I LOVE these books...

I'm so excited for the movie!

Exam Stress

Hey all,

so I'm *thisclose* to being done exams - just one more left to go! But today's exam was pretty stressful, including 3 long answers that all looked pretty much the same to me, but were worth 13, 17, and 30 points respectively. I'm not quite sure what made the one worth twice as much as the other...

So, how stressed am I?? This stressed:




And I figured - hey, my toes are cute, my fingers should be too!:



So now. I must get back to the clinical aphasiology. Though I must admit, it's hard to study when your fingers keep distracting you... ;)

Love,
ela

Thesis = Paper

Hi again!

I've been at it for about 9 hours now, and I thought I deserved another little break. This time, I thought I'd show you a bit of what I'm doing.

This is what my bed currently looks like:
I don't have enough desk space to spread out all of these papers to read them, so my bed is sufficing. Notice that many of them are made up of several sheets lovingly folded and scotch-taped together. I always knew those origami lessons would pay off someday.

This is a close up of the bottom 3 pages:
Those are important. All of those are supposed to fall into neat and tidy groups, preferably the 6 neat and tidy groups that I predicted they'd fall into. Guess what? That's right. They're not. I'm a little hung up over what to do with them. I sense I'm spending tonight in SPSS doing an additional rotation to see if I can convince them to be sweet and behave themselves.

And those 341 sheets of paper? Well, they're kind of filed now:
I have 4 research questions in my presentation, and each folder holds the printouts of the analyses that should answer those questions. Note how the first folder is HUGE. I printed out all of this factor analysis stuff, then realized I didn't need all of it. *headdesk* However, to quote my dad: "It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it." Amen to that, brother! Ahem, Amen to that, Dad!

Ok, I'm off to try to and graph the medians of my randomly selected variables in order to demonstrate what the Kruskal-Wallis scores mean... If you don't get that, don't worry. Neither do I, and I'm presenting it to 3 of my instructors, one of their wives, and 4 of my peers in just over 24 hours. Sweet!!

Love,
Elizabeth

ETA: I tried an additonal rotation - SPSS can't do anything more with my data. What I've got is as good as it gets. *sigh*

E.

Some days I think I should have just gotten a job...

Morning all! It's 8.15, and I have 15 minutes before the SPA office opens and I can go and borrow a stapler. I've been at school for about an hour now, printing out data for my presentation on Wednesday, and now I need to organize my THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY ONE pages of stuff. So much for my printing credit... ;) And just think - 48 hours to analyze and make sense of it all!

Yesterday was one of those days by the end of which I was wishing I had pursued a career with my BA. You know, I could have made a great barista, meat wrapper or babysitter. I got a ridiculous Telus bill, bought the wrong kind of mouse, and spent about 14 hours straight in front of computer. On the plus side, I had maki, got a mouse that worked, and didn't actually have a mental breakdown and proceed to orating:

I think mice
are rather nice.

Their tails are long,
Their faces small,
They haven't any
Chins at all.
Their ears are pink,
Their teeth are white.
They run around
The house at night.
They nibble things
They shouldn't touch
And no one seems
To like them much.

But I think mice
are nice.

That's by Rose Fyleman, by the by.

So yesterday was not so good. But today is a new day, I'm wearing a cute skirt, I have a coffee... and the speech office is now open. I'm going to find a stapler.

Love,
e.

Cool Cat

Morning all!

I got up early-ish this morning, and went to run an errand. I needed to get a pair of glasses fixed. They were almost fixed, thanks to my Grandpa's ingenuity, but not quite. So I ran them over to the optician's, and asked if they could do anything for me. The lady took my glasses, looked at them rather oddly, and said "you want these fixed?"

"Yup," I said. "I know they're old, but they've got a lot of sentimental value. And I'm planning on wearing them this summer."

These aren't just any glasses. They're sunglasses. They're the cool cat sunglasses.

When I was a toddler, I loved to ride on the buddy seat* in my grandpa's car. I also used to wear his sunglasses, and he told me that I looked like a real 'cool cat.' A few years later, at the ripe old age of about 6, I was digging through the glove compartment:

"Grandpa! I remember these! I used to wear these cool cat glasses back in the old days!"

Well, Grandpa gave me the cool cat glasses at Easter this year, and I thought they looked pretty cute on me. I got them back to 100% now, so you can tell me:



Love,
Elizabeth

*buddy seat - the arm rest that folds down in the middle of front seat. I don't know if newer cars have them or not...

Do you think she'd look at you if you were poor?

Do you think I'd look at her if she were ugly? Fair's fair.

*grin* That's a line from the movie we watched tonight called A Good Woman starring Scarlett Johannsen (spelling?) and Helen Hunt. It was an interesting look at what life in the upper-middle class British world was like in the '30s, something I don't spend a lot of time thinking about. ;) The best bit was the costumes - they were absolutlely divine. It didn't hurt that the film was set in a beautiful Italian villa, either. The background helped make up for the lack of plot.

I spent today working on school stuff (finished another 3 sections on my thesis survey, go me!) and starting to study for finals. I'm amazed at how basic some of the earlier stats stuff seems now. At the time of the assignments, I was totally overwhelmed. Now, looking back, it's like "what on earth was so confusing about a Mann-Whitney U? Geez!" I'm kind of dreading tomorrow's session though - where I hit the stuff I'm pretty sure will still confuse me. Analyzing the SPSS output for a factor analysis? Gross. MANOVA? I'm not even sure I know what it stands for! Luckily, my newest book, SPSS for Psychologists, arrived in the mail yesterday, so I at least have a resource to go to!

I've got 2 projects and 6 finals coming up, and I was seriously contemplating being panicked this week. But I sat down and looked at my calendar yesterday - and they're actually spaced out rather nicely. Provided I can stay relatively on top of things... *grin* Yeah, right - because that always works out for me!

All right duckies - I'm off to study the lecture on Correlations. Go r-values! Make predictions! And then maybe I'll have a chaser of myasthenia gravis. Nothing like a little damage at the neuromuscular junction to give you some lower motor neuron issues. Yay flaccid dysarthria, fatigue and breathiness!

G'night,
Ela