This year’s charitable donation to science from the Etchevers household is in kind.

My in-laws have put me up in their home for a good twenty-odd times over the last year, at a rhythm of about 2x a month. (Without evoking the many times before that as well.) This comes out to a savings of a good 1400 euros for my lab, and they don’t even get the tax deduction they would if I asked them to make a donation to the lab and then I spent it on mediocre hotels, instead.

Tonight, I will welcome a M.S. student from the Paris group, who will learn a technique for which we have the entire set-up here in Toulouse as well as a couple of other people who can hold her hand through the process. She will stay in my home until Friday, go visit her parents for the weekend, and return the following Sunday until Thursday. I will be picking her up at the airport in a few hours, and probably feeding her dinner at least a few times during her stay. This, too, is savings for my laboratory funding – upwards of 700 euros.

I wish that when I did want to spend travel funds, it were not so complicated and difficult. Obviously, I have my laboratory’s budget in mind, and am neither choosing first class transport nor luxury accommodation. But it’s not obvious to everyone concerned.

Thus, if I need to take a taxi to one of my other M.S. students’ thèse de médecine tomorrow evening rather than hitch a ride with another colleague because my car’s engine is dead, I will have to beg and plead for a reimbursement. This is a legitimate expense – I am (honored to be) on her defense committee! In any case, I’ll be bringing my Parisian visitor with me, so that she will not only see how experiments can be conceived and conducted but in what greater context, as well. She’ll have missed the grants craziness, though.

If she runs away screaming after her fortnight, I certainly won’t blame her.