Turning in my key

Here is our fridge. I draw it to your attention not because I still think of it as our cool new toy (although you know I do) and not to point out our cool new super strength fridge magnets (thus allowing for the display of 300% more 'artwork'), but to point out the presence of the newest fridge-dweller:
Up until this afternoon this name tag marked the doors of the four offices that I have inhabited in my department over the past three years. Okay, technically this name tag is a newer, fancier recent replacement for the name tag that marked the doors of my four offices, but the point is, now it's on the fridge. And my key, after a week of hedging and avoiding and negotiating one more week of office time, is now in the hands of one of the incoming graduate students. Or would be, had I been considerate enough to return it at a reasonable hour of the afternoon. It has been so many years since I first started there that it is going to take a real effort for me to remember that it is no longer an option to wander down the block to work at all hours of the day or night.

I seem to have passed my audit by the quality assurance branch of the ethics board this morning with no problems, but I have to say, the very fact of being audited by the ethics board makes you feel like you must have done something unethical. But those are the kinds of things I am unlikely to detail on the internet.

This week has been a scramble to get everything together before I start medical school again on Monday. I had wanted it to be a scramble of dissertation writing, but it ended up being all logisticating all the time, including many rounds of Where In The Neighborhood Is The Car Parked Now?, a game born of the the combination of the new driveway and our street's No Parking, Now Or Ever policy.

When I was writing my dissertation proposal, I fell into a schedule where Dylan would go to bed and I would work for another few hours in the evening. In trying to get the rest of the damn thing written I have been on the same all-work-all-the-time-makes-Kate-sort-of-whiny schedule. This time it seems more intense, and when I can't even find 15 minutes (or, um, longer on occasion) at the end of the day to put together a blog post I know I am stretched thin.

Luckily for my mental health, Dylan has been particularly charming and easygoing lately. I think it's the talking, like when she started being able to crawl, she's just so happy to be able to express herself. It is so easy and fun to spend lots of time with her, although she was sort of a mess today because she was tired, as evidenced by an episode of sitting down on the sidewalk on the way home and whimpering about the Sunder that woke her up from a nap several weeks ago. For a while I found it absolutely impossible to do anything in the kitchen with her around, but now I just have to give her a job and I can get a lot done.
She LOVES the new driveway, and stood chatting happily with it a couple days ago for longer than I would usually consider normal for a two-year-old's (almost!) attention span. When we parked the car on it for the first time today she jumped for joy.

Next week she is also moving on, after almost a year in her current room at daycare. She'll be in the two-year-old room with her buddy from the pictures from the other day, and we are excited for her. We are slightly less excited for me, because I will be exchanging years of 100% freedom and autonomy for...not those things. I am also taking a gamble that I will be able to finish my dissertation in the next six months or so even with med school, and it is something I am about 90% certain about, but we'll have to see how it goes. So anyway, one way or another things are going to be very different around here, and I think I will try a little harder to find 15 minutes every day.