Tomorrow Came and Went, and I Worked Through It

Babies, that little boy birthday party? Eventually went well. How badly can a party with ten six-year olds go? Really, why would I worry about such an event?

Well, probably because one little boy was coming from another city and didn't know the others. One little boy was a younger cousin with a penchant for digging bugs. One little boy doesn't talk much, and eats less, and after a while I was afraid he was going to fall over but he soldiered on and didn't complain. And one little boy, whose mumma also attended the party, has Aspberger's syndrome.

Obviously then, no need to be concerned. Just a normal group of six-year old boys. None of them ate anything except carrots and cake and ice cream, and they drank about 50 litres of juice and water. They were uninterested in hot dogs! Six-year old boys who'd been running around a soccer field for an hour did not want hot dogs! what is this world coming to?

Really though, it was fine. Better in fact, than most adult parties could ever go.

*****

I haven't posted for a while because I have been working all the time, and when I'm not working I'm ferrying children around to soccer, doing volunteer work, attending a meeting of some kind, or going to yoga class, which is actually an okay thing to do. Mostly though, I've been working.

Crystallographers collect data that sometimes isn't used for years by the researchers. Some people grow crystals and get all excited about a structure, but they don't publish the paper that contains the structural data for another two years, maybe three, maybe five. Sometimes things get published very quickly, sometimes data is critical for a conference presentation, sometimes it's important for tenure, promotion, whatever. Sometimes it's not.

Some datasets are easy to solve and fall out very quickly, and can be sent off to their owners for future use. ... whenever that might be. Some are very difficult, either because they're twinned (that is, because there are two interpenetrating repeat lattices in the same crystal, and we have to deconvolute the data. While this has become more routine, it is still not always a straightforward process.) or because the crystals aren't physically single, and instead there's a main crystal and maybe a couple, or more, "friends" hanging around. These multiple crystals are more difficult to solve, not because we can't get the structure of the molecule, but because we can. We can solve the structure, but it's not a pretty picture, and the synthetic chemists who've made the compound always want the data to be better than it can possibly be.

It takes a long time to do this.

It used to be that we could collect data on about 50 crystals a year, and solve the data fully for publication. During my crystallographic lifetime we've gone from that 50 datasets a year to as many as 500, due to advances in technology both in detectors and in optimization of data collection strategies. I don't know what any one crystallographer would do with 500 datasets a year, because right now between two of us we're having enough trouble solving 200 per year. People submit crystals to us that anyone else would turn away, and why? because my boss can almost always solve them. I can usually crawl through a difficult dataset but it is agony to find the right pathway to a solution.

Solving difficult crystallographic data is what we do. Of course my boss does all kinds of other things, leaving him little in the way of spare time to carry out the work that sometimes needs his attention. I can handle most of it, but not all of it. I don't work in the X-ray diffraction area full time, to start with, and even if I did, even full time isn't enough time.

I've been working at night, reading emails and then "just taking a quick look" at data before I go to bed...and then I don't go to bed for another two hours or more. My problem is not that I have difficulty sleeping, but rather that I don't go to bed. Tired and bad-tempered, I've been waking up thinking about how to solve various small problems with data, and I do not like this. I walked away from being a tenured associate professor because I no longer wanted to be defined by my work. I didn't want to wake up thinking about how to solve x, y or z work issues, because really? I didn't think they were all that important. I still don't, and yet, here I am, dreaming about work so that I can fix problems. Yeesh. Good thing it's not a permanent gig.