Oof…fam, it has been a MONTH, and in that month my life has mostly consisted of work stress and moving stress…and some interconnected work-moving stress.
Moving updates: I got all the pre-move-in steps finished off so I officially have an appointment to pick up my keys next week! And the moving company dropped off my packing materials at the end of last week, so I’ve been able to start boxing things up. So far, I’ve got all of my books in boxes - the last time I moved, I had never moved my full library before and I just filled medium-sized packing boxes with books…and then felt incredibly bad for the movers I hired when I was unpacking and realized how heavy they actually were. So this time, I’ve tried to spread the books out so the boxes will be some books and then some lighter but bulkier things on top. Unfortunately, at the moment then, that leaves a lot of half-filled boxes throughout my living space. But it’s something!! It’s nice to be able to do something finally so I’m not just stewing in the planning stage without an outlet.
On the other hand, now my brain has refocused my stress on the post-move-day cleaning that needs to be done in this house. We’ll have about 4-5 days to get it done…I’m just stressed at the moment because my roommate still hasn’t finished her move out (which she had intended to be done with by now) and is currently out of town on a “post”-pandemic trip…and might have at least one more scheduled before the end of the month?? so there’s some things that are stressing me out with regards to that…but maybe once I’ve finished packing and can focus on what all the cleaning tasks are, I’ll feel a little better…and obviously there’ll be some planning with my roommate, but she left town right when the stress around this part had just started kicking in, and I don’t want to spoil her trip over it.
And lastly…work. We finally have word on when we get our graduate student offices back! Unfortunately, we can’t all just go back to our desks…there’s apparently a pretty big shortage of grad student desk space, so the whole assignment system was revamped. It’s kinda complicated, but the tl;dr is that I won’t have a desk of my own anymore. Since my work has both computational and experimental components, the department says I get 50% of a desk, and someone else will also be assigned to the same desk for 50% of the time. That would be fine…except my experimental station is also shared. The person who’s sharing my desk has lab space in another building, so maybe they’ll be spending more time there and I won’t have to play musical chairs on a daily basis…but we’ll see.
Real talk, I’m just excited to have office access back. I’ve been really privileged that working from home over the past year+ was an option, but it’s been really hard. Not having my colleagues around and being alone for most of my waking hours, plus having my schedule influenced by when my roommate has been home (a combination of feeling weird doing serious work while she was home and off the clock and also wanting to maintain some social time), has been difficult to manage. And although we’ve had lab access for almost a whole year now, going into the lab wasn’t always the best or lowest-anxiety option for me. On the stress front, that’s switched now…having my roommate packing (and more so rearranging things and leaving unpacked things in shared rooms) over the last month has made my space much less conducive to focusing and working, so I’m feeling more comfortable with the idea of going to the lab and spending more time there and I’ll definitely be going to my office as much as I can as soon as they let me.
I wish I had more fun news to report but that all has been taking up just about all of my brain space recently. Hopefully the next few weeks will bring some less stressful, more interesting news 
is better than anything else I could say.
