the quick bonus of a bad morning gone good

dearest all-

happy equinox!

today is hump day. the technical term is "wednesday" but everyone knows it as the day they, should they manage to get through it, can pop it in neutral (more or less) and enjoy the scenery as friday and the weekend approaches. but getting through the day? tough!

which is why i'm glad i have some good friends. let's recount the last few days.

so on saturday night, me and euge went over to the fox&hound to watch the usc/nebraska game and eat a burger. good idea. then we played pool for free. good idea. until 2am. not good idea. i hiccupped until nearly 5am. not good idea. then on sunday, i managed to rouse myself and pour through some work. good idea. i did a literature review for a project that just got funded and they want me to describe the methodology to employ there. good idea. the project is in belize and venezuela. good idea, good idea. and then i tried to catch up with clayt online. bad idea (esp. to the two people who know the time commitment entailed). and i didn't find him. bad idea. but i didn't give up until 4am. bad bad bad bad idea.

so monday arrives, and i'm, methaphorically speaking, dead. i get to my awesomely intellectually stimulating geographical history (and philosophy) class completely unable to be intellectually stimulated. bad idea. but class was still good and i got a slight uptic in energy as the coffee and Kant hit (i told you it was philosophical). and then i sidled over to the office and prepared for my TA session. we had a fun outdoor lab mapping the grassy knoll (there's apparently lots of them in texas). and my energy seemed to wobble upwards. which, in reality, was nothing more than a passing sugar rush. somehow, i managed to finish up work and headed home with the express desire to "stay up until 8pm". and i did! 8:35 was observed before passing out for 12 hours. great idea!

tuesday was beautiful here. low 80s, maybe high 70s, with a nice crispness that led, owing partly to the 12 hours of rest and partly to the break from the unbearable heaviness that is texas heat and humidity, to euphoric reverie. tuesday was, in all manners of the word, not monday. i sat in on geography 203 (where i will guest lecture tomorrow on the coriolis force!) and then powered through my two other classes. then i received my first great packaage from mayor mccheese of st. croix, vi. the data i was looking for for my wetlands talk tomorrow (for my wetlands class). hurray and huzzah! except: i had already told myself i was done with it.

but done i would not be, as i let myself tweak and update the presentation with several new photos of the ravaged mangrove forest post-hurricane hugo, and several bold new graphs and tables highlighting my premise that, when done on the cheap, restoration projects rarely succeed. and so i worked, nose to the grindstone, on said "completed" talk until 10pm last night. not a great idea, especially when you consider that 1) the professor of said class is out of class tomorrow and will not see the bold new graphs and tables, 2) i put off prepping for the coriolis lecture and other things (like reading papers, grading labs, etc.), and 3) i did this all without eating all day long.

but i made it home, weary champion of a job well done and slightly charred along the edges. i passed out about 11:45pm, after realizing that an incredibly easy sudoku puzzle i was doing was entirely wrong upon completion (never a satisfactory feeling). and given the change in the weather (i should have known from my studies of shakespeare and the use of change to represent unrest and conflict approaching), i left my A/C off. yea!

or so i thought.

apparently, given the high numbers (at least 1 each year) of students who try to jump on to moving trains as they pass through college station and fail in the most mortal way, all the engineers give plenty of warning of their approach. and even though i'm about 1/3-mile from the tracks, their horns sound like they're just outside the door. 3 times last night, i was awakened by the heavy pull of the whistle by the train engineers. not yea.

and then, it being wednesday, it was off early in the morning to the philosophy/geography/history class. excellent class, esp. the part when discussion the hidden motives of "mass education" in the late 19th century in america (i especially enjoyed the precept of "mass education normalized individuals leading them to be 'entrusted' with a vote" i.e. education was shaped to ensure people voted a certain way. my! how things have changed! but just prior to heading off to class, i got yet another email regarding some side work that i've been completing over the past six months. the kind of email, given the tone and the insinuations, that make a champion of a job well done stew whilst discussing orwellian underpinings of elementary school curricula. scary idea?

not to say that i'm entirely not at fault or that these emails have not been unnecessary. somewhere about 5 months into the project, the analysis scope was re-described and i was asked to start the analyses over again from scratch according to these new (to me) standards. which i said i'd do. long story short: with 200 data points each month, and (now) 7 months of data, we're talking about re-calculating 1400 data points. and each data point takes about 20 seconds to do. so we're talking about 3 weeks of new work. discovering that there were essentially clerical mistakes on about 11 (0.7%) is both not particularly surprising and not that big a deal because 1) the project is on-going and the data is only now being re-analyzed and being incorporated into the reports, and 2) the mistakes would surely be caught if not by me then by someone in charge of the report. and the fact that they have been caught proves my points 1 and 2.

what got my goat, though, was the sheer lack of the email writer that 1) they were unfamiliar with the methodology originally and suggested that i was making things up. and how they are unaware of the methodology makes me wonder what part of the coral reef science niche they occupy since the methodology is used by EVERY governmental agency, and 2) that they suggested i was personally wasting their time because i was submitting incomplete data sets. it's only partially true that 2) is correct. the whole story is that the coral died and at some point me writing those zeroes got dropped so that i could tackle one of the other 20 discrete data sets. it doesn't take brain surgeons to grab a hand and write zeroes if need be, which gives me the distinct feeling that the data, though read, isn't being absorbed.

of course, i'd have a much bigger leg to stand on if i didn't have 2 completely whacked out data sets that did indeed need to be redone. to that, in the words of benedict XVI, "my bad." now get over it.

anyhow, the reason you're reading this is that, whilst shaping my "go die in a fire" email response (attached were the corrected data sets), i got item number two from the mayor. a catalog of 7 or 8 photos of the local christiansted celebrity nightlife. we're talking "dollar bill", "mrs. dollar bill", "fast hands richard", "army guy", "drunk at 8am guy", "stick man", and "pink doo rag guy" (not his nom d'plume, but i know him as that or, alternately, the guy who stands always at the southwest corner of king and strand streets, making me always cross along the north side. as if the mayor knew my plight and down-trodden spirits, he came through, as he always does. best idea!

so of course, if you're interested (and i don't know who to credit the photographs to or their tremendous ganas), i can email you "faces of crucian homelessness and drug dependency: a humorous take on life in tropical bliss". though you might have to be from st.croix to really catch that unique smell that is dollar bill as he shuffles up to you, jaw a-gape, hands outward, begging for change. if he asked for soap, he'd do much better. but i hear even he knows how to pixellate coral images for percent live cover and such.

but thank you, mccheese. i owe you some pale ale. best idea II!

--goose