Under new management

When my boss became seriously ill, and we had begun to ponder "grey" issues. We felt we could continue our research projects, but weren't sure if we would be able to. The University gets a heck of a lot of money in indirect costs from grants, could someone act in boss' name until the grants expired.

My boss finally admitted that he should try and think of the working stiffs interests. He gave our post-doc the same signing authorities that he had. He tried to arrange a faculty type position, so he could hopefully take over in case it was needed. By means, this was no guarantee - the funding agencies could still pull the plug.

But in the recent months, the post-doc complained about the lack of progress on the faculty position. He frequently said that if it wasn't for him acting in OUR best interests, he would have taken another post-doc position somewhere else. But he started to overall manage our projects, and start to take over the ones the departing grad students had left.

Then a person who graduated from our lab said that he was finishing up his post-doc, and wanted to explore the possibility of coming back to the lab as a junior faculty. His options are fairly limited because he wants the next step after post-doc, and needs to still work in Tucson.

I thought there'd be a turf battle going on. But if the graduate returned, it would be at the beginning of the year. Now if he does come, it'll be before Thanksgiving. The post-doc seems resigned to his fate. And I almost felt sorry for him (even though I knew he was tired of Tucson and wanted a job in California).

Then he called on his way out of town. "Could you take the poster down to get printed for Friday's poster session?"

Me: "You know they require two business days to print. It's 2:30PM, and there's no way in hell we'll get it in time for Friday AM. I thought this had been taken care of weeks ago."

Him: "Sorry, forgot about it."

Not to even mention our poster is in the wrong format and can't be quickly changed. And what about his promise to update the data.....

Any sympathy just evaporated. I know this would not have happened with the other guy. I hope he does come.

The light bulb just turned on

I had posted a few weeks back about a breakout of what I thought were bug bites. They faded after a few days, and I quickly forgot about it.

Until last night. When I finally got around to slipping into something more comfortable, I noticed a red strange shaped rash on my ankle. It didn't quite have the shape of a bug bite, and since now with the cool nights, my feet and ankles are always covered. It didn't really itch, and having the fabric covering helped, so I covered it up with my slipper socks, and didn't think anything more.

Then this AM while I was walking to my car, it suddenly hit me. Could this be dermatitis herpetiformis? DH is associated with celiac patients, and for as long as I most likely had celiac, I thought I had beaten the odds. I know that I've had a lot of trouble managing symptoms this month, so perhaps the odds have finally caught up with me.

If you do a search for DH, don't do so after you've recently eaten. Some of the pictures are terrible. I'll probably document these, but they're nowhere near as bad as some of these people.

End of an era

Due to the University's new policy on email support, the email address I've had for a long time will be going away at the end of the year. Until I get around to changing all my addresses (like here), the mail will forward to my new account.

My biggest gripe is the one and only source for email and web page hosting still only allows 3-8 chracter usernames. Having a common first name and a last name that's also common (for a guys name). But I was able to change it to something that I can live with. And while I will miss having the generic username of first name initial and last name, I guess those days are almost over.

One era that has NOT ended are the fall vendor shows. I missed the VWR show last week because of clinical sample processing. But I will go to the Fisher Scientific one today (even if I can't eat their food). I admit that part of the fun of these shows was the free lunch and free food. The fall ones were more fun because there'd be oodles of Halloween candy they beg you to take.

Since my candy selections are slightly limited, and I'm trying to lose the mysterious ten pounds that showed up, I will be good today.