And if that's not enough, it's snowing AGAIN

It’s hard to be unhappy when you’re wearing brand new hand knit socks, so it’s a good thing I finished them last night. They are quite beautiful and warm. Pictures will likely follow eventually.

I arrived at work at 8:06 this morning, and now (2:05) is the first time I’ve been able to stop at my desk for more than three minutes at a time. First there was class. On my way there, I discovered that most of the techs at this lab have too much time on their hands because they were lurking about the hall and decided to heckle me all the way to class. The actual lecture was uneventful. Then I went straight to the student meeting where I had planned to be as positive as possible about the crap that is happening in the program-wide version of the graduate student organization. They were not so positive. I have permission to make the woman in the program office who is sticking her nose in our business cry at our next meeting. The meeting ended a few minutes early, and I made the mistake of checking my email. Yesterday, the professor from Yale who is one of the PI’s on the jellyfish project emailed a question about whether I thought she could adapt some of my data so that it’s comparable with some of hers. Rather than answering her immediately, I decided to think about it for a while and give her a better answer today. My mistake. As usual, she did not send the question to just me. She sent it to everyone on the project and a few others I’ve never even heard of. Since I wasn’t here to answer her first thing this morning, they started answering her, and the crazy ideas started building. By the time I finally checked my email, they had all clearly lost their minds. I think I finally cleared up their confusion and made it clear why their ideas were bad, but this could actually continue for weeks. The high point of the day was the seminar. The speaker was both very good and very good looking. About the time I finally made it back to my desk, all the lab kids arrived because schools have been dismissed due to the expected winter weather. One of my committee members just ran through the lab broadcasting that he found my advisor’s kid in the receiving area eating the packing peanuts. If I can concentrate in this odd little circus, I have about an hour and a half to decide whether I want to go see a poetry reading. I did a little research, and the woman’s work has been described thusly:

“[Poet who shall remain nameless] takes our evolutionary development in the womb as a departure point for remembering or imagining our links with nonhuman animals, which make us feel both alien and alive. She writes of being "raised by wolves," that "everyone marries into another species," and of "hearing things" in the voices of the rattlesnake plantain or the apple core. With an offbeat, sometimes-gallows humor-the poems' subjects range from roadkill to stingray-human sex to a traffic ticket for avoiding toads on the road-that looks at our connections of blood, home, and exile, [Undisclosed Title] nonetheless speaks of hope that we belong where we are.”

I am torn between curiosity and repulsion and the possibility that the person who wrote that description may have been more than a little confused about the content of at least one of her poems. Maybe the weather will decide for me.