The Two Week Wait

First, before anyone gets excited - NO, I'M NOT GETTING PREGNANT.  The "two week wait" is a common phrase for people trying to conceive to describe the stressful, intense waiting time in between ovulation and the earliest pee-on-a-stick test that you can take to figure out if you're pregnant or not.  As I have only experienced this once, and mostly I didn't expect to actually get pregnant, I had a pretty mild experience with it.

However, I've also never felt anything quite like it - great excitement, mixed with great fear, mixed with a very sincere sense of impatience.  And yet!  I've found another experience that feels *exactly* the same!

So my paper got editorially rejected from Science - although it was quite a kind and positive rejection - and so now we are waiting at Nature.  I wake up every single morning fervently both hoping for and dreading the decision, and feeling distinctly impatient that I can't just know now (and praying that someone gave the AE his/her coffee that morning!!!). Anyway, both Nature and Science try really hard to make a decision in two weeks, so it's on the exact same time scale as the TWW for conception.  For grants and "regular tier" manuscripts, although I want and dread the decision just as much, the time scale is more like 3-6 months and you just can't live that way for so long, so you literally have to forget about them in the meantime.  It ends up making for a very different experience!

Other than that, we have no really exciting news here.  I'm plugging away at more manuscripts, and I got a new computer after my old one fried its motherboard exactly one day before my warranty expired (so I did sneak in under the wire and get a new motherboard for free - but yeah, I don't trust it not to die again).  Anyway, I'm currently doing a clean install on everything rather than migrating from my old computer, which is a process that I've only done once before since it's so much easier to just migrate.  It's definitely a way to purge some of the detritus that really, really should never be on a university-owned machine (e.g., my cat video collection from grad school).  So while my iTunes library transfers, I had exactly 10 minutes to bust out a blog post :)

I leave you with one of Maya's cute new videos - she is starting to play pretend, and she loves her dolls - singing about "potato will falls."  Last night she busted out on camera that "Mama has big penis!" and although husband is quite enamored with that video, I chose to post this one instead.