The long-awaited pictures

Here are before-and-after pictures of the bike pulley system. Click on the pictures for larger versions. I get quite a kick out of looking at it. Dork? But of course. And now it's time to head to school to be the Cupcake Fairy. I made miniature cupcakes, which are a serious tease. But then again, so am I.

	The Study. Here's the study prior to recent improvements--this was shortly after I moved in.
	Bike pulley system! And here's the freshly installed bike pulley system. I did some additional rearranging as well to lighten things up. The rope extends down to a cleat by the door (off to the right of the picture). Quite a nifty system!

On academic writing

Sometimes, writing this paper is like giving birth to a monster. I've been tangling with this ferocious beast for two years now. Two years. One paper. My advisor wants to know why it isn't done already, but it's not like she even remotely knows how to analyze the data.

I long to go back to simpler projects with clear statistical analyses that aren't in the realm of, "Well, I think I can teach myself how to do this whole branch of statistics that I've never done before."

Part of this is probably the fear of failure (as in, we submit this beast to a reviewer and he/she just shakes his/her head and gives up on trying to correct grevious statistical errors), and also the frustration of being stuck in the amorphous realm of blind decision-making.