Yes, I am feeling overwhelmed. I have 11 days until my first class and I am still writing up my syllabus and planning out our weekly labs. Four of those days are weekends, and it is impossible to get anything done on weekends; one of those days is a holiday, and two of those days are in the 'before day care starts but after nanny leaves' category. That leaves 4 days to get it all done.

I should include today but I have a different set of tasks for today: clean up my desk, clean off my bench, and get all my notes organized in lab. I am taking a leave of absence from my post-doc* for the fall, while I focus on teaching. When I finally do come back I want to be able to remember what I was doing and to find my lab books and frozen stocks and solutions, etc (assuming no one else lays their hands on all those things). It's weird. Last time I had to plan for an extended absence was just before I gave birth; since I didn't know exactly when that would happen, as my due date approached I would write up a detailed 'to-do' list before I left work each day, just in case… (Truthfully, I only had to do this once each pregnancy. In both cases, I left work Friday night thinking "this weekend will be it" and Saturday morning, I woke up and went into labor.)

I am excited to get a break from the bench and focus on teaching, even for a little while. I hope when I come back I'll be able to jump right back into work.

*As of October 1 I think I officially outgrow the title "post-doc". Last time my PI had to introduce me to someone (a post-doc candidate, as a matter of fact) he was puzzled as to what to call me. "This is Tina, a- er, um, ah- senior researcher in the lab."