I'm not dead yet

Wow, have I been remiss! I can’t believe it’s been a month since I last posted… Between training for my race, simultaneously potty training and weaning my toddler, jury duty, car troubles, a weeklong visit from my very best grad school friends, and wrangling with some awkward lab politics that I can’t get into, it has been an incredibly busy month!

The briefest of brief updates: I’m doing fine, great actually. My project kinda has me frustrated right now, but I’m through the “is this ever going to work?” phase and into the “I will clone this motherf***er if I have to ligate the phosphate backbone myself” phase. That’s usually more productive.

Husband has been burning the midnight oil. We have an incubator set up in our dining room and a microscope on the desk in the bedroom so that he can make it home for family dinner and then get back to work once Bean is off to sleep. One of my dear friends mocked us deservedly for our home lab setup, but one of my friends used to bring her western blotting supplies home with her at night, so surely a microscope can’t be that bizarre.

My training is going fairly well. I’m logging about 35 miles a week right now, and several of those runs are quite hilly. But I haven’t been keeping as strong a training pace as I’d like because my shin splints are back and I’m trying to avoid a full-blown injury. I’ve come to accept that I may not finish this race under 2 hours, and I’m only mildly annoyed by that. I figure if I can just make it to race day and complete it without injury, I’ll have done pretty well. Although I’m secretly hoping for some race day adrenaline that pushes me to finish in 1:59:00. But we’ll see.

Bean is, indeed, potty training right now. She’s using the potty around 4 times a day right now, to much praise from her doting parents, but I’m hard pressed to see how we will go from potty as novelty to full-time potty use. I have to do a bit more reading I guess.

And this week I officially weaned the Bean. She’s done pretty well with the transition. She’s still asking to nurse at our usual times, but doesn’t seem too upset at my explanation that the “milk is all gone.” I, on the other hand, have been in terrible pain all week and hope that my body gets the message soon that there will be no more nursing.

In my next post, I will (finally) respond to the Bean-mom’s interview meme. But for now, there’s a 0.8% gel with my name all over it.