Today

I don't know about you, but normally I'm positively itching to walk out the door the last day before vacation, a weekend, or holiday break.  Well, I was up until last year.  There's something about being fully immersed in a satisfying job that makes you actually want to keep working.  This week I worked as usual and even found myself offering to come to campus to work on some stuff for the course I'll be TAing for next term (a class about which I know practically--and theoretically--nothing).  Like, I wouldn't mind coming in on Christmas Eve to review the syllabus and website with the professor, who said she'd be working through the holiday on the course.  Crazy.

It helps that we were on vacation last week.  And by "we" I mean Dave and me.  No Eddie.  Although, we did invite Edward to come once we were there so while we weren't on a solo trip, we were child-free, which was quite nice.  I already posted pictures on Facebook and I have a Picasa album I can share with you if you like, just email me or leave a comment.  (After combing through and annotating 200 pictures I've lost motivation to write up a blog post about the trip at this point...but I will soon.)  The trip was amazing and I'm so glad we went where we did, for the reasons we did, and when we did.  The author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People advocates for time off to "sharpen the saw."  I couldn't agree more.  It was recharging, uplifting, relaxing...and calorific.  Mmmm, I love cheap eats.

So going to work this week was sort of nice; I liked getting back to my data, my samples, my plan.

My building, however, was dead.  I only saw people from two separate labs other than myself, all day.  My goal for the day was to pack 1/3 of my samples into tin capsules for total nitrogen analysis (something that should have been done in the summer but I checked the "carbon only" box on the form instead of "carbon and nitrogen" box...doh!).

So this is what I did all day...while listening to about 5 episodes of This American Life from 2001.

Even if I forgot to eat lunch, it wasn't a bad way to spend a rainy, freezing cold day.  And at the end, I helped my friend Danny water some stuff in the greenhouse before he drove me home.  Eddie was napping so Dave couldn't come fetch me and with the buses on break service who knows when I would have been able to get home.

The Mayan calendar ended today...but the world didn't end.  I thought about making some doomsday cookies to bring to work but I didn't have a flame shaped cookie cutter and as it turns out not enough people were at work to enjoy them anyway.

I hope everyone has a safe, fun, delicious, relaxing, and just-a-little-chaotic (too keep you on your toes) holiday season!  It's here!