Well that was...let's never do that again

So after weeks of not updating I'm starting again with the blog posts. In the weeks of semi-radio-silence, I've gone and successfully defended my dissertation. To the many, many people who have asked me "what's next": a cupcake, a lab migration, and a wedding.


I jest.

Well no, those things are actually happening buuut they may not constitute the actual answer that people expect, since the actual question that people have failed to specify is, in fact, "what are your long term plans now, after the defense?"

I have some minor edits for my written dissertation Apparently I missed some grammatical errors so now I must go back through it with the metaphorical fine-toothed comb (my committee suggested that  I find someone whose native language is English, to which I snickered in secret because the people with the best grammar in my acquaintances tends to be people who had to learn English as a second language). Then I need to actually submit that and the packet of signed forms and go through two different appointments with the Graduate Office so all THAT can get processed.

We, meaning my labmates and I, are also moving to a new lab building next Tuesday! From Thursday onward this week has been barely controlled chaos. Large equipments are decontaminated and sealed off (making my experiments gradually more impossible). Stuff are being packed. Our PI wants us to defrost ALL the freezers and fridges in lab, which we barely managed to do in time (finished the last one yesterday). We, the five of us if you count the PI, will be shuffling about 15 years worth of papers, records, equipments AND reagents to a new space. So the immediate future is...more barely controlled chaos. Yesterday we have unearthed three boxes of indecipherable lab notes from nearly a decade ago, two yo-yos, a box of battle-tops, and a vase. Also very very dead protein A on sephrose beads where it was NOT supposed to be. Once THIS settles down I'll need to archive all of MY data and samples so that it can, in theory, be handed over to whomever wants to take on my project once I've lest.

In the meantime I'm still running experiments, because I still have a manuscript that I need to get past reviewers before I can leave.

And then: a year off from academia -- I'm heading for the herbarium in Berkeley. Depending on how the year goes I'll either stick with herbarium, try for biotech, or go back and see if I can find a lab to be post-doc in what will not send me spinning into a therapist's office.

So there you have it: "what's next". Please stop asking me. 

Am really looking forward to the year off though, since I did go from high school directly to...well, here, with no pause in between. It's time to shuffle through my "someday" tags on Tumblr and Pinboard and see what I've saved for myself in my folders. I live with a vague fear, based on observing others, that I may one day end up retired at age 65 with 65 years' worth of "someday" tags that I will then, of course, never get to do. So rather than that, now that I have a bit more time (in between the lab and the...lab) I've started to try to catch up. Starting with the music tags. So far I've discovered that I quite like ragtime as a genre, that the 12 Girls Band has some interesting stuff, and that the 1984 mix on 8tracks is not something to listen to while alone by myself in the dark. Also Ella Fitzgerald has a song called "Let's Do It" that I giggled all the way through. It is the only love song I've ever heard that sings about jellyfish and electric eels and educated fleas. I just...what?