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Woo-hoo! I got a bonus! They gave it to me because of the stuff I've been doing with my professional development group. I totally didn't expect it. Maybe this will help offset the money that I've been spending on ostentatious trophies and taco dinners for my group. XD

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My Intern:

Hi!

I just found out that a spot to see the Conan O' Brien show opened up (it's free, and I had registered to be on the wait list two months ago). He's my favorite comedian/talk show host alive, and I was hoping it would be okay to not come in tomorrow since they recommend going there (Universal Studios) at around noon although the show is at 3:30 since they overbook.

I'm still working on my presentation (it's 20 pages right now,with images and 2.5 pages of references). Kailtyn told me what you told her today about structuring our presentations, which I'm also working on finishing.

Can we meet on Wednesday sometime?

Have a great evening!

Best,
Adi


Me:

Haha, yes. Have fun seeing Conan.

#yolo

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Well, the last month has been pretty crazy. So crazy that I can't even keep track of all of the things that have happened. I will try to summarize them here.

Beginning of July: I flew to France to give a talk about Mars. I am starting a new side business where I get paid to give talks about Mars. At first I thought it would be easy, and they would just pay me, but in the end I've been spending hours reading about whether or not I have to register myself as a business, whether I have to register myself as "self employed" in France, whether I need to incorporate, how to issue invoices, and how to pay taxes. It isn't straightforward, mostly because French people like every piece of paper to be stamped in triplicate and sent as a registered letter.

The next week I attended a little conference where we were discussing the benefits that we might get by controlling robots on the surface of Mars (or other planets) using humans that were in orbit around that planet. It's much harder (and sometimes impossible) to get down to the surface of a planet with humans (see: Venus), but controlling a robot from nearby would mean that we could be way more efficient with our data collection. We were trying to figure out what exactly we could enable and what kind of changes in technology we would need. They had astronauts, Department of Defense people, planetary scientists, field geologists, neuroscience people, everything. It was pretty fun. Unfortunately I had a proposal deadline at the same time, and they didn't allow anyone to be on their laptops or on the internet during the whole workshop, so that was a bit stressful and required one almost-all-nighter to overcome. I hope they fund our proposal-- we proposed to download every paper in the Martian literature and then scrape them using computer algorithms to get all of the latitudes and longitudes that they mention in the papers. This way we could georeference the Martian literature, and as we surfed around on Google Mars we'd be able to see all of the papers that had been written about any given area of interest. It got high scores last year but wasn't funded. Cross our fingers for a better outcome this time.

After that I went to Napa Valley to run a half marathon with my older sister, pinkcoconut . It was so fun! I can't believe I ran that many miles. My legs were exhausted. I was being very good about keeping in shape before the race, but after it was over I've done nothing. :D

I had two days back in town, during which I had to communicate with everyone on all of my projects and tend to my interns. On Thursday night, I left for the mountains for a retreat that I was running for an 8-week professional development seminar that I invented for my coworkers. It was really fun. I had divided up the participants into small groups and they all had subjects that they had to report about. They had to make their reports in creative ways, and there were some pretty creative ones! We also just hung out and played camp games.

Immediately upon returning from the mountains on Saturday, I showered and washed my dog Juan Pablo and hit the road for San Diego, where I was attending Comic Con to be on a NASA panel. I arrived too late on Saturday to get a badge, but
ranor and I walked around and did some things that didn't require a badge, like an Escape Room. Ranor and I defeated the Escape Room in a ridiculously short time, with about 1% help from the other members in our group. We won a free season of "The Expanse". The next day we walked around buying things and I went to my panel and told stories about working at NASA. It was fun. Someone asked for my autograph and said, "You guys are the real heroes".



I had a long dinner with Dennis, where we hypothesized about why we weren't married to anyone yet and eventually decided that we just had to try harder.

On the way home I was one car removed from being in a hideous multi-car accident, which I instead watched play out before my eyes as if in slow motion. I don't think anyone was horribly injured, but there was a lady lying on the pavement with a broken leg and blood all over her arms, totally dazed and confused. I blocked the accident with my car and helped pick up a bunch of random pieces of car that lay strewn around the highway, and then, when the cops came, I headed off down the road, a little bit more jumpy than before.

This week I have five days of relative calm before things start happening again. But this only means that I have to take a shovel to the huge pile of outstanding tasks that have been accumulating continuously as I've been away.

I have come to the conclusion that I have to find a way to graciously exit from at least half of the things that I am committed to do, but I can't figure out how to do it, and I can't decide which things I should give up. There is only one task that I am sure that I should give up, but that's the one sending me camping for four days in the middle of Utah next week, and the flight is already booked. Plus I get to spend four days driving a Jeep around amidst some of the most fossiliferous rocks in the country learning about stromatolites from world experts, so who wouldn't want to do that?

Today I have to turn in four abstracts for a conference in December, two for myself and two for my interns. I also have to organize the last two meetings in my 8-week professional development series (for 62 people), and decide what I'm going to say during the one that is happening tomorrow, which I am leading. My teams have been earning "points" throughout the series, and I also have to go back through my email and add up all of the points to see which team is winning. I also have to write the newsletter for my larger professional development group (>320 people) and organize all of the events that will be happening in August. It's crazy how fast a month can go by.

I decided to stay at home so that I wouldn't get too distracted, but look at me, here on Nutang procrastinating by writing down all of the things that I have to do. Oy vey. I might have to stay up all night tonight. But I am taking off about 5 hours to get a tour of Universal Studios from my new friend Soroush.



I almost forgot: yesterday, when I was driving out of the driveway, I saw a rat flopping around in front of my car. It was not moving like a normal, healthy rat, and I stopped the car and watched it. It flopped around a bit more, then lay on the ground, panting, until it died. It reminded me of one of the opening scenes in The Plague, when all of the rats are dying, and people don't realize that the plague will soon consume them all. I sort of hope that someone had poisoned it, because at least that would explain why it was acting the way it did. Last I checked it was still there in the driveway, flattened by one of the neighbors' cars. I don't really want to get close enough to it to touch it.

The End.

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Today I went to the doctor to get a skin tag removed and they convinced me to have a pap smear because I hadn't had one in about a decade. I reluctantly agreed, and now I feel like I fell off a roof and landed on a bicycle with no seat. See you in a decade, sadists!

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