15: Five Things Friday Vol. 105

Five Things Friday: just five things I’m thinking about or things that made my week, or things that I otherwise feel like sharing.

The next few weeks will be busy. My mother-in-law will be visiting for a long weekend. We contemplated going down to SoCal for Thanksgiving, but since Thanksgiving travel is always crazy, we invited her up here, so she can see our new home and we can host an early Thanksgiving dinner the weekend before. (Is that frowned upon? As a German, I usually oppose celebrating anything early, but I’ll make an exception in this case. Hehe.)

Oh, and because this year hasn’t already been crazy enough, why not also throw in an annual check-up, pap smear, and mammogram between now and my marathon in early December? I am aiming to start with a completely clean slate in 2025. #gettingshitdone

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I have completely neglected Linus and Sally, my sourdough starters, in the last few weeks and they’ve been ‘freezing their butts off’ in the fridge. I got them out this morning to revive them and hopefully bake again on Sunday! I miss a fresh, warm slice of rye bread in my life.

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In other news, we booked (horrendously expensive) flights to Germany for the holidays. I know, I know, we should have looked sooner (although Meike reassured me that prices have been nuts for weeks so maybe there was nothing to be done!) but we had so many other things going on that we postponed dealing with it until after our move. It hurt a little bit to hit the purchase button, but what’s done is done and I am solely focused on the jubilant anticipatory joy of being able to spend the holidays at home with my family for the first time in over a decade! 

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I had my first one-on-one meeting with my new (acting) supervisor this week. I like him. He’s personable, seems to take his temporary job seriously, and has pledged to help our group out as much as possible in the next few months. Unfortunately, it also sounds like he’s really just in for the short term and we don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the spring. Our research group needs a new program chief (who also develops programs/projects to keep us all busy), but I don’t know who’s going to step in. It might be a while until they hire somebody new for the position. It sucks to be in limbo for the foreseeable future.

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ICYMI: may I direct your attention to the 9th annual Secret SANta Swap 2024, a holiday swap that I’ve been hosting for a few years now and that I simply created because it’s so fun to put a smile on somebody else’s face during the holiday season. As many of you know, to receive something in the mail that is NOT bills and advertisements is a tremendous joy. I think we could all use some of that. 

Happy Weekend, y’all. 

I am doing NaBloPoMo this month. 30 blog posts in 30 days. Come join me. #nablopomo2024Links to the Participants List and NaBloPoMo2024 Blog Post Ideas! Happy writing!