Noob mistakes and a generally craptastic week

First, let me express my thanks to everyone who has discovered my blog and left encouraging comments. I must say, though, that I think I've made a noob mistake in setting this up. My blogroll is ridiculously huge! I can't believe there's this whole community of women scientists online that I never knew existed. But alas, there's no way I can keep up with all 50 top women in science blogs from that phlebotomy school's list, plus everyone else I stumble across. How do you ladies do it? I just got Viigo installed on my BlackBerry so I can access the RSS feeds whenever I have a spare moment, but I've signed up for so many of them that it doesn't seem to be keeping up properly, and even if it did, I could never keep up with the reading. Since I'm particularly interested in reading about the lives of scientists (especially pre-tenure) who are also mothers (particularly of young children), I think I will have to cut my blogroll down to just those blogs. If anyone knows of a list just of those...

Meanwhile, I will tell you a little about my generally craptastic week. I should note that I am probably going to include enough information here that anyone who knew me personally would recognize what's going on in my life, but if you do identify me, please be discrete. Beloved PI has enough shit to worry about without anyone putting ideas in his head about me going on maternity leave and then permanently cutting down my hours.

So, this week, I got the score back on the 2nd submission of a pre-doctoral fellowship application. It was exactly the same unfundable score as the first submission. The most frustrating part is that I felt like I had done a really nice job of revising it and responding to all of the reviewers' criticisms. It was significantly better than the original and definitely worth funding. I was really optimistic about it, and [Beloved PI] even admitted that he had been "quietly confident" that I would get it. I was really pissed the first day, went home a bit early to get hugs from Hubby, have a few glasses of wine, and sleep it off. The next day my reaction had mellowed to disappointment and disillusionment with the process. The only thing Beloved PI could say to try to comfort me was that it wasn't personal, it's all just a crap-shoot. That's really not very comforting when I think about spending the rest of my career constantly dealing with such a screwed up system.