Fireworks are in the air…

In more ways than one! I hate when I fight with people. I had a big disagreement/argument with someone very close to me today. (No it wasn’t Husband. The worst fight we’ve ever had was over toothpaste!) Most people wouldn’t believe it, but I don’t like to argue or disagree with people. After the fight, I feel horrible. My stomach gets out of whack and I mull over it for hours. I generally end up convincing myself that it was my fault. I did try to apologise, but damn call waiting!!

Anyway, to cheer myself up, I thought I would share some of my favorite photos from the 4th of July.

My friend Claire and I went to see the fireworks at the local fairgrounds. I definitely stood out carrying my tripod and Nikon. Claire had a great time watching the show, and I had a great time taking pictures and fiddling with the setting on the camera. The best pictures I took with a shutter speed of 4 seconds and an aperture of either f/20 or f/4.4. iPhoto tells me the aperture of f/20 but a max aperture of f/4.4. I can’t remember which one. I think it was the 4.4, but I can’t remember.

Enjoy! (Sorry if the page loads slowly. These photos are pretty large. I didn’t want to compress down much smaller.)

I love this one. It’s the drama and violence of the fireworks with the absolutely still spectators in the front.

This one was fun. Some of the reds are a little washed out and the black isn’t as deep, but it still works.

It looks like an explosion of galaxies!

But these next two are my absolute favorites.

  

There are about 120 more photos, and some of them not very good. But I had a great time. The only problem is that I’ll have to wait another year to take more photos of fireworks. Unless I start traveling to fireworks shows. Kind of like following the ‘Dead around the country.

Cats eat the darnest thing

I finally found my camera card reader! It wasn’t in my office, but I’m not going to tell you were it was…

Cats eat the weirdest things. Growing up, my cat, George, would take you down for olives. Black, green, it didn’t matter. My dad’s cat eats cantaloupe. My dad will buy $4 cantaloupe in the dead of winter for that damn cat. I was visiting one time and tried to eat some cantaloupe but my dad wouldn’t let me. I think he loves that cat more than he loves me.

My cats, this is what they eat:

Caymus like brussel sprouts. Actually, I think he likes the butter sauce more than the sprouts.

Indi takes after me. She needs her espresso in the morning.

She LOVES Oreos. Loves them. I was trying to get a good picture of her eating a little bit of one when she stole this one off my lap! Don’t worry, I got it back from her before she could eat it all.

I’m more than a two page letter.

I was going to do another post, but I forgot my camera adapter at the office, so this one will have to do.

More tenure tribulations coming your way. I had the pre-turn-in-your-tenure-package meeting with the provost and the head of the tenure voting committee. Everything was going well until the head of the committee said:

“We’re going to summarize your life in an one to two page letter, so make sure you include enough detail in your package.”

I almost missed the rest of the information from that point on.

Summarize my life from my tenure package? Really?

I wasn’t planning on including the fact that I am passionate about gardening and would rather spend the day in my garden just puttering than doing just about anything else. How are they going to find out from my teaching evaluations I am madly, deeply and crazily in love with my husband? They probably already know that I have an unreasonable attachment to my cats just by coming by my office. (Sorry Husband. I still don’t have a picture of you in the office…) Although, come to think of it, I don’t think any of them ever have come by my office.

In fact, I barely know any of the committee that is going to be making this decision. They’ve not going to come by the office to shoot the breeze. And to be honest, I won’t stop by their office either. At this point, it would look like sucking up! They won’t stop by one of the classes that I’m teaching to get a view for themselves how I handle a classroom. If one of them walked into my research lab, I would probably fall down in shock. Everything will come down to a written statement by me that describes what I think they want to know.

I guess this makes a case as to why I should write a really kick ass tenure package, but it bothers me that a written statement and a one hour interview is the only way that these people are going to know anything about me. When I interviewed for the job, I at least got to do it in person. I had an hour, face to face, with EACH person in the chemistry department.

Ah well. Maybe one day I can change the system. But not now. I’ve learned my lesson about saying yes to things. After this is all over, I’m going to keep my head down and work in the lab. I’ve missed doing science and creating new knowledge.

And kitty makes five?

We didn’t end up adopting the little grey and white kitten because a friend wanted her instead. That’s OK. We were heading out of town so it would have been hard anyway.

I let a vet friend know that we were thinking about adopting another one, and she told me about a year old cat that she just found. My friend spayed the cat, tested her and got her all checked out. Everything that is supposed to be negative is and vice versa. Jenny says she’s very friendly and neat and doesn’t seem to be cat aggressive.

The only drawback?

The cat is black.

I’m not sure how I feel about another black cat. Husband and I are going this afternoon to meet the cat and we’ll see from there.

My life on the C-list

I’m not dead! Just busy with too many things going on. Plus, I just got back from an inorganic chemistry conference. It was a pretty small, exclusive-type conference that I had to apply to and everything. I introduced myself as an “Inorganically-Inclined Physical Organic Chemist.” It was fun learning about a whole new area of chemistry which I find myself getting more and more involved in, but I was having second thoughts about whether or not I actually should have been there when during talks on the first night, my biggest question was:

“Is zirconium an element?”

In my defense, I couldn’t decide if they were talking about zirconium or zirconocene in the talk. But questions of those sorts were par for the course during this conference. I learned a lot and met some fun people, but I have decided that I am a C-list chemist, and that’s only because of who I know. If I weren’t married to an A-lister, I would totally be with Kathy Griffith in the ranks of the D’s.

I had never thought about the stratification of chemical society until I happened to glance over at the program of one of the other attendees. She is from a good PhD granting school, but it’s not ranked in the top 20 or anything. She had crossed out a couple of names of people who had presented. They were obviously beneath her notice or the science so bad that it wasn’t worth even leaving the title unsullied (at least in her opinion). I started thinking about those she had crossed out, and they were all scientists from small programs, or programs without graduate programs.

(And yes, I was one of the names crossed off! But I did talk about a lot of physical organic chemistry and may have explained Hammett Parameters a little more in depth than I should have, but I wanted to make sure that those inorganikers understood the premise of my research.)

The social hours were also pretty much broken down along ranking lines too. The conference was supposed to bring together researchers from different backgrounds (A through D list) to talk and build collaborations, and some of that did occur, but not very often. I know that some of it comes from the fact that most of the attendees know each other from other conferences. They tend to hang together. I did try to talk to a lot of people, and some times I was pretty much ignored or shut out of conversations. That’s OK though – I’m just going to claim that it is because I’m an organic chemist…