Working, working, working

What have I been doing this week? Working. It's one of those times of the year when it seems that there are not enough hours in the day and that I don't have enough brain cells to deal with everything. And it's going to last for another month or so.

Classes were a mess from the snow/ice days at the beginning of the semester and I think we've just now gotten everyone straightened out. Just in time for their first test on Friday!

I'm a co-investigator on a proposal for a NASA Explorer mission with the submission deadline coming up soon. I've been spending lots and lots of time proofreading the proposal and typing out corrections (mostly grammatical and typographical corrections at this point) to send to the principal investigator. Seems a bit amazing to me that I am one of the science experts on this effort... but I guess that's what I actually am, so I shouldn't be so surprised!

The proposal deadline for the next cycle of Hubble Space Telescope observing time is coming up fast (end of February), so I've also been scrambling trying to get some preliminary results together to show in my proposals so that I can justify asking for more observations. "See what neat results we're getting? Give us more observations so we can have more neat results!"

I'm also trying to get some results together to write a Letter to Nature in rebuttal of a recent Letter to Nature that was titled something like "There is no connection between this thing and that thing". My title will be "There is a connection between this thing and that thing" of course with the proof in the text and figures. And with this project, I feel a huge self-imposed deadline to get it together and get it submitted soon while people are still thinking over the first article that started all of this.

I finally sat down for a few minutes and forced myself to write an abstract and complete my registration for a conference in Milan, Italy in April. The abstract wasn't too hard to write, I just really had to force myself to focus on it for half an hour or so, and it was hard to find the focus with all this other stuff going on and pulling me a million directions. The deadline is Monday, so I made myself finish it Friday afternoon before going home for the weekend.

Where does this leave my crafty projects? Exactly where I left them last weekend. :P I'm forcing myself to take some time away from work stuff this weekend so I don't push myself over the edge and end up getting sick (which always happens when I work too hard and get run down). I have some sewing to do on my Pendrell blouse and Crepe dress, and assembly and a collar to knit on my Blackberry cardigan. If I can get my cardigan assembled and get the shawl collar started this weekend, then the rest of the collar knitting is mindless enough that I could work on it in the evenings next week when I come home exhausted and brain dead.

So, yeah, Milan in April. Just need to hold out a few more months...