Religion, and various random matters

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by responses to yesterday's post. Navelgazing is fun, n'est-ce pas? I'm not sure if I'll be able to convince myself to come up with direct replies to everything. We shall see. In lieu of that, here's something else I've been turning over and over in my mind. It might even be another hot-button topic. But I feel compelled to write about it.

( blah blah blah about Catholicism and stuff )

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On to completely unrelated things:

Last night, I rode an amusing bike on the CRAP ride--it had a retro-direct drivetrain, which means that when one pedals forward, the bike is in one gear, but when one pedals in reverse, the bike is in another gear. So it's possible to travel forward while pedaling in reverse. This was all pretty fun, except the seat was down too low for much of the ride, and it took a bit of extra effort to get the bike to move.

On top of that, I had my second physical therapy appointment yesterday. They added a couple of new exercises that clearly demonstrated to me that my poor rhomboids and associated muscles are exceedingly wimpy. Last night and this morning, they're back to hurting again. On the other hand, now I know how to make them stronger. [For those interested in the technicalities, they have me doing seated rows, ha! But the seated rows are segmented such that the first part involves squeezing my rhomboids and then drawing in my arms just to the point where my elbows are even with my torso. They also have me lay on my stomach and do "Y's, I's, and T's," holding my arms and hands in various positions in such a way that I have to use the muscles around my shoulder blades.]

So I skipped rowing this morning. Blah.

Blast. Retracing my steps. [research]

Now that I am no longer in intensive data-collection mode, I've been getting back into measurement and analysis mode. I have a list of five major projects that need to move forward, so there's no shortage of things to do. The only drawback to this switcheroo is that now I have to go through and piece together what things I still have and what things I lost in the Black Hole Era (the period from March 3, 2009 through June, when my laptop Ruby was stolen).

Generally, this is a disheartening venture, although there are occasional semi-uplifting moments when I discover things aren't as bad as I thought they would be. For example, I spent a lot of time and energy reorganizing some critical data files (Excel spreadsheets), summarizing a lengthy experimental timeline, and developing a new naming system for worksheets within those files. I was afraid I'd lost all of that effort, and would have to reinvent it and relocate a bunch of paper records, but then I discovered a couple of things I'd e-mailed to myself and was able to reconstruct everything in an hour's time instead.

I am also about two-thirds of the way through a project from that era that involved measuring fungus areas. Tedious business. At least it's getting done again, and I am more cautious now, so I won't lose this batch of about 30 hours' worth of work.

But every once and a while, I remember/discover something else that no longer exists. The thing I'm remembering now is a particularly hairy mess of data that may need to be re-entered from another set of cryptic paper records (I was a pretty inexperienced scientist when I started the project, back in August of 2005, and my notes are quite spotty and disorganized). This time through, I will probably be smarter about re-entering the data, though, and won't re-enter the stuff that I won't end up using anyway. So I have learned at least something.