Flight of the iPhone

It took me several days before I realized I had such nice comments on my last post! Why, you might wonder? Afterall, one of my last posts (I won't call it 'recent') extolled the virtues of my iPhone. Why did my iPhone not alert me to the presence of my happy readers stopping by, you might wonder? The story goes like this:

It was a dark and stormy morning...ok, it was actually sunlit and beautiful, but that's not exactly the setting one would expect for such a horrible event. General Disarray and I were rushing around, running late for Baby Mayhem's doctor's appointment. (Running late is one of my least favorite things in the world. It makes me stressy and distracted and liable to do stupid things that I would never do if I had a quarter of my brain focused on the task at hand.) Since Baby Mayhem is not overly fond of her car seat, getting her in and safely strapped down requires some freedom of movement. So, as General Disarray finished grabbing things from the house,  I put my purse on top of the car, strapped the glowering baby into her seat, grabbed the strap of my purse and yanked. Somehow, this motion slingshotted my iPhone out of the purse; arcing through the air it landed face down on the cement floor of our garage.

When things go really wrong for Baby Mayhem, her face goes through three distinct phases.

 

Phase 1: Shock. As in, did that really just happen?!

Phase 2: Uncertainty. I think this was bad, but how bad was it really? Let me ponder this a moment. (This phase is always accompanied by a mouth that looks exactly like an upside down U)

Phase 3: Certainty. Yes, I have pondered what just happened and I have come to the inescapable conclusion that this was indeed as bad as I thought it was. Screaming inconsolably is the only logical reaction.

As I picked up my iPhone and processed this:

Not actually my iPhone, but a fair facsimile thereof!

General Disarray says my face exactly mirrored the 3 stages of unhappy Baby Mayhem. Since we were running late, General Disarray quickly bundled my sobbing ass into the car and off we went with me cradling my poor iPhone. Given all the abuse it has taken (baby hands, baby licking, baby throw up, being sat on, being thrown), I had come to believe the thing was indestructible. Turns out it is only almost indestructible. Amazingly, after slingshotting through the air horizontally 4-5 feet and dropping vertically by 6 feet, the damn thing still worked! However, using it for any period of time kinda felt like looking at the world through a pair of glasses with a prescription that is close to yours but not quite perfect.

So what does one do other than sob uncontrollably? Apple is more than happy to put in new glass for you for a mere $250, but General Disarray (knowing that life would never be happy again in the Chaotic Disarray household until the iPhone was whole again) found an awesome company: Mission Repair. They do it for about half the price (which also includes their awesome overnight shipping system - they overnight you a shipping box for your iPhone, you drop off your precious at FedEx, Mission Repair fixes it and ships it back to you). If, unlike us, you didn't wait until Friday to send your iPhone in, the whole thing (from ordering on line to getting your unblemished precious back) takes about 3-4 days.

So there you have it. What have I learned from this? 1) The iPhone is not (completely) indestructible, 2) my happiness is disturbingly tied to an inanimate object, 3) my baby's unhappiness response is apparently genetic, and 4) General Disarray is awesome (I already knew that but it never hurts to be reminded).

Newborns mean always having to say you're sorry (but not really)

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I thought about starting this post off with the obligatory apology for going so absolutely silent. But I do a lot of apologizing these days and felt like my own blog was the one place where perhaps I would skip that step. With the baby and everything else going on, I've dropped the ball on many things - mostly things other people want me to do for them. Most of my apologies are partially heart felt. After all, I am sorry that I (fill in blank with thing that someone else thought was important but I didn't do here). However, it's not like I've been eating bonbons and sipping pastis so I'm only sorry they're unhappy with me; I'm not sorry that I didn't do what they wanted. So I write a lot of emails that have various of the elements below:

Dear important-person-So-and-So: I am so sorry that I haven't responded to you in several months. I know you thought your (fill in blank here) was incredibly important but over the past few months I have: 1) Had a baby, 2) see #1, 3) went through the tenure process which required putting together my tenure packet and giving a talk while operating on only a couple hours of sleep and nursing a newborn and I only had two hours a day to get stuff done because my baby hates napping, 4) see 1 and 2, 5) tried to keep my research program rolling by writing an assload of grants to funding agencies with apparently negative funding rates (I didn't know negative funding rates were possible either, but there you have it) and finally, you guessed it, see 1), 2) and 4). Much of my work time these days is spent holding a baby with one hand, typing  with the other "obviously, the predictions of the model are well supported by..." while blowing raspberries and saying such erudite things as "roly moly poly foly toly" (she apparently loves rhyming nonsense).  As you might now begin to suspect, my email inbox looks like someone sent it a Howler which did a lot of screaming and then exploded. Terribly sorry. Hugs and Kisses, Professor Chaos.

P.S. please don't respond to this email unless its really important as it will take me another few months to respond. In the meantime seeing your unanswered email in my inbox will cause me great guilt and anxiety which, contrary to all logic, will not actually make me respond more quickly but will only make me not respond to more emails until your email spills on to page 2 of my inbox and I no longer have to look at it (and thus no longer feel guilty).

I once tried to email an important but absentminded professor who apparently had allowed his inbox to fill to its quota and thus bounced back incoming email. I'm beginning to think it was not absent-minded at all but the most brilliant strategy known to man...

Things I've learned while returning to work

Things I've learned while I've been slowly ramping up how much time I spend working versus doing baby-related things:

1) Working at home is still more productive than working at school...if Baby Mayhem agrees to take her naps or her grandmother is visiting. I really thought that going to work would be critical for managing to get work done. But I'm only at school 1-2 days per week and those days often get jam packed with meetings. Even though Baby Mayhem's good days only give me 1-3 hours of time to get work done, that's still more time than I get at school. Of course on the bad days, being home is kinda like  being stuck in a faculty meeting all day - lots of crying, yelling, spitting, and general frustration.

2) You do actually get used to baring your breasts at work (behind locked doors, with the blinds drawn closed, and the lights off). I now regularly pump when I go to school. What's hard is making sure I get time to do it. Since my day is often booked from beginning to end, it's hard to find 30 minutes to deal with the breast pump. It's not like I can schedule a meeting with a student or administrator and pump during it. I have, however, used milking myself as an excuse to get out of a painfully long committee meeting. Let's just say a room full of men have no comeback to that one...

3) I'm less worried about other people's whiny problems. A senior professor fussed at me because I hadn't sent a mundane email that he thought I should have sent. Before Baby Mayhem I would have gone home and worried about whether the incident made that professor think less of me. Now, I just looked at him and thought "pfft. I'm getting 3 hours of sleep at night and still working while on 'maternity leave' and taking care of a newborn. Write your own damn emails."

4) The state of my appearance is generally unchanged. Over the years, I have seen mothers of newborns generally stop investing in their appearance. They stop brushing their hair, putting on makeup, wearing nice clothes, etc. However, I never did those things before I had the baby so there is no discernable change in my appearance. The only real difference is that instead of having white deodorant stains on my shirt, I now have white spit up stains.

5) Sleep deprivation will drive you slowly insane, but your graduate students may not notice. I'll let you decide whether that's because I'm good at hiding my insanity or because my graduate students already thought I was crazy...

and last but not least

6) Not having much opportunity to do science for the past few weeks has bothered me personally much more than I thought it would. Getting little done scientifically doesn't worry me professionally (I worked my butt off before Baby Mayhem arrived to make sure things were going through the pipelines before the lull hit). But personally, I really miss working on my science. However, I take it as a good sign that I still love that aspect of my job and I've chosen the right career for myself!