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 Don't worry, I have not been consumed with fever and been eaten by my cats. I just somehow forgot to blog yesterday. I wasn't particularly busy or distracted, I just...forgot.

Fridays at work are always a bit of a scramble  because our deadlines are based on "calendar days" not "work days". So if there's a random distribution of due dates, Fridays get three times as many things falling due. We try to anticipate that and pack some of the work into the earlier part of the week, but...there you are. Most of my current investigations are spiraling toward the drain, which means it *looks* like I'm not actively working on them, but at any moment there maybe comments that need to be addressed and turned around immediately.

I have two new investigations, one of which I volunteered for because it happened as part of the same process as the other and since I was in the middle of immersing myself in the background, it seemed most efficient for me to do both. The first one involves some of the sort of document-history detective work I love doing. Where you trace back the problematic bit of the Standard Operating Procedure and discover that several years and multiple revisions ago, someone made a peculiar error that has never been caught and now you have to sort it out and ask how they were managing to perform the procedure correctly if they were actually using the SOP for guidance. And seemingly unrelated issues pop up in the mean time. Here's the basic issue: We have a procedure for shipping Object X from Location A to External Storage. We have a procedure for transferring Object X from Location A to Location B. We do not have a procedure for transferring Object X from Location B to Location A, nor do we have a procedure for shipping Object X from Location B to External Storage. Location B is full and we need to move some of the contents to External Storage. How do we do that? (Or rather, given that we *are* doing it, how do I deal with that because our procedure clearly doesn't allow for it.)

I also spent a fair amount of work time coaching my trainee (who, in theory, is fully qualified but that's different from being completely independent). I forget if I blogged about the investigation last week where, at the last minute, my reviewer required a whole slew of documentation on potential impact that was utterly unrelated to the actual failure I was investigating. Anyway, my trainee has an investigation for a similar part of the process being reviewed by the same reviewed and was told, "Provide me with this laundry list of documentation. Heather can help you because she did it for her recent investigation." Never mind that I explicitly said, "I'm giving up and I'll give you The Things because we need to get this closed, but I don't want this to be a precedent that these requests are reasonable or necessary and (to my manager) this is an official escalation that we need to address the question of irrelevant documentation requests." So the idea that my grudging capitulation is being used as precedent to require the same in another investigation is galling. (I told my trainee to talk to our manager and ask him to push back on her behalf.)

Yesterday I gamified part of my kitchen reorganization. The problem: I have a lot of coffee mugs. Far more than I need (especially given that I've got a full set of coffee cups as part of my china pattern). And I want to free up some cabinet space. (Currently one entire cabinet shelf is coffee mugs.) So every day I'll be using and posting a picture of a different coffee mug and asking facebook whether I should keep it. So far, the answer is: the vertebra-shaped novelty mug should be kept as a pencil cup on my desk, but removed from the cabinet, but the squat wide-bottomed "travel mug" should be ditched.

I had decided that, on my lunch bike ride, I was going to formally introduce myself to the regular I think of as "purple leash lady". (She has a very long, purple nylon webbing leash for her dog to let him run. Which means that any time someone is passing her and she needs closer control, she has to loop up 50 feet or so of leash. Which she does, but it's a bit funny to watch.) I've already spoken to her a few times (including apologizing for my initial comment, "you think the leash is long enough" because I realized that she's undoubtedly heard that joke entirely too many times before). But we missed each other's schedules because I was a bit late getting away from my desk, so I didn't see her.

To decompress over dinner, I've started getting caught up with some of the tv shows I've bought off of iTunes. I've been working my way through Versailles, but though it's a gorgeous show, I can't say I entirely *like* it. In part, it dwells too lovingly on physical nastiness (one of my squicks is body horror and it does a fair amount of that). But in part, I get restless because of how male-centered it is. Not that there aren't female characters, but with the exception of doctor-lady, their stories all revolve around the men. It gets tedious.

I'm having a bit more fun with Wolf Hall, though it's still a very male-centered story. I keep mentally comparing it with my memories of A Man for All Seasons and thinking about how entirely different stories can be told of the same events from different perspectives. Even as the viewpoint character in Wolf Hall, it's inescapable that Thomas Cromwell's story is that of a villain in some ways. And yet we're inescapably drawn into understanding the events from his point of view and seeing why every thing he does makes perfect sense.

I'm definitely getting starved for one-on-one social interactions, so I've set up a Skype call that I need to sign off here for soon. So I'll quickly summarize the food: breakfast - savory oatmeal with some of the lamb minced up and some of the lamb drippings mixed in. (I'm a big fan of savory oatmeal.) Lunch - lamb sandwich with apple chutney, lemon shortbread with mashed fresh raspberries. Dinner - hmm, trying to remember. Oh yes, the last of the lamb, reheated with some leftover steamed potatoes. 

 In commenting about my "ritual" for intake of take-out food, I was reminded of this poem I wrote back in the mid-80s when I was working in a biocontainment lab (level = "P3"). People might find some gallows humor in it. The particular organisms we had in that lab were bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD, a relative of mad cow), and Valley Fever (coccidioidomycosis, cocci for short).