Today I had one of my almost-weekly meetings with my boss. The first weird thing is that I am the only person in the lab that has such regular meetings scheduled with the boss. The second strange thing is that my boss wants to meet with me even when I have no new results to report and she says "we do not have to talk about data, let's just talk about science in general" and moreover she seems to be very keen on having these meetings. I do enjoy getting so much attention from her, but I feel that I do not need these meetings that much and I know that there are many people in the lab that would like to have them and would benefit much more from them than I do.
But the weirdest thing happened today. My boss asked me if I had been on holidays (that was actually the very first question she asked me during our meeting today). I kind of understood it as a complaint that she haven't seen me for some time, so I told her that I had taken one of Fridays off two or three weeks ago. Then she said that I definitely should go on holidays. I replied that I would have loved to (as my friends were coming to visit California in two weeks time and I would like to travel with them for a week or so) but that I was in the middle of four-week long experiment, so I would not really have an idea how to arrange for a break in such situation. My boss said that I should not worry about that and she promised to arrange for my experiment to be taken care of while I would be gone. Within hour after our meeting a person responsible for one of our lab technicians, as well as this technician, came to me to asked when I would be gone and what kind of help I would need as our boss asked them to help me with that experiment. Isn't that extremely nice and thoughtful of my boss?