The last couple of months have been a whirlwind of deadlines and activity at work! Including:

A big paper revision due in January. This is a paper I wrote with my colleague in Psychology, Mitch, on the role of visual information in speech processing. Audiovisual speech perception is something on which Mitch is an expert, but this was my first foray into the field. It was a great learning experience and I think we ended up with a very nice paper, but it was a lot of time and effort (especially making the figures, which is always something I'm picky about). When it gets accepted I will post about it on my lab blog.
A surprise job application due at the end of January. This could be a whole post on its own. The short(ish) version is that the Australian Hearing Hub at Macquarie University (in Sydney, Australia) is looking for a Professor of Language, Hearing, and the Brain. Coincidentally this is exactly what I do, and they invited me to apply for the job, even though they ideally wanted someone more senior (a full professor with a lot more experience). It's not clear if anything will come of this, but I wanted to apply because it's an excellent networking connection, good practice at conveying my strengths and goals, and potentially useful in negotiations with my current department. Unfortunately the application was not short, and I (of course) wanted to do a good job. So, this took a few days of my time during a month when I could not spare a few days.
A big grant due February 5. This is an R01 from NIH in which we proposed to look at speech processing in Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and healthy aging. I knew this deadline was coming for a while, but due to the items above I didn't start in earnest until mid-January, and most of the research portion was written the last few days. This is a BAD IDEA and a recipe for A LOT OF STRESS. I got the grant in, and am fairly happy with the outcome, but it was not fun.

Wednesday I leave for the UK for a week, including talks at Oxford (aaaaah!) and University College London (aaaaaah!), both places with formidable reputation and top-notch researchers. It's exciting to have opportunities to give talks there but I definitely feel a lot of pressure to do a good job. My official reason for going back is a 2-day workshop in Cambridge on a specific type of fMRI data analysis, at the CBU (where I used to work). Our friends Mike and Amy (both at Penn) are going also, which will be fun. It's going to be a whirlwind trip though: Oxford (1 night), London (1 night), Sussex (1 night), Cambridge (3 nights), London (1 night).

And yes, of course I'm planning on stopping off at the Eagle and Child for a pint.

I have two grants being reviewed this month; the outcomes of these reviews will do a lot for my mood over the upcoming months. My current funding runs out in July, so if I don't get either of these grants I will not be able to afford any staff in my lab, and my own job will start to feel pretty precarious (we have a new department chair coming this year, so nothing is certain — though if I'm bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in grant money, things are a little more certain).

All of that aside, with the February grant deadline past I can breathe slightly easier, until March 8th (next grant due March 16th). What I'd really like to do is get back to regular exercise, walks in the park with Jill, and cooking at least once per week. Jill has been hugely supportive the past month and a half as I've felt margin-less, and she's done all of the cooking and cleaning and basically everything else. I certainly couldn't have done all of this without her!

Hopebench