To be not more pontifical than the Pope!

Well, I have good news and bad news, and they can both be summed up in the same statement: I'm done.

First the good news. The revisions of that science paper are OVER! *cheers and applause*

And I didn't get killed in the process. :) I guess twice-rejected made him a lot more receptive to criticism, and so he didn't mind at all that I was utterly ruthless.

Well. Actually, apathy probably had a lot to do with it too - this paper was never one he wanted to spend any actual time working on. From the beginning it had always been "get it out the door and published as fast as possible." Along with lots of "by golly they better stand in awe of the awesomeness of this work and publish it regardless of how well (poorly) we communicate it on paper!" I think he was secretly thrilled that I decided to take the whole thing over and do it all for him. :p It meant he didn't have to look at it ever again.

So anyway, I gave it to him yesterday afternoon, and he read through it and made a few minor edits to it and passed it back to me this afternoon. I then fixed it up and sent back the final copy to him tonight. If all goes well, he will like the opening paragraph I wrote for the Discussion section, and it will be submitted out tomorrow.

The opening paragraph took a while for me to figure out what to put into it. When I discussed it with him yesterday, he was initially pissed that I'd removed all of his opening paragraphs and moved them (in pieces) to the intro. But then I explained what I thought ought to go into that space instead, and he seemed amenable. That is, he seemed amenable to me writing it. :p So that was the final big hurdle. I had to reread through the entire paper in a "gloss over all the details" way, after I'd done the final editting polish read. But after I finished it, I was glad I did it. Only I could've done it. I summed up, in three sentences, exactly why our study was important. My boss can't do that because he rambles and goes off on weird tangents and gets bogged down in little details, and can't pinpoint his main point to save his life. :p While I, on the other hand, am really darn good at getting straight to the heart of the matter and saying "This is it." (There's a downside to this, of course. I can't come up with anything else to say and tend to be of very few words, when most people would much prefer that I talk a lot more.) (My current boss has commented on this. "Use more words," he's said to me straight out. :p)

It's a left-brained vs. right-brained thing, I think. My former boss's writing is very right-brained. He'll pour it all out onto the page, and it'll be very stream-of-consciousness-like with no real organization to it. My current boss, on the other hand, is very left-brained. I've editted one article from him, and it had a nested brackets approach, with a very complex grammatical structure to every single sentence. Lots of parentheses and dependent clauses. The thought progression does not start at the beginning of Current Boss's sentences, like they do with Former Boss. They start somewhere in the middle, buried amidst all the dependent clauses. It's very dense and you have to read each sentence three times to figure out what it means.

Anyway, so I wrote the opening paragraph and was very proud of myself for managing to sum up the whole paper in a single paragraph, and have it actually make sense as a Discussion paragraph to boot. ;)

On to the bad news: SFR. I'm done. I can't do it. There is no way I'm going to make even 30k words by the end of July, because work is about to suck up the rest of my month.

I have two back-to-back cruises coming up. Late 13th to early 15th, which is a practice cruise for me to prepare to solo on the big main cruise, early 17th to late 23rd. The 16th is also going to be taken up, because the chief scientist on the big cruise wants me to help load the boat. So what this means is that I'm going to be working for 10 straight days, most of it offshore. My sleep schedule is going to go kablooey. By the time I get back I doubt I'm going to want to move, let alone try to be creative.

I'm not too worried about the first one. That's the practice run, and my boss will be there to train me to do all the work. But no one else in my lab is going on the big cruise. I'm going to be in charge of the data we need to acquire. At this point in time, I am not at all sure how to do that. The practice cruise is really too close to the main one than I'd like, but unfortunately it's our only remaining shot to get me up to speed. We had to bow out of a practice cruise 2nd-3rd because it had other purposes, became overcrowded, and we decided to pull out to make room for other people.

It doesn't help that my boss seems to think that I will magically be able to figure out how to do everything. He has this tendency to expect me to read his mind sometimes. I do learn very quickly. You only have to tell me how to do something once, maybe twice, and I'm good to go. But you do have to actually tell it to me the first time. I'm not going to figure it out if you don't tell me at all.

In terms of writing, I'm seriously considering the purchase of an Alphasmart Dana. If I order it tomorrow, it might have a chance of getting to me before the big cruise. Then I could take it on board and have something to write with while I'm gone. I've looked on ebay, and there's a couple of them that I could bid for - but the end prices on them don't seem to be that much lower than buying new, the auctions aren't going to end fast enough, and also who knows what shipping speed would be like from independent sellers.

This would all be part of my general plan to upgrade my electronics this year. I can't afford to buy both a new desktop and a laptop. I'm planning to get the G5 iMac with a 20 inch screen as the desktop, and also set up a wireless network between the old computer and the new one. The Alphasmart Dana has a wireless version now, so I will buy that and use it as my laptop. My main reason for wanting a laptop is so I can have a mobile text editor, which is a very expensive way to go about it when I can just get the Alphasmart to do that. As for the iMac, well, with the recent announcement of a major chip change, I'm hoping for a massive price drop on the computer I want. I'm really not willing to wait another year for a new computer, considering I've been waiting 3 years already. (My current computer is a Powermac 8500 which has been upgraded to a slow G3. It was purchased new in 1996...). (As a sidenote, I plunked down 20$ on ebay today to get a slightly faster G3 chip for it. Should help things a bit until August, when I get around to ordering the new computer.)

Most of my non-work time on the cruise is going to be spent getting up to speed on all the roleplaying games I've volunteered to run. Lots of reading. :p I'm going to be taking at least 3 books with me to go over in detail.

That pretty much sums up my life as it stands right at the moment. I also have a number of roleplaying posts that I really need to do, but I have to get my brain to shift gears back into fiction. Oh well. Onward. Upward.

Chicken Noodle Soup

2 cups egg noodles
1 chicken breast, skinned and boned, cut into little cubes
2-3 carrots, cut into little pieces
2-3 stalks celery, cut into little pieces
half an onion, diced
1 gallon chicken broth (I typically use two of the really big cans of Swanson's, plus one big can of water to dilute the salt)

1 teaspoon marjoram
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon black pepper

In a large pot, bring to boil the chicken broth and water. When it comes to a boil the first time, add the carrots and celery. When it comes to a boil again, add the noodles. Reduce heat and let simmer for about 20 minutes, or until noodles are done.

Meanwhile, brown the chicken and onions in a frying pan with a bit of canola oil. Add the herbs and black pepper when chicken is no longer pink. When noodles are done, add the chicken and onions to the pot. Stir well, turn off heat.

As with the beef barley, this soup tastes a lot better after sitting out overnight and then in the fridge for a few hours.