More Old Blogs

Here a few more of the old blogs.

Old Blog 2:

After
Well... My wife is home and doing very well. She is not in a lot of pain and is in very good spirits. We have to wait about a week for the pathology to come back on the lesion. Now we wait... and hope.

Old Blog 3:

24 hours later
It has been 24 hours since my wife came out of surgery. She is doing well- not in a lot of main and in high spirits. She is still very, very scared that the cancer has spread and she would have to go through chemotherapy. Unfortunately, unlike my wife, I cannot get sick leave from graduate school. So, if she has to go through chemo, I don't know what we will do. She will be very ill for a long time and I will have to be the caretaker, house keeper, cook, student and husband. Our lives have already changed so much. Atleast we have the next couple days to adjust to this new phase, before we find out if our lives will become more chaotic. We are both very excited to go home this weekend to Wisconsin. We are going to see our brand new neice. She was born Thursday, April 13th. I should say something sly and prophetic about the circle of life... but it is a cruel notion and my heart aches too much as it is. I hope all of you who read this are well and that you take the time each day to do something that makes you truly happy. This has made the world of difference to me in the past couple of weeks. Regards.

Old Blog 4:

RAWR!
Well on top of the saga of my wife's illness and her recovery from surgery, my Ph.D. advisor recently left the institution that I am at. I originally moved to Massachusetts last year to follow him when he decided to take a job here, out of the blue as far as he told any of his students. It was follow or find a new research area since there were no other particle physicists at my old university. So I asked my wife to leave her high paying job (she took a major pay cut coming out here) and leave her family and dying father. She did for the betterment of my carreer and our family. Then, after living here in Massachusetts for 6 months, my advisor decided to leave his job, since the institution here would not give his wife a job- a prerequisete for him taking the job in the first place. So I woke up this morning to find an email from one of the graduate commitee members saying that they were screwing me over for the upcoming year. Let me elaborate: When I came to this institution, I had just received a NASA fellowship. The deal I was given was, since the fellowship is not enough to cover my tuition and gave any money left to live on, the school was going to cover whatever was left between what a Research Assistant was paid and what would be left after my tuition was paid out of my fellowship. Now that my advisor is gone (he was the Physics Department Head), they have decided that I have to teach to cover what the school is not getting from me for my tuition. So, since I have no patron to watch over me, they have decided that I am fair game. On top of it, all TAs will have to take 2 mandatory teaching courses. My plan was to graduation in about a year. My research is going very well. I am publishing a couple papers. Once I reach the credits needed (about a year) I should be in a position to graduate. By forcing me to teach and take these crappy classes, they will be essentially doubling the time it takes me to graduate since these classes and teaching will take about 20-30 hours a week of my time. I am furious. I feel emotionally thin. My wife is very ill, my school has decided to **** with me. I have considered leaving with my Masters, which I can get at anytime since I have met all the requirements, but my wife is the one with the insurance and I really want to finish my Ph.D. quickly. In order to finish my Ph.D. I would have to move and she would lose her insurance and we would not be able to afford her healthcare. All I have to say is: Something has just got to give.

So that is a bit of our old clan saga laid bare.  Things worked out in graduate school.  I didn't have to leave, I finished with my PhD.  I got a job, well kinda.  I got a postdoc.