potpourri

Late at night when I am too exhausted to sleep I browse vacations on-line. I need one.

My husband learned this week that he passed the Colorado Bar exam. Ho! Ho! Ho! He finished up law school in December and took the exam in February. Since then it’s just been waiting. (I hate waiting). While I am thrilled and relieved for him, I am sad to say that his school had an abysmal passage rate. Only 53% of his peers passed the exam. Other schools in our region have a much better (90%) passage rate. So with him having passed the Colorado Bar and the Patent Bar, I am hoping that the job offers will start coming in. So if you know anyone searching for a harding working shiny new attorney who is interested in IP work, please let me know.

We are wrapping up the search for my new boss. Over the past few weeks we interviewed three candidates, each for two days. I am grateful to be on the search committee, to have a voice in this decision. The three candidates we brought in were all at the top of my personal list based on their resumes, vision statements, phone interviews and letters of recommendation from the larger pool of candidates. Each has a very different set of strengths and weaknesses. While I liked some of the candidates more than the others, I’m uncertain as to whether this matters. I think all of the candidates are good and could do the job. I suppose the hard part for me is that I enjoy working with my current boss. Yet this change is coming. In a few short weeks or months someone else will be in that role, but I cannot yet see any of these candidates in that role. I suppose that this is good in a way as I am unlikely to be disappointed by whomever is finally chosen.

The sheer scope of preparing a 50,000 square foot research facility for closure so we can move the labs to campus has been an incredible learning experience. I sit on a variety of regulatory committees at my University (Animal, Biosafety, etc) that help make research safe. However, I was not aware of the myriad rules involved with moving the tools for these things from one place to another, on public roads. Some of these things are regulated internally, by the state, by the feds and in some cases by the city. I have been trying to create a document for the laboratory staff that addresses most of the major issues. Luckily, another university has also been moving laboratories from one campus to another and had many documents which I could modify for our use. One major concept that I’ve learned over the last month that is critical to building out our new laboratory space correctly is that of the “air plenum”. We have certain work spaces that cannot have the air shared with other spaces and need to be negative to the the halls and other rooms. Thus, you can seal off the room, above the ceiling tiles, to enclose the “air plenum” to prevent this contamination. Neat.

Not much I can say on the biotech front. The technology is progressing nicely. Many hours have been spent with investors. Several have asked for our PPM recently which is promising. There are bursts of activity and then it gets quiet for a few days or weeks. We spent Saturday with a potential collaborator/competitor who asked very pointed questions about our technology, our business model and our competition. It reminded me of being in graduate school, the hostile Inquisition challenging the precious hypothesis. It was nice to be mostly an observer and note taker. There is a local man who would like to step in as CEO. He’s had a lot of experience in CEO jobs with larger companies taking devices through FDA approval. I think his experience and expertise would be helpful but as with the search for my new boss above, I have very mixed feelings. I like the person we have now with whom I’ve been working with for the last few years.

I had an odd conversation with a colleague the other day. He said to me “Cathy, you’ve taught me that sometimes it is the low hanging fruit that tastes the sweetest.” It’s oddly accurate. I do generally like and value very much what I have and what is available (possible) and yet I am always striving for more, better, shinier.

I have a hard time admitting, even to myself, the things I really want. I applied to attend this HERS institute in Denver in the Fall. DU will be sending two faculty to attend. Although I have an incredibly non-traditional position, I am really hoping to attend.

My Nana (mom’s mom) is losing her mind to Alzheimer’s disease. She is my last living grandparent. I do not have anything lasting, aside from pictures, for my other grandparents so I started a separate blog about my Nana. My mom has been sending me Nana stories for years. I wished I had saved them all. I have begun to collate them all here. Ultimately I will intersperse more research and development into it, but for now it is a real time look at the ups and downs of living with a person with Alzheimer’s each day.

Fitness. Pfft. Pants are tight. I started lifting weights again this past week. Diet is OK in content but not volume. I know what to do I am just not spending enough time doing it. I think for me it all starting falling apart when I stopped tracking every gram of food, every minute of activity. I thought I was getting OCD about it but I think it it is necessary for me. The only thing missing is the time where I will fit it in but it looks like my schedule is only going to stay crazy so I just need to find a way. When I was teaching I kept telling myself, things will ease up when the Quarter is over. But now it’s time move a 50,000 sq foot building. When that’s done surely something else will spring up in its place.