It’s not that I do or do not love Microsoft Access, but I can say for sure right now that I wish I were doing something else…. which is probably why I’m blogging, right? 🙂
I’m in the campus library trying to get motivated to code data for my Midwest paper, an important thing to do considering I’m supposed to *present* this paper (as of yet completely unwritten) in roughly two months. EEKS!
I actually feel really good about the project, even though I am about three months behind on creating my dataset. With any luck, it will be done in a couple of weeks, leaving me 4-6 solid weeks to crunch it and (hopefully) find evidence that my gut is right, theory-wise.
Meanwhile, back in reality, I am planning what I think is going to be a really great (and hopefully really successful) unit with my writing students tomorrow. Hopefully they will get into it as much as I am!
This semester’s classes are a breeze, comparatively speaking, to past semesters. I’m taking a time series analysis (methods) course that is manageably difficult and really interesting. It’s only a month into the semester and I feel like I’m really *getting* it. Of course, I still feel like a total methods idiot when it comes to tackling these new tools on my own, but when someone else explains it to me, it makes perfect sense. Let’s hope my commissions paper will be mentored along by methods gurus who can help me make sense of Poisson models (no, not fish!) and “negative binomial” things. Ugh. I wish I had a dataset now!
On that note, back to coding. Next up is the 1995 President’s Advisory Board on Arms Proliferation. FUN!