October and Cooler Temps

How about that?  My weather fixation continues.  Actually, I just like sunny Sunday mornings.  It was 56 this morning when I went out to set my sprinklers.  Brrrrrrrrr!  I haven't felt 56 in a long time.  It's supposed to stay like this for a little while.  High 50s to low 60s at night, mid-80s during the day.  Beautiful weather, but no rain in sight.

I have seen rain though.  Both times I went to Washington DC in September it was raining there.  I wish I could have brought it back with me.  Still, even with water restrictions my lawn is looking pretty good.  The break in the heat will probably save it, although the same can't be said for many of the trees in the area.  Flying into Dallas last Friday, everything looks brown, and maybe half the trees are brown rather than green.  You can tell there's a serious drought here.  It looks like mid-winter rather than early Fall.  I'll have to cut back all my dead shrubbery out front and hope to find some green in the center.  That shrubbery is usually green all year.
The cat kids are fat and happy.  I found a pet sitter for them this year while I was on the long vacation and had her come in every other day.  She worked out perfectly.  Only Addy came out for her, but at least Addy got wet food every other day.  Addy didn't lose weight while I was away like she has been for the last couple of long trips.  You can see from this picture that neither of them is in danger of starving, but I didn't see the usual, Addy-dropping-weight-and-Zoe-gaining that I often see when I'm gone long periods of time.  Here they're taking an early morning drink at the patio birdbath/cat watering hole.

I have no trips in October, but a lot of small projects to complete.   I'm participating in a Webinar this week.  Then I have an e-learning project due, a talk for the lab techs, a presentation at journal club,  a set of chromatograms to tidy up and submit for a book chapter, a science project to help a local student with and a GC/MS assay to bring up in-house to make our ICU docs happy.  That's my list I'm hoping to either complete or get well into this month.  The GC/MS assay will probably take more than a month to validate, and the science project I just need to grow up some cells and figure out some basic stuff before helping the kid set up the project herself.  The talks and presentations should be pretty straight-forward, so they'll get done this month.  I've become pretty good at throwing presentations together.

My promotion went into effect on September 1st and all is good at work for the most part.    I had to qualify that because of 2 things:  We have a new Chairman of Pathology, and a new Chairman means lots of changes coming along.  It will be interesting to see how things work out.  The second thing is that the County Hospital is struggling right now and going through lost of changes.   I sign out test results over there, and they are working on getting credentialing up to date.  I haven't been credentialed over there previously despite signing out for the last 10+ years.  So I'm getting credentialed, and in the meantime, someone else is covering my signout duties.  At my primary job though things are going very well.  New instruments are being installed, and I'm staying nicely busy.

And that's the news for this lovely Sunday morning, October 2nd, 2011.  Or something like that.