A tad late (which only means I am already fully integrated into the Spanish culture) and with a real cup of coffee in front of me, I will try to write a professional blog on my time with A&M.

I vividly remember my very first encounter with Andrew: we had proper coffee in a coffee place somewhere near his department in Edinburgh. His whole lab, including Silvie, would soon move to the US of A, and I was the jobless spouse who would simply tag along. I guess he wanted to see who I was and what I did. Although it was freezing cold, I was sweating the whole time… He asked me (very good) questions about my dissertation, but I often had no clue what he was talking about. For some reason (probably because I knew what a mosquito was), he offered me a job. I would work for Matt, whom I never met before…

And there I was, January 2008. Alone in a dirty and moldy office in CEL, complete with grandpa furniture and yellowish insect images on the wall. And with Matt as my boss… 😉 These were the early days. We had no incubators and it was a year before the first experiment would take off. But hey, I didn’t care: Very soon we would have a brand-spanking new insectary, an Anopheles gambiae insectary and Plasmodium falciparum up and running!

I was given all the freedom to come up with a line of research (from Andrews’s blog below, I would pick the following verbs: encourage, stand back, stimulate and cheer). For months I pooped out one figure after the other in excel, to show the bosses I was onto something. The white board proved invaluable: Matt and I had many white board sessions, shaping current ideas, and exploring future research directions (I truly miss those sessions). And one day, more than a year after my arrival in State College, the psychedelic plot was born. The rest is history 😉

The past five years have been a fantastic roller coaster ride. Some years were clearly full of loops and corkscrews, during other years we were more on the chain hill. But hey, you have to gain height, before you can get your ultimate thrill!

I learned an awful lot from our silverbacks. I did not only benefit from their scientific intellect, but often sat back to observe their way of leadership. From how they pitch ideas to why they hire the people they hire. I think they taught me invaluable lessons without even knowing they were teaching me. Off course there are always things I would do different, but thanks to them I feel ready to continue on my own now. I just hope that I won’t crash into the first window I encounter…

♥ I miss you all guys!

I recently decided, again, that I should learn to use R to graph and analyze my data. The decision was a form of, in Monica’s words, productive procrastination, as I was supposed to be putting together my presentation for lab meeting. But, wherever the motivation invaded from, the R infection finally took off and successfully established; I’m loving it! I’ve been thinking about why, this time, I decided to keep forcing through the confusion and why now (nerd alert!) I think it’s so much fun.

I first set out to learn R at the end of my first year of grad school. Overwhelmed by how very much I did not know about everything, my poor soul couldn’t take the blank stare of R’s option-less console, or its lightning rejections of my attempts to make it do what I wanted. (Or do anything except issue vague and vaguely disdainful error messages about how massively or minutely wrong I was.)

Now what?

Later, when I had more of my own data, committing the time to learning another way to look at the data seemed frivolous. After spending an afternoon making a list of odd numbers from 1 to 99 or the alphabet backwards, I would go back to SPSS, where clearly-labeled menus meant your p-value was just a few simple clicks away!

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure why I’ve moved past these hang-ups- I certainly don’t know much more about everything or have more time to spend getting to results- but I think it has to do with a new outlook. Now, I see using R like solving a series of puzzles with only a limited set of random tools. When what I thought I would see on the screen actually appears, it makes me feel MacGyver-y and oh-so-clever. Like I could survive living on a deserted island with only a jumprope and a pack of gum.

I’m sure the thrill will wear off…I’ve only JUST started trying to do statistical tests, and it’s going far less well than the graph-making…But, for now, if anyone needs me, I’ll be victory-dancing in my cubicle.

Two weeks ago it painfully sank in that I had completely missed out on a major transition in Silvie’s life. Leaving her nurturing scientific nest in the Read Lab to take a brave dive into a new world in yet another foreign country, beginning a new episode… Luckily I got to spend an hour with her on her last day on campus and was able to share some tears but also present to her the subject of my distraction form anyone else’s life.

While Silvie and Krijn had been finishing up projects, packing and shipping belongings overseas, having last dinners and toasts with their loved ones, I was preoccupied with preparations for a new beginning myself. I had taken off work before the due date of my second child and was spending my time at home exhibiting perfect nesting behavior.

The baby had been due beginning of the month, but the due date past, and the new earthling was showing no intent whatsoever to come great this world any time soon. I was joining my three year old bouncing up and down the stairs, I raked leaves, and hiked all the way up Mount Nittany, but none of it helped. There was no choice but to give in to the thought of eventually being induced. The doctors scheduled me for Monday November 12, a day after Marcel’s birthday. At least we were going to be having a birthday party for him then. But given the early appointment I had been given for the induction on Monday, we decided to have the birthday party on Saturday night instead of Sunday, so everyone would be able to drink lots of wine, sleep in, and cure eventual hangovers.

We spent Saturday preparing a birthday dinner: my god mother made a fancy first course with smoked trout, fennel and orange, I prepared the first lamb roast of my life, and Marcel’s postdoc’s wife brought a to-die-for home made German Schwarzwälder Torte. The evening promised to be a success. After we had been for a short walk in our neighborhood park – the usual picture of us, a family with a toddler and a black cat – I felt some muscles contract in my abdomen. Somewhat excited I told the others, but hey – these practice contractions can last for days.

We started eating and the contractions continued, but I kept telling everybody to relax. They were hovering over me but I just wanted everyone to have a good time, we were having a birthday party after all! And again, these kind of contractions were possibly going to last for hours if not days before becoming the real thing. I don’t know whether they believed me, something told me they didn’t. When my contractions became more frequent I was starting to write them down. ‘Relax’, I kept saying, ‘open another bottle of wine and enjoy! I am just fine…’.

We made it through all courses, everything had been just divine, and I was stuffed to the rim when the contractions became definitely more severe, and we decided that maybe I should call the hospital to ask for advice. I was told on the phone that I should probably come in to check for labor, and so the guests had their last glasses of wine and were slowly preparing to go home.

Marcel and I left the house at 10:47pm that night, and Elina came to great the world at 11:43pm. There were mere 17 minutes between the ‘time of admission’ and ‘time of birth’. She was very much in a hurry all of a sudden and, it seemed, determined to have her own birthday after all. And what a considerate little person to have let us all first taste that birthday cake!