his closest friends is South African and invited us to come with him next spring when he goes home to visit again!  This is very tempting since we would both love to go on a safari and spend time meeting Glen’s extended family and seeing the country from a native’s perspective, so we’ll have to see if we can plan that to fit into our schedules and most importantly, budget.  Going with a friend will save a ton of money though, when we’ve been invited to stay in his family’s house :-)  A bulk of the trip cost will be just getting there!  Maybe that will be our last hurrah before babies are in the picture.

My weight loss is also going well.  I weighed in at 133.8 this morning, so even though I’m not dropping lots of weight every week I seem to still be decreasing.  I haven’t changed anything about what I actually eat, I just changed the amounts of what I eat so I eat less of the sweet stuff and more of the green stuff.  I have been going to the gym every day for months now missing maybe one day every 3 weeks or so and although I’ve only been running (or walking at a huge incline) I think it’s making a difference.  All I did in undergrad to lose weight was run, so hopefully the difference in my 21 year old body compared to my 24 year old body isn’t tooooo much…

I'm also getting a lot of fun reading done -- you would think after spending the day reading at my desk I wouldn't want to go home and read, but I am enjoying reading things unrelated to school and it's nice to not think for awhile.

Extreme couponing

There's a new show on TLC that I've seen commercials for but I haven't actually seen called Extreme Couponing.  I saw this article on Yahoo News this morning and was pretty blown away!  I have a lot of friends that coupon in a way that I would classify as extreme, but the woman in this article is ridiculous.  I'm not even sure it's possible to go through 70 bottles of laundry detergent (although I guess the article doesn't specify how big the bottles were) in a time frame where they would even still be good.  I'm sure those things have a shelf life even if they aren't food.  I mean, I can't wait to have a pantry in our house to store the things I stock up on, but where do you keep 450 rolls of toilet paper?  250 rolls of paper towels?  What about all the other things I'm sure she buys -- canned goods, baking products, pastas, etc?  I am also looking forward to having a big freezer because I would stock up on things I can freeze (like meat, veggies, and fruit) but I feel like there's a limit to how much a house can hold.

More importantly: how is it even possible to SPEND $14000 on groceries in a year?  That's a hugely impressive amount of money to save, but how many kids does this woman have to have to spend that much money on that stuff?  The absolute max that Keegan and I have ever spent at the store in one week was around $85, when I stocked up on lean hamburger, pork, and chicken along with the stuff we usually buy every week or every other week.  Even if we spent our absolute max to date every week at the store it would be about $4500 for a year's worth of food.  Factor in another hugely over-estimated $1000 for health and beauty stuff, and we're still at $5500 for the year.  For this woman to have saved $14,000 in one year she must have been spending at least $300/week at the store.  What the hell is she buying?  The article doesn't specify, but the only possible explanation for this is having like 5 kids.  And even then that's absolutely ridiculous.  My parents spent at most $150/week to feed and clean a family of 5 (I know because I learned to grocery shop with my mom) so there's no reason a family of 7 should cost twice as much.  I guess now we know why she has room to store all her purchases, she lives in a gigantic house bought when they spent $20,000/year on groceries.

I'm not a couponing master.  I don't go to like 4 different chains of grocery stores to try to get deals on absolutely everything that's on sale that I need that I have a coupon for.  I know some people that do, and that's cool for them, but to me it's a waste of time and gas.  I also don't print coupons from the internet, but I have been meaning to try that because there are some good coupons online.  Now I buy almost all things generic so it's hard to get coupons that I would actually use, but there are somethings I always buy namebrand because the quality actually does matter and I/we can tell a difference (soda, toilet paper, shampoo/conditioner, etc).  I'm not sure that I'll be able to meet my goal of saving a month's rent at the grocery store this year, but then again since I'm starting out spending less than other people maybe I will just have to settle for a percent of savings instead of an actual numerical value.  I also realize that when babies come along my budget will get all screwed up because diapers are freaking expensive.  And wipes, and baby food, and juice, etc.  But at least for now I can save!  And who knows, maybe I will try to make my own baby food, like some of my friends.  There is a reason why I have a nice processor and blender (that I can never use because of limited counter space) and it's not just because we got married and nice people gave us nice things!

April pleasure reading, part 2

As promised, I quickly finished Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.  This book was also pretty fast-paced and kept me interested, but I don't think it was as good as the other Dan Brown books I've read.

This one was about the NSA and it was a little easier to guess what was going on/was going to happen than in the other books, but since I think this was his first book maybe he hadn't quite mastered the art of suspense yet.  I would still recommend it to other people who enjoy his books because I'm sure you'd still like it.  This book is essentially about a giant code-breaking computer working to break a code whose writer claims it is unbreakable.  It is a little concerning to think about what the government may actually do to invade our privacy without us knowing it though....

Now I will move on to reading The Hobbit and another book that Keegan just bought for me (what a good husband!) called The Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin.  I've read all of her other books, so it'll be interesting to see how this one measures up.  Her first book was made into a movie that is being released this summer I think, called Something Borrowed.

April pleasure reading

This weekend (ie yesterday) I read Deception Point by Dan Brown.  Last week I also reread Angels and Demons and at the end of the book was an excerpt from Deception Point, which doesn’t feature the same characters as Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, or The Lost Symbol but it was still really hard to put down (obviously, since I read it all in one day, enjoying the great weather and then burning 1000 calories on the treadmill because I was determined to finish the book before I stopped exercising and underestimated how long it would take me to finish it)  Once I read the excerpt I was already sucked in, and since Keegan has all of Dan Brown’s books, I just borrowed his!  Our own little library!

The book was really enjoyable – fast-paced and exciting (if not really that believable) but it was believable enough and I guess that’s where the intrigue lies.  I also enjoyed that it was about science and NASA, so that was pretty cool.  There were a lot of twists and turns that were unexpected but I did figure out what was going on about 4 pages before Mr. Brown revealed it (as opposed to being blindsided in his other books hah).  I enjoyed Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code because I think the history behind them is neat, but I also like the character of Robert Langdon, so that’s why I hadn’t read Dan Brown’s other two books because they're not involving the same people.  But last night I started Digital Fortress and I’m about 150 pages into it so I’ll be finishing that up this week too I’m sure (I’m so glad my defense was last week!)  This book deals with the NSA, so it’s pretty cool too.

I’m also reading The Hobbit, which I checked out of Duke’s library.  I wanted to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but The Fellowship of the Ring was checked out and I didn’t want to start in the middle of a trilogy, so I settled for reading the prequel.  I’m only about 50 pages into that, so we’ll see if I enjoy it enough to want to read the other LOTR books.

How to keep your mouth shut

I really enjoy spending time with my in-laws, but, as with all people, there are certain traits about them that I find annoying and these are chiefly all issues I have with my mother-in-law.  She spends most of her time talking up her kids, which is obviously a common thing with proud parents, and it's not as if she doesn't have anything to be proud of because her kids (my siblings-in-law) have all accomplished a lot and are each exceptional in their own ways!  But many of the things she says are directly insulting to me, and I'm not sure if she's oblivious or vindictive.  For example, she insults public colleges in front of Keegan and myself, knowing full well where we went to undergrad.  She also makes no secret of the fact that she thinks all the public high schools except the one her kids go to are complete jokes, also knowing that I grew up in Raleigh and went to a different Wake County high school.

Last night we were at their house for dinner because one of Keegan's aunts and cousins are in town, and she's going on and on about how excellent the twins' high school is and how my youngest brother-in-law is going to go to school there next year.  To start her story she said something about all the APs they offer there and it's amazing that Camden can go there because "*knowing nod* it IS the best high school in the state...!" and by this time my patience was wearing very thin and I interrupted with, "Actually, it's not.".  Very blunt, very direct, very true, but very rude.  They do go to an excellent school, and it's great they have access to so many neat programs, like the IB program, but just her tone was so smug and irritating that I just flat-out didn't want to sit there and listen to it anymore.

I know I need to control myself better and not say things like that, but after years of the same snide comments it's sort of hard to ignore.  That, and the fact that I knew I was right.  If she really thinks that public schools are not good enough and that her son could do better than me why doesn't she just say that instead of making broad derogatory comments about where I went to school/schools like where I went to school?  There are plenty of other things I would like to point out to her, such as the fact that none of her 4 kids who have gone through the college application process so far were accepted into their top 2 or 3 schools (not even waitlisted), and none of them got into Duke, let alone full rides to Duke (so it's not like I'm light-years behind all of her kids, which seems to be the attitude she takes).  It's taken a lot of control so far not to point that out, and I'm worried that my resolve is not going to hold.  Is there a way to deal with particularly difficult people/situations in a tactful manner?  For the most part we get along really well, and I'd like to think she's oblivious, not just mean.  But I really can't tell sometimes...  I try to think about other things when she goes on one of these spiels but usually she tries to engage me in the conversation, like she wants me to explode at her or something.  It's such a stupid thing for me to get worked up over and it's not worth starting arguments, but I just can't walk away!