The grant has been submitted!  Which grant you ask?  A $300,000 request that will allow the department to purchase fancy molecular devices that do all sorts of cool things with DNA.  When bringing up the idea of submitting this grant to the rest of the faculty, I naively thought that they wouldn't make the frog guy write it.  Well... turned out that they overwhelming thought it was a great task to give to the new guy.  Which is awesome considering I have so little else to do.  Nonetheless, when requesting help 3 weeks ago, I was met with very little help or input.  In fact, at one point a professor suggested we just quit and submit it later.  Which actually sounded like a great idea to me because it was like moving a mountain trying to get anything going.  So, I told everyone that we were just going to wait 6 months and submit it then.  Well after taking a couple days off and feeling really good, I checked and realized that the grant was only offered once a year!  So I had to go around to everyone, and muster up support to get a grant that had basically nothing written to a full bore submission in a little over a week's time.  Of course, this week was also the week we started classes to add even more to the chaos.  So I basically spent the entire week writing, editing, hounding, getting signatures... working every second during the day, and well into the night to get this thing done.  In the end, everyone stepped up and helped, but it was exhausting.  I literally walked into my ecotox course at 11am and talked about playmates and pesticides for an hour, went over to the Dean's office for a signature, ate lunch while reading my teaching evaluations (more on that below), printed out the 81 page document to proof read, showed up at my graduate level class- Foundation in Ecology- literally without having ANYTHING prepared.  Apparently the grad students are used to it, and praised me for having buttoned my shirt correctly (commenting on how another unamed prof was in complete disarray when submitting his grant).  Somehow I managed to pull something together on the fly and headed back to my office for the final proofreading.  And now... it is submitted!

So to clarify some comments- playmates in class- I was discussing linear trends and found an interesting one that I knew the students would rememeber-

Teaching Evals- So I scored a 4.5 out of 5.  Which I would think is pretty damn good for my first go at it especially.  But, after some magical statistical adjustment it drops down to a 4.1 which is just average...  No idea why, but apparently it weights things like if the students are motivated to take your course then it penalizes you?  Since they are likely to give you good scores?  If you teach a course no one likes (like statistics) then it bumps up your scores.  Totally lame.  So the message I am getting is to teach crappy courses that no one wants to take.

I am taking tomorrow off since I worked all of MLK day and have missed this entire week- the inaguration, and even the season premiere of LOST!  Of course, there is no rest for me.  I swear ten seconds after I submitted the grant- I got an email from a journal giving me a second notice that a review I have to do is overdue...  Never ends!