A Week in Review

A disjointed compendium of this week's events:

* The starter on my car finally died Tuesday night. Wednesday morning (too early) I got a tow to the Nissan dealership that's 2.7 miles away from a guy with whom I had a conversation about blood phobias (his phobia: open wounds) and a ride from a nice old lifelong Carolinian with whom I compared notes on Texas vs. NC weather home again (with a silent, perhaps pissed-off dude in the backseat). I took the shuttle to school, which was really convenient. After school, I called the guy from the dealership again and caught a ride to pick up my car, in which they had replaced the starter and the battery as well as re-attached the front bumper that had been knocked loose by my I-35 blow-out last year. (The service guy said, "The interior of your car is immaculate, but what's the story on the bumper?" I gave him the two sentence version that did not involve how I got my hand injured fighting a mugger.) They also have ordered a new windshield washer fluid assembly that they'll be installing later.

A nice bonus is that not only does my car start up really fiercely every morning but the windshield wipers, which have been only barely functional for months, and then only with me carefully turning them on and off while I drive (which is distracting and dangerous), are now working normally again. The mechanic said that they were probably working so pathetically before because of the battery problem. It's nice to have a problem that money can solve, and the money to do it.

* Thursday was also the day of the stats exam that had sneaked up on me when I wasn't looking. I felt pretty good about my grasp of the material going into the exam, but it was different from what I had expected, and harder. I know that I was tired from getting up so early the previous day to get my car into the shop, but I don't think that was the reason I struggled with it. My best guess is that I let myself be thrown by the way that the test questions bore basically zero resemblance to the homework questions or to what I had anticipated the questions to look like. They were "trickier" and less straightforward than what I had expected based on his statements about what the test would be like. This is not to say that they seemed unfair, out of bounds, intentionally confusing, or anything like that. For instance, one section of the exam required us to use this giant array of SPSS output to fill in the missing numbers marked with letters, ignoring the numbers that had been marked with XXXX "to keep things interesting" he wrote, and to indicate if we did not have sufficient information to answer the question. Don't you love those questions that you don't know whether you should give up trying to find an answer to or not?

And from talking to other people today, I was not alone in being thrown for a loop by the professor saying it might take a little longer than our usual class time (1:15) but then finding the test time-consuming to get through. It took me 2:45 to finish. I did waste about 45 minutes in a doomed attempt to use linear algebra to solve a problem that I gave up on, decided was unanswerable, but then realized, shit, in this specific analytical situation, I can get the answer by taking the square root of this other number, then use that in combination with these other numbers to answer this second problem, but there were many questions that took me a long time to work through. I probably should have worked on the exam longer but I was the only person left in the room (I discovered today that others started earlier than I did and/or continued the exams in other rooms, since they thought another class was taking over our classroom) and I had a meeting to grade my students' stats exams in 15 minutes and I was just done worn out.

All this being said, I think I did fine, if not as well as I should have done. I do feel confident I did better than my student who got a 56.5% on her exam or the one who did not show up for the exam at all yesterday morning.

* My home-cooked lunches continue to amaze, astound, and provoke hunger in my office mate. (I do not eat in my office, but we often end up crossing paths in the lounge a couple lunch-times per week.) This week, it was chicken and rice soup that I rustled up from my freezer (and which heated up extremely well with the addition of extra broth). Last week it was a chicken/rice/broccoli casserole in white sauce and a spicy beef/rice/peppers casserole with tomato sauce. It's funny to me, since those two casserole recipes came from Hillbilly Housewife (who has a fancy new web site) and the back of a package of Kraft shredded cheese, respectively, but by lunchtime, it does not need to be gourmet to smell good enough to make grown men drool.

* By this afternoon's seminar, I was feeling rather punch-drunk, and when we were talking about behavioral genetics studies with siblings, identical twins raised together, identical twins raised apart, randomly selected partners, etc., and the correlations between these different pairs on various personality traits, I had to summon a great deal of inhibitory control not to ask the question: What do the correlations look like between people and their evil twins?