Welcome to 2024! Judging from current affairs, it’s going to be a rollercoaster thrill ride of highlights and abject horror. I do follow current affairs, but rarely talk about them to anyone but my husband. Some things are just not polite conversation with the general public, or even coworkers. I’ve known my current SSGCID coworkers since 2009, and we only rarely get political or religious. “Rarely” means once or twice a year.

With a new year came a discussion with my husband of 25 years regarding my current career situation. SSGCID is funded by a government grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It gets funded in the large in five-year increments, but the money is only released annually. Should an anti-science majority reign in government come 2025, we are likely to lose all funding and the center will shut down. Therefore, I need to look past my tenure at SSGCID.

I like my SSGCID coworkers immensely. That’s one of three reasons I’ve stayed probably longer than I should. Working with people you like and respect personally and intellectually is priceless. Furthermore, working in science has been brain candy for me. The center produces protein structures for the purpose of discovering drug targets for emerging and neglected diseases. There has been so much to learn on top of continually improving my tech stack.

But with the possibility of the project being cut short and the inevitability of our leader retiring at the end of this five-year contract, my husband encouraged me to make some kind of online presence. As a hiring manager, he said that a job candidate without any online presence would be unusual. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of social media. I attribute that to having been a community manager for a senior-oriented chat room back in 1997. You might think that senior chat would be mellow. You would be wrong. Seniors can get up to a lot of no good and that drama soured me on online interactions.

In lieu of a traditional social media, I trashed old blog posts and restarted an old-fashioned blog. The longer text format suits me better. I’m not fishing for random hits and popularity. I just want to have a cache of posts that future hiring managers and potential coworkers can optionally view if they want to know more about me before or after an interview.

There’s no chronology here, so pick and choose whichever posts sound interesting. Thanks for taking the time to show up and learn more about me. I appreciate it very much.

-L.