Pajamas & Papers (& Pictures!)

"Are you going to post photos on your blog?" I innocently asked Friend a moment ago.

"Don't know," she said, having just finished a phone call to her mom. "Why?" When I just blinked at her, clinging to my guilt-free expression, she smiled and said I was free to post them if I'd like.

"I'll credit you," I promised, "but some of them are so ridiculously exquisite that I have to show people!" I have this first one - with the water and the clouds and the rocks and the lotus (!!!!) as my desktop background. It's just perfect. And after Psyc Girl commented that the pictures were rather relaxing, I abandoned my lit search and watched a slide show of Friend's 150+ pictures in Preview. "It is relaxing," I sighed as the flowers appeared in bursts of colors and faded away to make room for the next image.

Unfortunately, the pretty bits of petals and greenery made my head all sick. I woke at 3, took 2 antihistamines and did lit searches until 4:30. Exhausted, I headed back to bed, only to cough and cough. So I got back up to drink some juice, finally drifting off again around 6:30.

"There were two problems with the church plan," Friend noted at the doorway to my bedroom. I opened one eye to see that it was 10:00 and rolled over to see her with her hair still ruffled from sleep. Then I nodded - neither of us woke in time. Plans to go to the zoo were similarly abandoned - not by any conscious choice, but because neither of us was peppy enough to actually get dressed. I'm still in pajamas and glasses and ponytail - all relaxed and comfy. This made napping easier this afternoon. I had been re-writing and trying to read pdfs on my screen and my brain just got tired. And though Friend showered rather than slept, she still put on a different set of soft gray sleepy clothing after she was clean.

The paper is coming along pretty well. I brought home pages of printed text, but only got through the first two before I started to edit on the screen of my laptop.

"Guess what?" I said to Friend after frowning at a table for a moment. When she looked up, I explained that my rows should be columns and columns should be rows. "When you want people to be able to compare values across groups?" I clarified, "You should put them next to each other rather than every fifth row. I made this really useless for anyone who wants to understand my results."

I began to move cells around in Excel, carefully checking values with raw data and offering a resigned nod when I realized that this was the only logical way to present my results. How did I not see this when I created the sucker in the beginning?! I tossed the document - called Katie's ugly table - to Friend. Then there was clicking and mousing across the room as she made it pretty in Illustrator for me.

"Wait," I said after a moment. "I need to put in * for significant differences!" After a bit of discussion, we decided that * would be p<0.01, ** p<0.001 and *** p<0.0001. I felt smart when we did this and beamed at her. "It's like this table is making everything really easy to follow!" Then she found me a † to represent a significant difference between two different groups (which was hard - I gave up while looking for it, but she persevered!).

So I have done considerable work clarifying tables and text, and feel like the paper is tremendously improved. I'm pleased, but tired.

As for Friend's pictures, aren't they pretty? I didn't do any cropping or anything! She's been killing my wireless all day uploading photos to Flickr, so if you can talk her into letting you see them, there are many, many more that are gorgeous. And my paper is getting better too.