Finally the manuscript on which we had been working for the longest of times was submitted last night. Experiments and simulations, getting them to work together and in harmony had been awfully hard. Was lucky that the student working on this problem has excellent attitude and wasn't getting hassled by the several iterations that we had to go through to get somewhere with our understanding. It is hard when the student comes back to you with a long face saying, "mam, it is not working" in an accusatory tone. It invariably shifts my focus from the technical problem to the attitude problem. Thankfully it wasn't the case this time and we are still on friendly terms. I know I do make a heavy job of writing and this time took nearly two and a half months of non-teaching time to write the paper but it was quite exciting to tie it all together in a storyline that we believe is a good one. Right after submission, however, I wasn't as confident because we have submitted to a rather prestigious journal in my field of interest. Not entirely sure if we have been over ambitious in our choice of the journal but that we will have to wait and see. I am overly attached to this work so I am sure people finding faults with it will surely hurt my ego but at the moment I am happy to get on with other things which had been put on hold for all this while.
Our term, meanwhile, started two weeks ago. Teaching a new course this time. It is a course on numerical methods, enjoying it but lecture preparation takes much longer and often I am up late night wrangling with epsilon and delta. This is the type of the course as a student I would have stayed clear of but as a teacher since I have to go through the details I am finding it not as bad at all. It helps immensely to have an expert in the immediate family with whom I can argue back and forth to clarify my doubts etc. Classroom strategy: maintain aloofness. No heehee or haha, only epsilon and delta.
