Back on the Wagon

Well, I managed to get myself out of bed this morning to erg, after 6 solid hours of chocolate-making yesterday. If I have a chance later today, I'll blog more about that whole adventure. For the moment, there are three items of note:

1. My replacement glasses frames finally came in yesterday. I can see again! It's amazing how much it has improved my quality of life. Being able to see is a really big deal.

2. I'm now up to 143,251 m for the Concept2 Holiday Challenge, after erging 22.5 k this morning. Only 56,749 m to go. Today I remembered how I used to think of erg training as excellent preparation for other mundane tasks that require that extra bit of mental tenacity, and got through the piece by counting strokes in sets of 12. My iPod recovered for the piece on Monday, but has given up the ghost again and I haven't yet tried to do much about it.

3. 226 miles to go on the Jolly Roger, in the next 11 days. My plan on Saturday is to ride to the farmer's market and back, help build bike racks for the bike valet, and then go on a long bike ride to somewhere where I can be quiet and think for a spell.

Also, today I feel like a super-genius

I'm currently working on revising the Manuscript of Doom II: The Sequel. My advisor is headed off to Australia in about a week, and one of our near-term goals is to get this manuscript revised and sent off to the proper people before the spring semester starts. Since we're going to be on different continents, part of achieving this goal is getting all of the associated references organized and digitized. That way, we will both have copies of everything to work with, and won't be too bogged down by piles and piles of papers.

I started using the reference management software Zotero about a year ago, and so all of my references for this paper are entered in their own folder. I've spent the past couple of days making sure that I have .pdfs of every single article linked to the references. Now I'm back to revising the manuscript, and suddenly it's extremely simple to toggle between references, my reference list, and the manuscript I'm writing. Finding papers on relevant subjects is so simple with the aid of the search function in Zotero, and then I can open the papers up with two clicks of the mouse to scan through them and check to be sure I'm citing them properly. Altogether, this means that tasks that used to take the better part of 20 minutes now take 3 or 4 minutes. Awesome.