So, I’m done

Tuesday night: failed utterly to sleep until about 3:00 am when I gave up and looked up the diffusion distance through Nafion membranes for reactive materials. Dozed for an hour and then caught cab to airport at 4:30 am.

Wednesday: Flew for 11 hours, read a lot of papers and annotated my research proposal with a lot of green ink. Checked into hotel. Practiced talk, phoned Mr Bob and asked him to stop by for dinner, practiced talk, slept (yeah!)

Thursday: Picked up by prof and taken to university, tour of labs and instrument rooms, gave talk on research to date (went OK), answered questions (went very well, though perhaps I should have not used the term “that’s a common misconception” to the professor-about-to-be-emeritus), met with people, gave proposed research talk (went quite surprisingly well-this was supposed to be quite scary-I’m still not sure what happened. I found it almost pleasant), met with students, dinner with two profs, hotel, sleep.

Friday: Taxi to university, meet with lots of people (profs, secretaries, glassblowers, Dean), met with search committee, asked what I would do with useless students, they seemed pleased that I had fired a student (quite pleased actually), asked a bunch of other stuff about research across Canada and the world (didn’t do so great there), met with head, dinner with two profs.
The final dinner was actually quite nice. I was done with the interview and I was having dinner with the two profs that Mr Bob goes for coffee with the most. (As I mentioned in the blog, the fact that I am Mr Bob’s wife is supposed to be a secret.)

One prof mentioned Mr Bob a couple times in passing in the taxi and then about 5 minutes into dinner he says “Mr Bob, (looks at me)-we can say his name now-let’s get that 800 pound gorilla out of the corner..pause…Did I just call Mr Bob a gorilla?” So after that, dinner was much more relaxed and I had a lovely time. The two profs weren’t on the search committee, so I could just hang out.

Got back to hotel, checked out, Mr Bob picked me up, went back to house, said hi to friends that were visiting, poured myself a whisky and passed out on the couch 30 minutes later.

I slept a lot this weekend.