Clearing the decks

I've been busy this week preparing for the presentation I told you about and getting a significant piece of writing out the door. Both are finished now, and I am left with the strangest sensation:

There is nothing I need to write right now.

For the last ~2 yrs I've spent most Saturdays (and not a few Sundays and evenings) attached to my laptop, writing and rewriting one thing or another. The past month was one piece of writing; the 3 months before that were a paper that we sent out in December; the 9 months before that were the paper we published last fall; the 3 months before that were my dissertation--etc.

Of course, some Saturdays were taken up with experiments to sort out details of these papers and so forth, but the gist of it is--this is the first weekend in a very long time that I have woken up and thought, "Hey, I don't have any writing goals this weekend."

It was disorienting. We went into lab and I puttered around doing basic lab catch-up things that I've had to cram into the work-week (or haven't done at all--e.g. certain types of equipment maintenance....). When I'd accomplished what I wanted, we went home and I didn't even turn on my computer, let alone try to rework an abstract or find an appropriate reference or tweak a figure or check some statistics or.....It's not even that I dislike writing (the sensation of pushing a final product out the door is deeply satisfying, and I learn so much in the process) but there's just always something to do.

We should be getting reviews back on the most recent paper within the next couple of weeks, and no matter the result there will be work to do. And when that's over, there are some lingering things in GradLab I should still deal with, and so on. This is just a brief respite, the eye of the hurricane.

But oh my, it feels rather nice.