Forget the cheeks, TUMMY! TUMMY!

So why the hell can't I fit into my old pants???

I think I also lost some weight recently (amazing, the visual effect of one more almost visible rib to the "is it just me, or did I lose weight?" body monitoring), but for some reason, can't fit into 2 pairs of jeans anymore.

My hypothesis: it's the cloths that are changing, not us.

FTR, I don't think I'm under 100 pounds just yet (prolly around the 104), so not alarmed. Hell, after the test-season I almost finished, nothing can alarm me anymore. Besides the test season which will start in about 3-4 months.

But oh, wait. There's an adorable baby that's staring at me. Humm... awwwwww!

Baby Chucks! [link]

Punk rock mommies!

Oh, Em. You little fashion diva!

Don't tell me what to do!

I WILL. THINK DIRTY THOUGHTS.

Cheeks! [link]

I cannot STAND!!!!!! how cute he is.

And little baby shoes are by weakness.

Dog~ma in quantities would be appreciated.

In 5 weeks, my until-then-perfectly-healthy-dog saw the vet 6-7 times.

Tomorrow he's going to see an eye specialist (we think he got something into his eye - it's infected, and a week of eye ointment didn't help), and an hour ago (we discovered just now) he broke a nail, and he's bleeding.

That's after a week on antibiotics, and a cardiac problem which begun it all. We'll consult with a vet cardiologist soon.

But he's 10 years old, dammit, and there's a limit to how many times we can anesthetize him so he'll be treated properly.

Cheeks! [link]

Cutie!

I did some research today to prepare for my phone interview, which will be Thursday (so, no time to get anything meaningful from a coach.) I realized that this job was one where the links in the original job posting were all broken, in a way that made it impossible to apply, and they were fixed several days later, but just fixed in the original posting. There wasn't any sort of "If you tried to apply and couldn't, here's what to do" new posting. I went back to the ad a few times to try to figure it out, because there's a professor at that school working on a lot of stuff that I'm really interested in, but I'm sure that plenty of people just tried the original link, realized it didn't work, and said "Whatever" and went on to other stuff.

Thank you all for the well-wishes for my mom. She says she feels like she's doing better today, although she can only be up and about for a little bit at a time. She even admitted she was pretty worried herself--it seems like every time she gets a cold, the following bronchitis is harder and harder to shake.

I survived the sick, hyper child. He was actually quite delightful after he got over his mom leaving.

I got three rejection letters today. I'm kind of panicking a bit. As usual. I'm thinking about what I can do if I don't get a job in academia, and I really can't think of much.

Hil, are there postdoctoral fellowships in math? That is the traditional way to wait out a bad job market while staying in academia.

It's a terrible, terrible year to be looking for an academic job. My own program is ranked 6th in the country out of 235 programs, so our students are usually competing for the very best jobs, but this year there so few jobs that every student from every program in the country is applying for the the same handful of positions, many of them in institutions the applicants woudn't normally consider.

I got a call recently from the department chair at a not very well-known regional university who was "considering" interviewing one of our best students. He was so obnoxious about how selective they were being about interviews that I looked him up; turns out that the graduate student already had twice as many peer reviewed publications as the department chair had managed in his 30 year career! This is the topsy-turvy world of the the academic job market right now. Programs feel free to reject young applicants whose skills and accomplishments already exceed those of the entire department. In the sciences, at least, most people are trying to ride it out in a postdoc.