End of 2013

Just like last year,  here is my year of blogging: the first sentence of the first post of every month. 2013 was a year in which a lot happened: my PI decided to move (but we could stay), my husband got a fellowship which enables us to move back to the homecountry, where I found a job too, and we welcomed a new addition to our family! Right now that new addition to our family is napping, while I am purchasing our plane tickets to return to the homecountry, which means our adventure as post-docs in the US will soon come to an end. It's nice to go home, but there will be a TON of things I will miss about living here - something for a different post some other time. Not to mention the hassle of moving an entire family + acquired stuff across the Atlantic...

January: Nothing says back to work after a good nice vacation like a good spell of the post-holiday blues.

February: I was tied to my electrophysiology rig for the past three days and completely missed the #postdocalypse hashtag on twitter.

March: The other day I talked to another post-doc who is in hir fifth year and about to leave the lab. 

April: There's a bunch of things going on that I would LOVE to blog about, but for several reasons I have decided not to.

May: Before BlueEyes was born I knew I wanted to give breastfeeding a try, but I didn’t have any particular goals in mind.

June: This morning I got the dreaded email telling me that I'm not invited for an interview for the important home country grant I applied to.

July: Whenever we go back to the homecountry, I’m excited about all the things I can eat therethat are hard to find here in the US. 

August: I really appreciate that my parents tried to raise us with gender-neutral toys.

September: A while back I wrote about pumping milk at work and the other day I got an email from a reader asking me the following:

October: My homecountry is getting ready for Sinterklaas, which means lots of people need to buy toys and the large toy stores send these big books full of ads to people.

November: This weekend, I read an article entitled: ”Rebels rise against science gone crazy” (my translation) in one of my homecountry’s newspapers.

December: So you know those lists that help you identify whether you're in true labor or not? 

Thanks everyone, for reading and commenting!!

I can haz job!

So I have been complaining about how hard it is to find a TT job in my homecountry and how often people seem to get jobs through the back door instead of through vacancies that are posted somewhere. For a while it seemed like I needed to get at least a personal grant or fellowship in order to continue doing science in the homecountry. And since my husband already got a personal grant and the homecountry's scientific organization made him move back before a certain date, it looked like not getting a grant would mean no job for me (at least not the job that I would want). One fellowship that I applied for got rejected, and one got a score that _might_ get funded, but more likely will nog get funded. And even if it got funded, the European Union decided that only half a salary would be enough to "integrate your career"… So things were looking a bit bleak and where last year I was sad that there were so little TT jobs advertised, now I was sad that maybe this meant that I would have to look for other jobs outside of science. And even though I'm not sure if that would be what I want, the prospect of never patching a cell anymore really made me really kind of sad.
But this morning brought the happy email saying that I can come work as a post-doc for a year on project that I'm very interested in, at the university where Dr. BrownEyes has a job too. So yes, I am very happy that I'm going from being a Research Associate here to being a post-doc in the homecountry and I am very happy about it. And I could insert all kinds of disgruntled postdoc comments here, but I won't. Cause I'm happy I get to do science for at least another year and a half.

Happy holidays everyone!

The real test to know whether you're in labor

So you know those lists that help you identify whether you're in true labor or not? Turns out, the only real way to know is whether you walk out of the hospital with a baby inside your belly or outside*.

This is what he looks like and we'll call him Little Brother on the internet.

*coming from yours truly, who had to go to the hospital THREE times before actually having a baby. Turns out, you can go to 4 cm dilated with hours of very regular contractions and baby all descended and what not and then go home and wait another 6 (SIX!) days before having said baby.