#4: persistence

The cold that Daniel and the kids had last week has finally caught up with me, right in the middle of coronavirus hysteria. And/or the sun came out yesterday and the pollen counts are huge. So I'm sneezing and coughing and generally feeling icky, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's cool for me to leave the apartment. I stayed in bed most of the day yesterday, but we decided to go out for a walk in the afternoon (making sure to keep our distance from other Sunday strollers). 

I decided I wanted to check out the ponds at the cemetery, which are often a great place for frog eggs and tadpoles. The first pool we looked into looked like it had been cleaned recently, nothing to see but clear water and a few dead leaves. Undaunted, we walked up the hill to another one, which looked at first glance the same, but when we looked more closely some of the leaves were dead and dying frogs. Creepy, but this is the cemetery and we have to embrace the whole cycle of life, or whatever. Then we walked around to the other side of the same pond, and as we approached it looked and sounded like a jacuzzi - a mad roaring and bubbling of blackish water. I thought they were aerating the pond or something. But as we got closer we could see that it was frogs, frogs, and more frogs, writhing and jumping and croaking, and when we reached the edge of the pond they all dove under and the whole thing was suddenly still. But filled with masses and masses of eggs.

As predicted, it's getting hard to keep up with this self-appreciation thing, but when I fished hard for a compliment last week, Ruwan said I was curious and persistent. Which I am. Once in grad school, we had to attend a sort of management training weekend: the UK research funding body had realized that there were not enough academic positions for all the doctoral candidates they were training, so they thought it would be helpful to teach us about transferrable skills and interview techniques. We all had to fill out a personality-test-type questionnaire about our job skills, and predictably most of us came out with the type "subject matter expert." Hmm...said the facilitator, I suppose that does make sense since you're all Ph.D. students, um...let's look at your second-highest score... Mine was "completer-finisher." I've held on to that. Not that there aren't projects I haven't finished (*glances nervously at nearby bookcase with piles of papers cascading off it*), but I do tend to see things through to the end. If I set out to find frog eggs, I'll find frog eggs. 

Ribbit.