More floating heads

I think I have found my decorating niche. We had another going away party for a co-worker who has graduated with his Master's and is moving into industry. He took a job at Bloomberg as a programmer. I found a photo of Mike Bloomberg (our Mayor) and cut out his head and made a cake topper out of it. Jonathan really liked it. Jonathan is a lot of fun to have around as well as a hard worker. We are going to miss him and his quircky personality a great deal. My least favorite part of working in academia is the high turnover. We will have lost 5 great employees by the end of the summer. It is very sad for me since we have had such a good team over the last couple years, but I am excited for them all and the next steps in their careers.

December 19

6 Days till Christmas and what would I like to see

The Secret Santa Finale

Friday was the finale lunch for our Secret Santa game at work. We play a week long version of Secret Santa. Each employee who wants to play fills out a survey where they list their likes and dislikes and give their santa ideas of what they might enjoy receiving. Then we hang stockings up for all the players. Each day Monday through Thursday the Santas slip a small gift into the stocking of their assigned person. Then each day at 4pm we all gather and open our stockings and find out what is inside. It is a lot of fun. On Friday we had a lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant where we go around the table and try and guess who we thought our Santa was. When each Secret Santa is revealed they give their person a final larger gift to open. It is always fun to hear who people guessed their Santa was and why. My Santa did an exceptional job. The first day I got a "locker organizer" which was perfect becuase it was a mirror. I didn't tell my Santa on the survey I wanted a mirror for my desk, hmmm. The next day I got a diet soda and an apple. I put on my survey that I didn't want food but only a couple people know why (my diet), hmmm. Then the third day I got 2 gold glittery ornaments that PERFECTLY match my Christmas theme at home, hmmmmmmmmm. Forth day I got a little cute notebook. All so perfect, all so me. My Santa seemed to have an aweful lot of inside information, so I guessed that it was perhaps my good friend Suzan, and I WAS RIGHT! She gave me this gorgeous bowl that perfectly matches my living room. Everyone had a really nice time. It was a great last day of work for the year!

Pretty pretty placecards

One of my projects at work right now is planning our annual Genomics Symposium. There is a big dinner after the meeting for speakers and faculty and every year I make place cards for the tables. My boss is impressed with just printing and paper but this year I wanted to do something a little more interesting. I made about 8 prototypes but settled on this one. It features our logo and and the guest's name like always but this year I cut out a little smaller arch and stuck it on top with foam tape for a little 3D appeal. I think they turned out really cute. Too bad the only creative play I get these days is for work!

Weekend Warrior

How am I spending this beautifully sunny holiday weekend? Working of course. I was in the lab all day on Saturday putting the finishing touches on the project you see in the photo. My boss signed on almost a year and half ago to edit a book. That means that I got to edit a book. 31 authors contributed and at times it was like wrangling cats to get them all to keep to the schedule (which they never did since this book is a year over due!). Then it was up to me to do all the technical editing on the 500+ page manuscript. Saturday I finally had all the chapters and contracts in and edited and was ready to paginate and print the whole thing. The publisher is a British company so they required the whole thing be printed on A4 paper which I had to buy special for the project. I am really glad it is done and will be in the mail on Tuesday. Of course it will be back to haunt me as a proof needing to be indexed. I'm not sure how I will get out of that one!

As for my Sunday, it was spent putting together my last application for grad school. I had to rework my resume to highlight my public service experience and find a way to rewrite my essays for business school to work in this public service school application. So far so good. I will have my mentors/bosses take a look this week and then it will be done. One essay uses this thing they call a visual explorer. You pick a photo from the 23 available and write about how it represents to your passion for or dream of public service. I chose a row boat. Let me tell you, the Stern essays were much easier because they were so straight forward. No row boats or zippers or tiger's underwater (all options for photos).

Today (Monday) we hit the grocery store to stock up on food for the week, and we are going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge for fun as it celebrates its 125 birthday. Then I have to come home and make place cards for my next big project due on Friday, our annual Genome Symposium and Dinner. May has been a crazy month for me and I have been working 6 days a week for 5 weeks but all in hopes of making my summer a relaxing and peaceful one. Look for more regular updates starting June 1st when I start my "summer" with a week off from work and plan to do lots of projects around the house!

Out with the old and in with the new

At the very beginning of the year my lab moved from our private location on 7th floor to a giant shared lab space on the 8th floor. The lab had been in one place for over 15 years. It was quite an undertaking but we managed to move everything (about 3000 sq ft) in a little over a week. I thought I would share some of our old vs. new space with you.

Keep in mind that the lab was old but it did look a lot better when we were in it! First up my office. I used to have a private office with a great view. Now I have a cubicle:And this is my view:I am really trying to get used to being so out in the open. As you can see from the photo I often look up and find someone else staring back at me. A little strange! Having no privacy has been hard.
The old lab space looking right:Old lab looking left:My old bench:Now it is just holding lots of junk but I used this bench for almost 2 years as a technician. At one point I shared it with Suzan. It was at that bench that we forged our friendship. I have never done lab work in this new space. That is a little bittersweet.
New lab, our benches:We get 10 benches in the new space. This is an example of 1 of our aisles. It is all open concept, no walls, open shelving.
The whole lab:The rest of the lab is common space. It has been hard to get used to and there are all kinds of group dynamics we are still getting the hang of.
Old lunch room:You can't even see the sink, microwave and refrigerator. Lets just say dorm rooms have better kitchens than we did.
New lunch room:We are all so excited to have a full sized fridge and a microwave that actually works well. Not to mention in the new space our entire lab can eat together and we aren't crammed around 1 small table. Though, we do miss the coziness of our old lunch room! (This room doubles as a conference room. You can't see the table but it is huge).
Core:This new space is pretty state of the art. We even have a robotics room.

There are lots of other nice details. We are settling in well so far. My job is not finished however since they are moving 3 investigators into that old lab after a minor renovation and I am coordinating all their moves plus 1 other person going into a temporary space. It has been an interesting experience negotiating all their needs and wants. I hope you enjoyed this little tour!

Fry-day!

My brain is fried! It has been a crazy week and unfortunately I have to work all day tomorrow too (Saturday). My boss gets on a plane on Sunday so it will settle down after that but until then we are all working like mad.

I am trying to get my friend Suzan to drive me out to IKEA tonight. Unfortunately she is working on the figures for the grant we are trying to put to bed so getting away will be tough but I am determined. I want to get the desks for the office/studio tonight. It is the only room in our new place that is still all in boxes.

I promise to take some photos this weekend to share. Have a nice weekend!

Power Outage

I know I disappeared at the end of last week and I am sorry. Last Thursday we had a planned power outage at work to fix a problem in the basement next to the main power bus. As you can imagine in a lab that is not a good thing. We have 12 small freezers, 2 large refrigerators, a cold room, 2 large ultra low freezers, and 10 growth rooms/units. That is a lot of stuff that requires constant power. In the end they allotted us 5 small freezers, 1 ultra low freezer and 1 large refrigerator to run on emergency generators. So we spent the entire day on Thursday cleaning things out and throwing away samples so we could consolidate all our units in to those few units that were allowed. Of course we couldn't just turn off the empty freezers since they are full of ice and would melt into a giant mess. We also spent the day defrosting the freezers and chipping away at the ice in a controlled way.

We were all exhausted by the end and had to stay late to wait for the electricians to come and switch us over to the emergency generators. When they showed up they couldn't figure out how to cut our power. One of my employees had to show them where our electrical panels were in a closet down the hall. When they went in there they realized that our lab wasn't connected to the power bus that was being repaired. WE DIDN'T HAVE TO LOSE POWER AFTER ALL!!!! What a waste of time. It is good to throw stuff out and purge but we probably wouldn't have sacrificed as much as we did if we didn't need to. My boss was not thrilled.

On a happy note the building was closed on Friday due to the power outage so my friend Suzan and I went up to Woodbury Commons Outlet Mall and shopped all day. I found lots of cute stuff for me but I also found tons of stuff for Greg at the American Apparel Outlet (the only store he lets me buy stuff for him from). I also got Father's Day gifts and some baby gifts that I needed to get. Plus I had a great time hanging out with Suzan for the day.

I do have stuff to blog about this week and I hope I will have time. So more to come.....

Friday I'm in Love

I have the Cure song, Friday I'm in Love on my brain right now. I have been really digging the random song function on my ipod lately.

Today was another "work at home Friday". My third in a row. I didn't multi-task as much as I did last Friday (I baked cookies, did laundry, cleaned, etc in between work tasks) but I did get some grant management stuff done that is about 5 months overdue. It is a really good feeling because I finally have a handle on one grant 6 months before our next report which is when I usually go into crisis mode catching up and dealing with problems. Now I feel like I know about the problems and actually have time to fix them and prepare for the report well in advance. This is the way it is supposed to work in a perfect world. A world where I am not just reacting to problems and being bogged down with other stupid stuff. Of course I have 5 other grants to catch up on too! But I decided last week to tackle one per week and I am starting with the biggest ones (this one is a 5 million dollar grant). Progress is good. I have one work at home Friday left next week and then my boss is back in town and I have to work at work, so I am enjoying them while I can.

In preparation for my spa day tomorrow I stopped off at the local nail salon on Thursday for a Mani, Pedi, and leg wax. I know it is kind of ridiculous to do all this prep work to visit the spa, but seriously if I showed up with my gnarly toe nails and the forest of hair on my legs to this fancy pants spa I think they would turn me away! Plus I love a fresh french manicure! I stare at my fingers for days. I was going to take a photo of all my pretty nails but never got around to it. Sorry!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Friday I'm in Love

No excitement here. It is Friday and the sun is shining which is nice for a change. I am crazy busy at work right now unfortunately and will have to work most of the weekend. In order to do that I had to order a new laptop to replace my desktop computer at work. I spent ALL day yesterday transferring files and reloading software (the IT guy is of course on vacation). I was about 75% done. Then this morning I come in and my desktop computer wouldn't wake-up. It is fried!!!!!!! Glad I had the laptop! The computer geeks in the lab were able to salvage my old hard drive and I can get the rest of my files but I had been hoping to use my desktop computer today. There is not printer working on this laptop yet and a bunch of other stuff that needs to be configured and I just don't have time right now. I must single handedly stop the government from taking away all our money. Not really but a little. Pseudo accountant Alexis is budgeting up a storm today.

The worst part about this computer fiasco is that I missed the office last night and there is a new episode ready for download on itunes and I don't have itunes set up yet on the laptop! ARGH!

Have a good weekend!

Tidbits

Scrapbooking Tidbits:
There was some kind of problem over at Jenni Bowlin studios (where I get my monthly scrapbooking kits) and they are requiring everyone to buy the kits individually this month whether you were a member or not. For some reason the kit just didn't grab me this month (especially the patterned paper) so for October I have decided to take a break. I have barely touched my September kit so hopefully this will give me a chance to use up some of what I have.
I am almost done with my 2004-2005 album so I am going to start organizing the next year of memories. I think I may order all my photos from scrapbookpictures.com this time around and that means a bit more planning on my part. We'll see how it goes.

Garden Tidbits:
The garden is a mess!

Exercise Tidbits:
I have been making an effort to exercise each morning. Those who know me well know I HATE WORKING OUT!!!!! But when I hit 30 I started packing on the pounds and had to come to the realization that I no longer had a choice. My body has decided it doesn't want to play fair anymore so I have to show it who's boss. I have about 4 workout videos and after the first month of consistent workouts I was bored with them all. That is when I realized that Netflix has workout videos. Now I make sure one of our selections is always an exercise video and it has been great. I do each one for a week and it has kept it interesting. I tend to prefer dance style videos but just finished the "Biggest Loser" workout which is not dance at all. I liked it so much I bought it off Amazon yesterday (only $9). It has 4 different workout choices including some with weights and some plain aerobic options. It is a nice contrast from my dance videos. Right now I have "Crunch Cardio Dance" at home. Not one I will probably buy but it has been fun and pretty easy to follow. I don't sweat as much as with other workouts but the routines are short and lively. It was also very well produced. Next in my Queue is "Paula Abdul's Get Up and Dance". I know it will be cheesy but I couldn't help myself! It should be here in a couple days. Do you have a video you love? Let me know.

School Tidbit:
For those following Greg's drama at CUNY, it all worked out. He was re-enrolled in his class and they dropped all the fees and charges. No one could really explain what happened so it is possible it could happen again in the future. Pretty soon he will be taking a break from the lab to begin writing his thesis in addition to taking Organic Synthesis this semester. He is pretty burned out with the whole school thing but is trying to plod along in hopes of finishing this year.

Work Tidbit:
My job has been insanely busy right now. I am filling in for a person who has left the department while we try and find a replacement and it has been pretty stressful. It means that when I get home I mostly want to veg out in front of the TV. All the season premieres this time of year help with that too. So, I haven't been getting much else done at home which means fewer interesting things to blog about. Which is how we end up with a post entitled "Tidbits"!