Post-grant recap

I have had a few people ask me what a grant was. I thought I would summarize it quickly. Basically what this is, is an application for funding. You are creating an application and submitting it to an institution and asking them to give you money so that you can do research. Research physicians like my boss rely on these grants to do research. The biggest organization that these are sent to is the NIH (National Institutes of Health).

A typical application from my physician is about 100 pages long. These are all pages that we have been working on for weeks and compiling and collecting. Each page needs to be included perfectly, on a certain form, with a certain number, etc. The rules are very detailed and intense and stringent. In fact, the rules themselves are like 100 pages long! I am not exaggerating.

No matter how hard we try, these grants come down to the last minute. Physicians aren't known for the speedy responses, and we are often waiting on other physicians to send us materials for the grant. In addition, most grants now are submitted electronically which is much easier. However, for whatever reason, this grant returned to the dark ages and was not electronic. I therefore relied on a woman I have never met to do all the final photocopying because I telecommute. She did a GREAT job!

Okay, so that's that. These grants are important because, well, without them I wouldn't have a job. Dr. Kullo can afford to have an editorial assistant (me!) because he has a grant that states he can have one. It is important that he keeps his funding coming in if I am going to continue to have a job, and he is going to continue to be able to do research. While he is a physician, he actually only sees patients one afternoon a week. The rest of the time is research time.

Other than that, life is attempting to slowly return to normal. I ended up working almost twelve hours yesterday. What's difficult is that my work at RLSF is sort of sitting there while all this grant work is going on. As you know, I got a promotion at RLSF so I have more responsibilities (including a grant due in December for them -- yuck!) So once the grant was out the door around 6pm, JB found me in my office doing RLSF work. He gave me one hour and at 7pm told me I had to stop and just sit on the couch. So I did. We watched Kid Nation (interesting show!) and Kitchen Nightmares (interesting as well).

Last night Scrubs gave me a bit of a scare. He's been sleeping in our bedroom because he can't fit in his kennel, and when I woke up at 2am and realized I hadn't been woken up between 9 and 2 by the dog, I wondered why he was being so quiet. I went to the little pad we make for him, and he wasn't there. I flipped on the light (much to JB's angst) and began scouring our bedroom. He wasn't there! I looked and noticed the bedroom door was shut! Where could he be? By this time I had woken John up and we went looking in other rooms trying to find the dog. In the end we found him on the sofa (where he isn't supposed to be) sound asleep. He must have snuck out of the room in between the time that I laid down and JB came into the room (just a few seconds) and decided he'd pick his own place to sleep! Yikes! Good thing he has this big cone on so that he can't chew anything up.

I also wanted to briefly touch on our adoption progress. Our Home Study is done, and Amy is supposed to be sending it this week. I was hoping to have it sooner, but apparently she had a computer crashing issue. Either way, we hope to have this study and send it to the Immigration Office sometime next week.

As some of you may know, there have been some other developments in our hopes to be parents. Right now, I can't go into this on the blog, but I do ask for your prayers.. There have been some "developments" shall we say that may change our plans a bit. When the time is right, I will share this on the blog, but, well, the time isn't right. So stay tuned. This is one of the reasons I haven't spoken much about adoption "stuff" on the blog. There's been a little fork in the road, and we are just watching as the Lord leads. I will share more ... when the time is right.

There's been a huge storm in all morning so I've been watching the news and taking JB's calls. Apparently there was a tornado touchdown right outside of base. It all seems quiet right now, but I'll keep you posted in anything changes.