Office Morale

Is really really low. We just lost the big proposal and now it is too late to pretend that any morale building exercises (office olympics? secret guerilla art?)are just for fun. There are long-standing issues with management and senior management that are being discussed vehemently now, and perhaps this loss is the catalyst we need to actually take care of them. Of course, nothing will matter if we cut 20% of our staff and have to do all the admin work ourselves. How do you keep an organization from imploding?

Awesomeness

My fixie, now that the Brooks saddle is gone, is a marvel of lightness and agility. Wearing my cute cow-hair ballerina shoes just makes me that much hipper.

I am totally holding down the fort while the bosses are gone! When the Communications person at a large government aid agency calls you to apologize for not including you in the calls, you know you are doing ok. That or, they really just want the money you promised for the drinks reception after the Hill briefing you are supposed to be planning together.

Somebody wrote the Seattle Times, which is publishing gads of stories on how much Gates is doing for malaria, to say that cholera is a bigger killer. Um, in what universe? Oh, it must be the universe where 2,272 is larger than a million.

Interior design report: don't try to drill through the 1/4" metal plate on your back door to install blinds so you can sleep in on the weekends. Instead, tack up blackout curtains with magnets. Also, studfinders can be very useful to figure out that your house has no studs, just drywall over the brick foundation. Sa-weet.

Fixie Up!

My one goal this evening was to make the fixie right again. All I needed was a front brake. Dumb Champaign bike guy gave me a rear instead of a front brake, so I went to Velocipede with intent to trade. Beth, the Wise One, warned I would have trouble finding a modern short reach sidepull in the boxes of old brake parts, and she was right. No dice. So I hightailed it to Joe's, where yet another adorable bike monkey took pity on my plight, and rummaged through the parts drawer for a proper brake. The one he found was too bulky and would have torn my tire to pieces, so he came up with an ingenious solution (and free to boot) - replace the back nut with a longer one so that it would fit through the drill hole in the fork (which is wider than the drill hole in the back, standard on most bikes). Ten minutes later I am Good To Go. I buy a bunch of tubes as a thank you to kind cute bike monkey, and rock on outta there, stopping at Whole Foods for some staples (milk, raisin bran, strawberries, ice cream). Dinner and then brake cable installation and barwrapping and shazaam! I am all set.

Of course, the new bars and stem are a tad long for my reach, and the Brooks seems a lot less comfy now than it was in the spring, but it's all about readjusting, yeah?

First ride tomorrow...can't wait.

Driving and Metro

Left work at 4:55.
Got in car 5:05. Downtown traffic heavy but moving.
Got to 395 at 5:30.
Parked at 6:05 in Forest Glen, two blocks from 495, for free!
Reached SAIS 6:40 (or would have, if had not run into very person I had been putting off phoning for work stuff; fortunately, was able to talk about all necessary business in 20 minutes).

Class was kind of useless - "what's an intervention"?

Return:
Out the door at 9:00.
Got on train 9:20.
Back to car at 9:55.
Hit 4 lane to 1 lane merge nightmare at 10:15. 45 minutes for two miles.
Got to MLK/downtown split at 11:05. Took downtown/83 home (next time will compare to MLK).
Home at 11:20.

Start the Day without Coffee

And end snoring on your desk over a draft toolkit.

Bad Dream

I had a dream last night that my boss and I were in Zimbabwe and crossed over the border to visit the National Malaria Control Program in Tanzania. Jeff Sachs was there lecturing within the NMCP to a bunch of exchange students. He saw us and got mad that we were saying he was a dumbass, and started yelling and grabbing my arm, so I pushed back and we got in a small fight. I think I said his ideas were too simplistic, that we can't just give everyone a bed net, that not everyone has access to ACTs even when they're free, and he said we were trying to kill people. Eventually it calmed down and we went back across the border to Zimbabwe.

Vaccines, useless

I had a really nice dinner with Djimde from Mali and Eili, from Princeton/RFF. Then we went to the vaccine session and I wish I had gone the way of the clinicians, because none of them were there. The super-exciting vaccine news was um, yeah, it's complicated; hey I tested this irradiated attenuated version on myself and it seemed to work so now I expect to have it ready in 8 years; and something about the molecular chemistry of something where the binding site is opposite the polymorphic part means Sweet, we could try to make a vaccine out of this!

At least I know for myself that I could care less and of course I wish all the vaccine people the best of luck.

The conference, as promised, was really really good, and quite fun most of the time, and extremely useful. Of course I wish I had talked more with a few people in particular but sort of made up by the people I talked to anyway. Now it's back to the grindstone and I have a sheaf of documents to review on the plane, so the two (ok five) movies I brought with me will have to wait until, hm, maybe Thanksgiving to be watched.

I have to say, too, it's really nice being surrounded by highly motivated people, especially highly motivated Africans. Might be just the kick in the ass I need.

The answer to the previous

is gay (or else he was sashaying to keep his noisy shoes from clacking on the wood floor?). Had an interesting muse on the evolutionary biology of women's gaydar. Hypothesis: women's gaydar should be more highly developed than gay men's gaydar, since we have reproductive capacity with our preferred partner.

Other discoveries this evening:

1) Resistance modeling is very complicated, but the models are very simple.
2) You need a lot of tools and effort to monitor large-scale malaria control programs, and even then, you might need to resort to massive drug administration to get the results you want.
3) Test kits for insecticide resistance will revolutionize program planning, if only Liverpool can produce them
4) Paul Eggleston is a master at explaining mosquito transgenic technology. I can almost explain to you how it works! Not that I think it's a great idea, however.
5) Mwanza, Tanzania has been out of SP for IPT for over six months, and none of the presentations at this conference know anything about how to fix that.
6) Matt Damon may become our newest malaria advocate.

Tomorrow are my favorite sessions, so I am skipping the bar and sleeping instead.

Gay or European?

Arg!

Malaria in Pregnancy

According to tonight's three sessions, is:

a)complicated and especially dangerous for your first pregnancy
b)not easily prevented with SP, at least in Manhica Mozambique
c)completely destroying all kinds of drug regimens on the Thai Burma border

Again, always go to the bar after the evening sessions, as magical free beer will appear and GlaxoSmithKline people will talk to you candidly about drugs and the ACT subsidy.

Makes me want to throw up

Oxford Bike Works guy with pedophilia moustache.

Old couples walking hand in hand on beautiful sunny day.

Trying to talk about malaria with clinical pharmacologists/molecular biologists.

M.D./Ph.Ds. who can do bio-economic modeling, policy analysis, and drug resistance research.

Sorry. Don't want to imply the meeting is not going well. It's going well. Just not when I'm inside on the computer. If you're ever in doubt about whether you should go to the bar after the sessions, always say yes. And you don't go to the poster sessions for the posters, you go for the other people looking at the posters. So off I go to stock up on cadbury's and biscuits (for Dave/Camilla's wedding) and then to ask nice questions about people's research.

I need a Ph.D.......

:(

IPTc PhD hey sure, why not

So I see Ogo, the director of the Malian Research Center on Malaria drinking coffee by himself and since he's one of my targets I go up and introduce myself. We get to talking about the severe malaria in E vs W Africa, because they're quite different - even within Mali you get different rates of cerebral vs severe anemia as signs of severe malaria. Next thing I know he's explaining school-based IPTc (preventive treatment in kids) and saying how it would be a great PhD thesis for me since I speak French and Bambara and know Mali, blah blah blah. He's half pulling my leg (he doesn't know my background) but it could probably happen if I wanted it to.

Next presentation we hear about IPTpd (post-discharge) where you give kids ACTs at 1, 2, 3 and 6 months after they're discharged to prevent severe anemia (the major problem in E Africa). Tomorrow we get all the updates on IPTi (infants). I just wonder when we're going to hear about IPTa (all adults). Just give drugs, all the time, and then you know, people won't get sick! Amazing.

It's sunny and breezy out today and I think I might go to the botanical garden.

Oxford

Being in Oxford is like the first day of school, except that all the other students are professors. Am feeling extremely undereducated, especially when talking to vaccine developers and pipeline guys, and clinical researchers. Fortunately at the end of the night I got a chance to bring it on back to advocacy and messaging, so not a total flop. Everyone's very nice, but hard to impress.

Also, the Deer Park is ridiculous. The deer act like dogs, wagging their tails and chasing each other around the trees.

Labor Day

Um, I loaded the photos of the bikes but am very very confused about where the heck my Mac is saving my photos....the whole Pictures folder is gone.

Oh For shame

Have not blogged in a while. May as well do it over lunch hour. I have these pics of the bikes we built over labor day but of course have not had TIME to even get them off the camera. Whatever! How do I not have time for that?

Oh yeah, I'm taking two classes (this week only- have dropped Australian guy's Health Econ in favor of World Bank guy's Health Econ). Nick and Johanna came over to help with the mess that is the house (last pesky details, like knife rack, bike stand, bathroom shelving unit, backyard mosquito eradication...still researching that one). I am driving around and sending kind friends with trucks to who-knows-where to pick up new dining room tables. I have skipped climbing twice though both days the gym was apparently closed. Yoga is kicking my butt because I come to work underslept and overcaffeinated and dehydrated, which makes for dizzyness and confusion. The new mattress seems good, if only I could spend enough hours in it.

Tuesday I had the Black Hole Stomach for about 5 hours, where it didn't matter what I put in, I just felt nauseatingly hungry. I'm wondering if I'm finally reaching the age limit where you can't get away with eating crap anymore. My metabolism seems to be on overdrive. I have 18 people coming for brunch tomorrow, then a haircut, and packing for Oxford, and then getting to the airport....once I'm on the plane I can finally relax, I think.

Frantic, I know, but indicative of what's going on this week.