Friday, July 27, 2007

It's that time of the year

Several weeks of summer vacations await me. So of course there has been a tremendous last-minute rush of things to do, especially since everyone else seems to have left at mid July. So I was the only one to answer the phone when questions arose from the administration.
Also my research students wanted extra office hours (we are talking of something like a total of three hrs/day in the last two weeks).
The paper with PD#1 and S#6 is finally ready. I am very, very happy with it, even though it is not a very great result. It is one of the few cases where I started with an idea of my own and saw it become slowly true. Of course I wouldn't have made it without my coauthors, but still it was my dream first.

I have said a bit too many times "yes" in the past few months, which means that I have agreed to write a number of non research articles of different kinds. I had the brilliant idea of planning to finish them all during the summer vacation: after all, for two weeks we are visiting my parents, and for one week we are going to a hotel with childcare.
The trouble is of course that my parents aren't willing to look after the children unaided for longer than 15 minutes, if at all, and that in previous occasions the hotel's children entertainment, while highly appreciated by C#1 and C#3, failed to satisfy the more discriminating taste of C#2. As a result, I was free to do any activity which could be performed while having on my lap 16 Kilos of child and/or running after said child who was obviously in training for some daycare level survival training.
So I will just summarize here the list of articles I have agreed to write, so that I can look at it occasionally:
  1. an expository article on a topic I know very well, but from an angle I am not familiar with;
  2. a short autobiography for a site about careers of women in science;
  3. a short article on the relation between women and science for a magazine with a mostly medical audience;
  4. another expository article on a topic I know very well, but which completely lacks readable references;
  5. a short expository article on part of my recent work;
  6. a short expository article about what I hope will become my future area of research;
  7. a very short article on the life of Emmy Noether, of which I know very little.
Due dates are basically all in September, but I should plan in finishing during the vacation, because afterwards the doctoral students will need even more time. And, I will have to seriously start nagging C#1 about her homework (last year she didn't do any... and WS isn't really very good at this kind of things, so it's my chore).

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