Siliceous and Delicious

After another write-off of a day yesterday—felt utterly exhausted and tired, and eventually just left to go home and get my mind off of everything—I have a meeting lined up with Sergio Vallina (a postdoc at MIT) and Pedro Cermeño (apparently a professor in Spain somewhere, joining via Skype) to talk about diatom diversity. These are the guys who, as Zoe told me earlier this fall, are about to publish their work on diatom diversity. This had sent me into a bit of a tizzy at the time, believing that this might threaten the feasibility of my second chapter, but I suppose it’s better to know what they’re doing and learn what I can do differently, than cry about how I’m being scooped.

So, it having been several months since I’ve so much as thought about diatom diversity (or longer? I don’t even remember), I felt that it was time to recap my findings so far before the meeting. Spent a fair bit of time printing out old emails, reports to Andy, and my reviews of Dave’s manuscripts. It’s remarkable how much time I’ve actually spent thinking about this stuff (pretty deeply at times) without actually getting anything produced from it. All this gestation must lead to some pretty spectacular (though maybe bloody) birthing event at some point.