Good (Professional) News...

Finally, after almost four years, two spent without any laboratory space, a Big Government Institution/Agency has decided to fund my work. The holy grail has been found - government funding. They sliced and diced the hell out of the budget, but my ideas (and my co-PI's ideas) survived the peer review process and actually got recommended for funding. My co-PI had recently served on a review panel and came back forlorn that out of the multitude (30-50) of proposals that had been reviewed, only two were recommended for funding. That gives you an idea of how bad the funding landscape is out there right now, and also why we feel pretty damn good about ourselves today, even if the proposed budget was cut back to the bone - we still managed to eke out two full years of RA support on it.

I got back to my office around 10 AM after teaching my summer class and saw the voicemail light blinking, which I usually hate to see since it invariably means that someone wants something from me or that I have to deal with people. I've really taken a shine to not coming into the office during the summer and working from home. You can imagine my surprise and delight when it actually was someone wanting to give me something for a change!

So, today feels like a pretty good day, professionally, and those days seem to be few and far between, so I think I'll enjoy this.