Full on

As my Kiwi colleagues would say, today was "full on."  Before work, I ran a couple errands to prepare for my upcoming trip overseas.  Then I went into the lab where I ran through my talk with my research group.  At that point my presentation was still at the 70% stage, so I had to arm wave through a couple of blank slides.  I have a 30 minute session next week and my first run ever (at this morning's group meeting) took me ~32 minutes.  I've taken out a slide and will tighten my narration with the goal of trimming down to 25 spoken minutes, with the extra time available for questions.

After my practise talk I had to run to the PGSA office for a retreat/monthly Executive Board meeting. 

... whoa whoa whoa, I thought you finished with the PGSA?

Well I am no longer President or a member of the leadership group, however, I am still committed to help the Association, as time allows.  Additionally, I'll be working with the new board, over the next month or so, to prepare for next year.

This afternoon and into the evening I made sure I had all the material to finish my slides as I travel.  I'll fine tune the presentation in airports and hotels, but I am confident I've prepared all the animations, collected all the data and snapped all the necessary photos.

Also today I am starting a new rating system to track the daily ups and downs of PhD life.  You'll see this as a number in the labels.  Moving forward, each day I'll tag my progress as an integer 1-4 (including the end points); with a 1 being a "bad" day and 4 being a "great" day.