Possible consequences of multi-tasking this month

• I fill out slides for a conference talk with names of parent volunteers, and a Teacher Appreciation Day spreadsheet with elements of a Journal Club.
• I remind the parents of Nikita's classmates to register for a systems biology conference, and biologists to RSVP to her son's birthday party.
• I present my pilot study on Journal Clubs to Nikita's classmates, and "Carnival of the Animals" to writing teachers.

The worst thing I've done so far is listing the names of parent volunteers as student representatives for Teacher Appreciation Day. I also left behind my slide advancer/laser pointer at an oral presentation session yesterday. Thankfully, the student who found it recently won a Goldwater scholarship.

But I did get a compliment this morning. The mom of one of Nikita's classmates came up to me, and told me she knew I was a scientist by the way I helped organized yesterday's Teacher Appreciation Day. The way I split up tasks into digestible bits and organized things in a linear fashion was very different from her normal dealings with other mothers when organizing events.