Tuesday, December 12th

Stupid K thought she was buying herself a picture frame to put pictures in. Having taken some ugly brown paper off the back, K discovered she had bought herself a picture frame with a peach picture in it which was firmly attached and sealed off with brown paper on the back.
Having taken off the back I guess I can't return it (but will try). I was going to get ahead of schedule by making nice collage for J (L's boyfriend) already this evening. now I have to figure out where to get a proper picture frame - and that will have to be at the weekend. What started as a peaceful week has turned out stressful (how could I take the weekend off??). Trying to learn about mortgages, spending mornings on the phone about them, realizing that letting someone else run 2 of your studies + finding research assistants to help her is quite some work, discovering mistakes in medialab study when looking at it with her, realizing you have not yet programmed one part of your experiment, needing to clear out a room and design an entire experiment was well as handing it in to the IRB + hand in amendments of an old study to the IRB because you decided to run a few men as well as women and probably a few more things I have suppressed right now - that is more than I had banked on early this week. I have my good-bye party this Friday and felt I should help with the preparations. Today I offered to make a start by getting wine tomorrow evening - hopefully that will make up for at least one hour less of helping, I was only going to work on Friday morning but I feel like a need about 3 Fridays to get all this stuff finished. If I don't I'll have to work when I get home which I do not want to have to do.
Yesterday I took my RAs to lunch, was really nice. They are fun, and we had a nice lunch. When I asked for feedback about supervision they were so positive, that was really nice, felt much better about my teaching skills afterwards. One of them said it had really touched him that I had made the effort to come and look at a poster he was giving (I went to a undergrad poster session with Tamar, the one I wrote about). So, I felt happy about that. But then J was so nice about something that was potentially quite problematic that I felt so sad about leaving I had to retreat very quickly from his room. Luckily he has left for Europe now and does not have much opportunity to be nice to me anymore. I nearly cried hugging Bailey too this morning so I wonder what state I will be in when I leave next week Monday... L looked like she would cry too when I told her how late my plane leaves. Leaving is so sad, even if going home is exciting (if someone would just give me a crash course in mortgages and then tell me why we are chosing the right one, so much money involved, and so little knowledge on my part - I feel I should acquire more otherwise I may have regrets, but how?)
I'm off to bed, need to catch up on some sleep and work very hard tomorrow (if I can, may spend morning discussing mortgages).