A lot of work done.

The past few weeks have have just been a blur. I was read somewhere, a couple of days ago, that it had been over a month since Michael Jackson had died. I was stunned by this because I was certain that it had only been a week or maybe two ago. But it seems when your days are dominated by writing grants the days just blur together.

But I'm finally done! In the past two months I have completed three major grants. One for the NIH, one for NSF and the latest was for the new version of the US anti-doping agency. All in all I've asked for just over a million dollars in total from the three institutions (to be paid over three years). The reality is I would be extremely lucky to get any one of those grants funded; though I just had a little moment of freaking out about what would happen if they were all funded. That might be the worst case scenario; I would be pretty hard pressed to get them completed in the given time if that was the case. But it's a problem I would be happy to have.

One of the ways I benefit directly from the grant is being able to supplement my income. I typically ask for about 10-20% of my salary, in the hopes of being able to by myself out of some of the teaching I have to do. Though if I get the funding this year I'm more likely to just pocket the money, as the budget cuts have now cut my salary by 10%!

The furlough plan recently passed, though I use the word plan in the loosest possible sense of the word. The plan, as we have been told is that we will be furloughed twice a month; we don't (legally prohibited from going to) work two days a month and are paid less as a result. Now the people organizing how the furloughs will work have all kinds of rules in place, such as the maximum allowable furlough days per month, the maximum number of consecutive furlough days... It's all well and good, except that there is no plan on how to implement furloughs for faculty members.

The problem is we don't all work the same schedules. Some classes are Monday, Wednesday & Friday, others are Tuesday & Thursday, some are only one day a week... this is not the typical government office type of situation. So the difficulty is how to implement a fair system for the closures of the university. Do you do it every other Friday? But then those who teach Tues. & Thurs. still work the same amount. Do you force every class to miss two lectures a month? Well that's not any better because now some classes will miss 25% of their lectures. Oh, did I mention that the students are now paying 30% more for the classes. I wonder how happy they will be with this whole situation?

To end this blog post on a more positive note I did just download a new game for my iPhone that is a total blast from the past: Worms Armageddon! Ok, so the armageddon part was dropped from the name, but the game is in the Apple App store. It's not perfect, but hey, for a platform with no real buttons nor a mouse it works pretty damn well. So I now have something new to play with on the days when I'm not allowed to go to work.