Work, work, work, Part II

I have indeed been working like a dog for the past month or so (hence the lack of blogging), and we've been a touch grumpy around here. But, everyone is happy at the moment and I actually managed to get caught up on all the immediate stuff at work, and in fact can't move forward on most of my projects until others do their pieces. Ah, the luxury! Even more important, today I had one of those days where it was really clear to me that I get a lot out of my job. 

I'm in the most fun part of a review, where I'm just learning about the field, figuring out the lay of the land, developing the protocol. Another woman is starting a related review at the same time so we've been working together to try to keep our methods as parallel as possible, for lot of good reasons. Our collaboration has been a great help to both of us. It has saved us both time and undoubtedly smoothed our paths for our reviews because we each brought up issues that hadn't occurred to the other, and that were good think through. This afternoon we had a 2-hour meeting with our boss and some other team members to hammer out the details of our inclusion/exclusion rules and it was fun and stimulating. It is so great to work with this group of smart, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and fun women--the debates were lively and thought-provoking and useful and good-natured. I left work full of energy and feeling productive, competent, and well-respected by people I respect.

So, I may complain about having to work at times and sometimes it feels like I have too much on my plate, but more and more I see that in many ways I truly have the best of both worlds.