eco science nerd fest 2010

I'm back in the sweltering STL after a week in Pittsburgh communing with my fellow eco science nerds. I know that the only thing more boring that attending a week long conference is reading someone's recap of it, but there are a few things that I feel I must note about the meetings, the venue, and the host city itself. I'll be brief.

Which way to the conference? Follow the throngs of sport sandals and hiking backpacks.

No one knows how to dress-down the already dressed-down business casual of conference attire like biologists.

How can you tell you're at a ecology meeting? When you're asking yourself "are these flip-flops too dressy?"

Also: I cannot remember the last time I was surround by so many super fit white people. It is making me wonder about the demographic breakdown across scientific disciplines. Is ecology the whitest science?

I was happy to notice that the upward trend in female graduate students and young faculty that I've noticed in my own city seems to carry across the field. But the senior scientists are still largely male. Is it only a matter of time until we all move through the ranks or are we dropping out before we get there? There are books and theses that delve into this topic, so I won't attempt to parse it here, but I remain optimistic.

***UPDATE*** I almost forgot to mention that I got to meet an internet pal in the flesh. Here's to putting faces to pseudonyms!

Pittsburgh? I salute you.

Who knew that Pittsburgh is actually kind of interesting? While I didn't get to explore very much at all, I was lucky to be staying in a B&B in a neighborhood (Lawrenceville) outside of the downtown conference-center area, so I got a small glimpse of the city on my route in. It's like an entire city made out of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In a good way. In an 1800s-houses-with-1950s-awnings sort of way.

The best part was all of the really excellent murals and street art. Dear St. Louis-- why can't we make this happen here?

Some of my favorites:

This awesome mural is by artist John Pena. lovelovelovelovelove this. passed it every day on the bus.

This one is so excellent in person:

(mural by Brian Holderman, pic via Cardboard Sea)

And there was Shepard Fairey stuff everywhere. Maybe a little played out if you live in LA or NY, but unexpected in Pittsburgh, if you ask me.

(pic via justseeds.org)

ALSO? It was not 105 degrees there. So, that was nice too.

a different kind of summer

Less of this...

& more of this...

(ok, well, I'll be drinking rootbeer)

.

As it turns out, I am still waiting to hear about the big grant that I applied for last Nov. The one that I had hoped would fund my last field season this summer. Data collection for what would potentially be my final chapter.

In the world of federal grants for scientific research, No News is not really Good News, and it is probably either Bad News or On The Fence news. On the fence meaning that maybe the panel is still trying to find some last scraps of money to fund it, so it hasn't been kicked to the curb yet, but things aren't looking good.

At first I was getting pretty bummed out about this, as I had submitted what I felt was a killer proposal that fit the guidelines to a T. But, you never know who the reviewers are going to be, and the topic I'm dealing with can be a little... well, not controversial, but it makes some people a little bit touchy. Going against dogma makes reviewers nervous. Especially when you are a graduate student.

By now I've wrapped my head around the fact that it's probably not going to happen this year. I'm in the good position of only needing one more summer of fieldwork, but I have two more summers to go, so I can always reapply for next year and get a ton of work done analyzing and writing my other chapters in the mean time. And that whole growing a baby thing. That too.

In a weird twist of fate I am also not scheduled for any summer fieldwork for my Research Assistantship either.

So this all leaves me in the incredible position of having NO FIELDWORK all summer, for probably the first summer since college. It is a bitter pill, really, as fieldwork is my favorite part of this job. But the side benefit of all of it is that I will be around home the whole summer! My garden might actually make it all the way through! I might get to actually participate in fun summertime activities! No leaving Adam to attend bbq's and festivals alone! I might have a chance to actually get out of the city once and a while and go exploring. And I will have time for all of the baby-relating nesting that is coming down the pike (painting, making, buying, fussing).

Oh, and also-- not being alone in the desert in June while 5 months pregnant is a probably a nice thing too. It probably would have taken me twice as long to collect all of my samples...

Point being: if I am going to make this whole plan to reapply next year and still graduate on schedule work, then I am going to have to keep my nose to the grindstone this summer. I have two manuscripts in the hopper, and data from last summer that I haven't even looked at since last fall. And an overdue grant report too!

WRITING WRITING WRITING!!! ANALYSIS ANALYSIS ANALYSIS!!

An in between all that work???

SUMMER!!!

the other BIG thing

So, in my list of things about 2009 that, when all was said and done, weren't entirely horrible, I made one glaring oversight. I neglected to mention that my first manuscript, the one I've been submitting and re-submitting for longer than I'd really like to think about right now, has finally been accepted for publication! I got the news on Christmas Eve, so that was a pretty rad Christmas present. It was provisionally accepted while I was in China, baring a few minor revisions that, given my crazed fall of oral exam-taking and grant-writing, took me WAAAAY too long to complete, but whatever. It's done and accepted, and I should get the proofs in the next few weeks. I'm excited and nervous to finally have it out there in the world, but mostly just relieved that I can once and for all remove it from my to-do list. And start citing it in the two other manuscripts that I have underway. Here's to seeing my name in print! Hooray!

The proposal that ate my fall is done.

$15K of blood, sweat and tears.

it's the little things

Cute chinese post-its with kitties on them can even make spatial statistics fun!

Grant deadline tomorrow.

Last dash editing of methods and then I'm done!

11pm sunday

you'll note the presence of 3 coffee cups & a wine glass...

Yeah, I haven't been posting much lately.

I blame it entirely on my new No Procrastination plan, a subset of my larger plan to Just Do the Work and Get it Over With.

Big grant deadline this coming Fri and I've tried to be all nose-to-the-grindstone about it and not allow myself to flit around online wasting time. Which has sort of worked, but my brain is wily. I seem to have supplanted obvious online procrastination with the more insidious kind that involves getting sidetracked into easier and less important work. That way I get to say "hey! I'm totally not procrastinating right now! This work needs to get done too!" Which is true, but it is definitely not the highest priority.

So, anyway, that was me last night, trying to focus on turning out one more draft before the weekend was up. I made it with one hour to spare.

__________

trying to spark the writing fire

I'm sitting in the eye of a maelstrom of stress.
One huge grant deadline staring me in the eye and a massive case of writer's block.
Classwork piling up all around me.

The goal this week: WRITE. Just get it out. Make it happen.
I LIKE grant writing. Usually. I thrive in the creativity and optimism of proposal writing.
But this one is hard and I'm sliding all over, can't get a foothold.
Hope putting it out there like this will force me to stop listening to the voices in my head and just make things happen.

Ready? GO!

headed home

Done with fieldwork!

It's been a long season, but a good one.

I've been to a lot of new places, and met a lot of good people.

And worked really hard.

Looking forward to fall (data analysis season!).

chasing the trains

I've lost track, and I forgot to check before I got out of the car tonight, but I'm up somewhere around 2500 miles travelled in the past week. Crisscrossing the desert from field site to field site. I'm feeling very tired, very antsy, and very much in need of some fresh vegetables and some exercise.

I arrived at the latest site this eve. A research station this time, so I have a 'real' bed tonight, but all that means is a foam mattress in a bunkhouse. Twelve hours of driving and I arrived in the dark. Up before 6 tomorrow to get cracking on the field work.

No one came out to greet me when I arrived, although supposedly they knew I was coming. The lights didn't work in the building where I was supposed to be staying, and as I was clamoring around in the dark, searching for another switch it occurred to me that this is how scary movies start. A woman, alone, in the West Texas rangelands, pulling into a dusty cluster of buildings in the dark. It crossed my mind that I may be getting too old for this nonsense.

I elected to move myself to the kitchen building, which also has beds in it, and functioning lights. And door locks. No cell phone signal here, but at least they have wifi.

Everything will look (and feel) better in the morning.

field site

transitioning

My time in China is coming to an end; I have one week left. This is both exciting and terrifying.

Exciting because I'll be going home! I can tell that I am beginning the mental transition out of here because I have started reading the backlog of recipes in my blogroll. Ok, yes, this is partly a case of severe procrastination (see below re: data entry!) but also means I am thinking about being home.

Terrifying because it means this is it. I leave the field station in 2.5 days and head back to Beijing for final meetings and final reports. So, no more data collection. The next two days will be tying up loose ends and packing everything up for transport to the various places that samples are going, and entering all of my data onto the computer and backing it up fifty times on the off chance that my field notebook spontaneously combusts, or i accidentally drop it down the loo hole on the train, or a pickpocket takes my laptop, or any of the other totally plausible scenarios running around in my brain.

Did I "finish my work?" Everyone keeps asking me this question. The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is that I finished the short list. My sampling is barely adequate, but it will have to do. I am learning that this is how things work here. Given one day to do three days worth of sampling? Work fast and get as much as you can and scrap the less important stuff. I am trying to let go of regret, because there is nothing I can do about it now. It is what it is.

Although, if you judge productivity by scrapes and bruises, then I have had productive summer indeed.

Exhibit A: A wicked case of Fieldwork Forearm (the elbow to hand tan) matched up with feet the pale white color of frozen cod fillets from being stuffed in boots every day. And I will spare you a glimpse of what they look like underneath, but it is not pretty.

Exhibit B: You can't see all the little bruises and scrapes on my leg very well in this pic, but as of yesterday it also sports three large gashes from where I ran into a barbed wire fence. (I dodged the puncture wounds though, so I think I'm good on the tetanus, right?)

Exhibit C: a lovely layer of small lacerations from sharp-leaved grasses overlaid on a heat rash.

There is also something odd happening with my toenails but I am trying not to think about that because it scares me.

Hooray!

end of the day

Waiting for our ride back to the station...

... hoping it comes before the rain.

This is Zuo Xaioan, my sort-of collaborator. Super nice guy.

how do you measure progress?

By the bag?

By the quad?

By the movement of a shadow across the pavement?

I thought I was on a roll, but today I realized I have made some plant ID mistakes that will probably result in me redoing about 2 days of fieldwork. So frustrating. I have to keep reminding myself that, due to time constraints, I have had to learn the plants as I go; never an ideal situation. The field assistants that actually know the plants, and could potentially help me, only know the Chinese names and do not speak any English. So I'm kind of on my own. Seriously regretting my general lack of proper botanical training. At least my 250 soil samples are all sieved and labelled!

ode to a field notebook

This one is not the first, and it certainly will not be the last, but it is the latest in a long line of reliable field assistants.  Like that preppy family that seems to always have a Golden Retriever named Molly, I buy a new one of these babies every time the old one runs out of pages. 

It has served, in no particular order, as:

-data sheet

-pillow

-plate

-hammer

-rain hat

-battering ram

-plant press

-seat

-bug squisher

-visor

-tripod

-t.p.

-kindling

-and I'm sure several more uses that are slipping my mind at the moment.

I have used them to record everything from fire weather to GPS coordinates to plant lists to sampling locations and everything in between. 

The pages are waterproof, and they have grid lines.  Oh, I'm a sucker for the grid; far superior to regular lined pages.  

They come in spiral bound and flip top styles as well, but give me the traditional bound every time.  I like to be able to stack them together on my bookshelf; tangible evidence of fieldwork accomplished.

It is not too much hyperbole to say that if I did not love biology so much already, I would become a biologist just to get to use this notebook.  

The End.

So much STUFF:

Packing the night before I left was, in hindsight, not the best idea. I brought waaaaay too many clothes. I mean, obscenely too many. What was I THINKING? I can't even tell you the bad choices I made regarding footwear.

However, I did make a few wise choices. The smartest things I packed were:
coffee
plastic baggies of various sizes
Sharpies

I was feeling crazy for bringing them, but all were infinitely more wise than the 4 pairs of shoes I left back in Beijing in a fellow grad student's closet.

In fact, I should have brought more coffee. The coffee was definitely my best packing decision.

oh, the FOOD.
The thing about being at a field station is that I have to eat what they prepare, and I can't really skip a meal, or people get worried. However, this is not a prob b/c the food here is excellent, and I am going to come back to the US all roly-poly from my three gigantic meals every day. So many different veggies at every meal! (all cooked with meat in them, of course). Americans don't know what they are doing with vegetables.
This does not stop the station director from asking me quite regularly if I wouldn't really, honestly, rather be eating hot dogs. I try to explain that even in America I eat more Chinese food than hot dogs, but he's lived in the US, and knows that American-style Chinese food is pretty much the same thing as hot dogs, when compared to real Chinese food.

the LANGUAGE

maybe you didn't get the memo, so let me fill you in on a little-known secret: Mandarin is HARD. Even when I think I know how to say something, I invariably get the tones wrong. And even when I'm pretty sure I have said things correctly, everyone still busts out laughing everytime I speak, and repeats what I say like an echo.
Me: "Han hao chi."
Everyone around me: chuckle, chuckle 'han hao chi!' chuckle chuckle.
All in good fun, though. Right?

setting PRIORITIES
Speaking of trying to learn the language, I might have to put all of that on the back burner a bit and focus on the real task at hand (research) and the impending Task of Doom which is my oral exams, which I have to take when I get back, and for which I should be spending all of my free time studying, except that when you don't even know how to ask the nice man with the keys for the key to the lab, and it is locked, and you need to work on said research, well... sometimes I go in circles regarding the priorities.

crazy-making
I have mentioned in the past how spending long hours in the desert turns my brain into a budget, poorly curated diner jukebox. Today's hit? Red Red Robin.
Yeah, that one. The bob-bob-bobbin'-along one.

accoutrement

breakthrough

trying to get started on data collection

It has been a week of ups & downs.  On the up side, I had a chance to take a day trip to another province to check out a research station there.  But I have been running into lots of snags on my way to getting my research really moving along.  I hit my lowest point a few days ago, when the communication issues, research planning stress and linger health-related issues all collided into a wet, soggy pile of kleenex.  I think part of the problem was/is also that, while everyone here has been more than kind, I have no release vale here -- no way to get away from it for a few hours and blow off some steam.  I need a happy hour!  But I've been receiving great support from afar from friends and family, which has helped immensely.  

i love the straight up old-school labs around here

Today I found some different equipment that will help me to do what I need to do in a more timely fashion, and had a chance to talk through my experimental design with one of the grad students here who had some really great feedback and tips, based on some of his previous research.  I'm feeling recharged and ready to get (re)started. 

I've also been tracking another blogger, as she documents her international research, and she is pretty much writing the exact words & emotions floating around in my brain, but in a much more coherent way, so maybe you should just go ahead and read her blog instead.

sample location H-S1-5

breathe

The good news is that I have a plan. I've morphed the things I wanted to do in the first place, and have figure out how to apply them to some different study plots in order to still get data that are relevant to my thesis. So, that is good.

Now, two hurdles stand in my way.

The first is money related. In the US I pay (or rather, my grants pay) to have all of my soil samples tested at a specific soil-testing lab at another University. This is a good plan b/c I don't have any of the right equipment at my school or, more importantly, the skills to do the lab work (I'm an ecologist, not a chemist!). I can rely on the results when actual chemists do the work, so it's worth it to pay for it. However, in this case things are much more complicated. There is some lab equipment here at the station, and I think some people just do their own analysis here. And that would maybe be an option for me if I knew what I was doing. Instead I have 2 options -- 1) send the samples (and a wad of cash) with one of the professors back to their university in Lanzhou to be analyzed there.
2) export the samples back to the US and use the same lab I always use. This is kind of preferable, for standardization's sake, but involves a whole lot permits and a hope and a prayer that they don't get seized at the border. I have the US permits, but the China ones don't seem to be happening for me. Either way it is going to be expensive. Quite expensive. This is a bummer, and makes me wish I has the skills (skilz) to do it here. Why didn't I pay more attention in chemistry?! (b/c I was busy staring out the window wishing I was out in the field looking at plants....).

The second hurdle is transportation related. I can't actually get to work until the driver is free to drive me to the sample plots. He seems to be booked with other things until at least tomorrow afternoon.

Rather than fret I am going to look on this as an opportunity to work on some stats for some other data, go through another Pimsleur language lesson, and maybe do some yoga.

All in good time.

pre-departure debrief

1. Detox.  In anticipation of restricted access to coffee I have been trying to cut back on my consumption.  As a result I get a massive headache every day at about 2pm, and it lasts until the next morning when I make the morning pot.  So, that's nice.  

2. Shoes. Can someone please tell me what is the appropriate amount of shoes to bring on a 2 month trip to China that will involve the following:  fieldwork (boots), travel by train (sneakers), sightseeing (sandals &/or sneakers), visiting various official offices (nicer shoes), presenting at a conference (ditto), attending banquets (dressy shoes) and wandering around Beijing trying to figure out how to get back to my hotel (hopefully not dressy shoes). Plus evening after fieldwork post-shower shoes (flip flops).  I am just now realizing that I do not own a pair of shoes that fit very well into the International Conference/visiting the Embassy category.  Rats. 

3. Language.  I have negative capacity to learn languages.  This handicap is not helped by the fact that I keep forgetting to take my Pimsleur CDs out of Adam's car. I am worried about making a bad impression.  Hoping that being the only American for hours will help this process along, once I get there. Trial by fire.

4. Departure.  I booked my ticket through the NSF's travel agents, and so I know that I had to think about the time difference in order to make sure I arrived on the right day.  But since then I have been so fixated on my arrival date, that somehow I stopped thinking about my departure.  I arrive in Beijing this Sunday, and I have started telling people/myself that I leave on Sunday as well.  Suddenly yesterday the 13 hr. time difference sprang to mind & I remembered that it is not actually possible for me to leave and arrive on Sunday.  I leave on SATURDAY.  I just lost a whole day of preparation.  Crikey. 

8. OhmygodIleavein3days.

9. Gifts.  I need to bring thank-you gifts to my collaborators/people who have been helping me with the planning, and will continue to help me while I'm there.  The only ideas anyone can give me are booze and baseball hats.  Neither of these thrill me with their originality.  But then again, I love it when people bring a bottle of whiskey to my house, so who am I to judge?  Also, booze is heavy.  

10. The Crazy. I can't believe the range of emotions I have been gone through in the past few months, in regards to this trip.  Excitement to freaked to stressed to excited to nervous to my current state: totally incredibly nervous.  I think the issue is that it's not like I'm just going on vacation.  I have to actually perform actual research, in a foreign country, with no one responsible for me, and a big fancy federal agency that I have to report my results to.  I have to get some data.  Please let the data happen!  So, pile all of that on top of the general nervousness that would come from traveling alone in Chine for 2 months and there I am.   I can't believe Adam has not locked me in a closet by now; I am driving him bonkers with my crazy.

the thing about science...

... is that it is so darn time consuming.

I was in DC, but now I am here:

(quite literally!  i'm on that green bench right now!)

When I get back I'll post more, I promise! Don't forsake me!