Diary: March 2011

Photos taken in March

March was the month of the vegetable. OK, maybe not so much, but I think I discovered that vegetarian diets (or vegetarian days) are far more tolerable when you actually eat vegetables: a Dan cannot live on bread alone. So I started bringing bags of raw cut vegetables to work for lunch, and Grayskale thought they looked good enough that he started asking for some, too. We ate a lot of vegetables.

Not that we only ate vegetables, by any means. We went out to a very lovely dinner at Mooo on March 14th, although we didn't have any pi(e). Mooo, some may recall, was the restaurant I went to for my birthday last year. It was very lovely for two, as well as for ten.

At the end of the month, I attended a work-related conference in New Orleans, LA, which was my first time visiting that city. I had a great time, and ate a lot. I caught up with a friend who was in town, too, which was fun. Incidentally, I also learned a lot about ITARs (Export Controls), 2 CFR 220 (Cost Principles for Higher Ed), and FERPA (Student Privacy).

This reminds me that some readers may not actually know what I do for a living, even if they know the name of the field. This was a major point of the keynote speech, and I feel slightly inspired to try to describe it. I'm a research administrator. My job is to help get money to people doing good research, and then try to make sure they're doing research with their money. It's not quite being a grant writer; it's somewhere between contract law and auditing, but with fewer professional degrees. I should sit down and write a 100 word description for people who haven't encountered the field before, but for now, let's just say I like it.