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Aaaaahhhhh.

That was me relaxing. I’m drinking a nice cuppa tea and everything.

Due to technical problems with the funding body’s website, last week’s grant deadline got pushed back to today. This was a good thing, because it allowed us to spend much more time tweaking and revising the application, but it was also a bad thing, because it allowed us to spend much more time tweaking and revising the application. It’s funny how these things expand to fill the time allotted to them. I sent the grant to our institute’s coordinator for his sign-off last night, and the damn thing is officially submitted and off my desk as of this morning.

Believe it or not, I actually quite enjoy the rush – as long as I’m confident that we’ll actually get things done in time – and at least the work is interesting and useful. My last job managed to be both stressful and boring (lots of repetitive work with very tight deadlines), and when I took this job I made a mental note to remember how horrid that combination was during the inevitable stressful times ahead.

This job being a constant cycle between super-busy and more laid-back, today is wind-down time. In my usual tradition, I have spent the day:

• Attending a very interesting seminar (I tend to skip them when deadlines strike, and missed some good ones this month)
• Tidying my desk, although Mermaid will still be able to recognise it as mine without checking the photos and tea mugs
• Printing hard copies of all final grant sections, and filing them away
• Printing and archiving all of my early drafts / edits of each section (I like to give it a week or two and then compare my versions to the final ones approved by the grant’s authors – it’s a good learning experience to see what they decided to keep / edit / rewrite / scrap entirely. This time around there’s a pretty good mix of the four options, with one section completely unchanged from my first draft!)
• Organising and archiving my email inbox
• Having lunch with the whole lab for the first time (fun! And yummy! So full!)

Things still to do:

• Meet a friend from my old job for a quick beer after work
• Go home and play with the kitties
• Get through the night without thinking or dreaming about the bloody grant

The whole cycle starts again next week with a meeting involving the two PIs of a potential new grant submission. And my boss wants to see all the information I have on a huge project that isn’t coming along as well as we’d both like, due to the big grant time-suck. But it’s nice to have just one day to organise my desk, my files, and my thoughts.