I went into the office again today, but not until the morning traffic had subsided.
We had our department meeting, which is the whole reason I went in both yesterday and today. It was neither all that, nor the bag of chips. The usual end-of-the-year stuff. Bottom line: Take your vacation, and do your PBCs.
Today was the annual Holiday (Food) Gathering for which the managers provide the meat, and everyone else brings a dish to share. I hadn’t signed up, because I was supposed to be on vacation today. Though, even if I had planned to be working today, I probably wouldn’t have signed up to attend. The last one I went to was about three years ago, which during the hour-and-a-half feeding frenzy that it is, my manager had said to me, “You’re the fattest you’ve ever been, working for me.” But I digress…
So today, I waited to the very end of the thing, when there is usually tons of food left over (and this year was no exception), and I went up to Charlie (one of the nicest managers we have, who always organizes the thing), and said, “Charlie, I was supposed to be on vacation today, so didn’t bring anything, but I’d be happy to offer some money…” He cut me off before I could finish and said, “No, no no. There is so much food here,” as he pointed to the sliced ham and turkey, and boxes and boxes of Bojangles chicken that were still on the table. “Please, help yourself.”
It was all good, particularly the Spinach Dip (sitting inside one of those big, round bread shells), and this Corn and Cheese Casserole, which was so good to me that I later sent an e-mail to Charlie about it—to find out who had brought it so I could get the recipe.
I accomplished my 1-on-1 meeting with my manager via instant message instead of waiting until 2:00-2:30, when it was on our calendars as a conference call. I told her that I really needed to give her my PBCs on Monday rather than by Friday, as I had school work to finish up this week—which was fine with her. “I think we both know what they’re going to say,” I said to her.
I stopped by home to pick up my flash drive, and then worked on my final Verbal Data Analysis paper all afternoon from Helios.
I spent about an hour-and-a-half finishing up the calculations for the Chi Square Test for Independence, and once done, it looked impressive, but I really didn’t know what it all meant as it applies to my data, and I don’t have enough time to read through our textbook to figure out how to interpret it with regards to my data.
Next I looked at the spreadsheet tab for the ANOVA test, and it’s totally beyond me what the “scores” are that are related to my contrasts that I should use to start off plugging into the formula provided for the test.
I sent an e-mail to Jason asking him if he was going to be in tonight (either in the classroom where we met during the semester for class or in his office), so I could stop by with a couple of questions. I also left him a voice mail in case he wasn’t in his office, or was going to go directly to the classroom without seeing his e-mail.
I left Helios at just after 7:30, and since I hadn’t heard from Jason, and I was going right by the English building on the way home, I stopped by to see if he was in the classroom. Crossing the street to enter the building, I was hopeful because I saw the lights on in that room through the window.
When I got there, I started to barge in, but fortunately noticed that there were way more people in the room than we had in our class, and they were all young people. (Our class is an “older” grad student and PhD crowd.) It was some other class having their final exam in there.
At home, I worked on my paper, going through each writer transcript marking in the text, the places to which we had applied codes, and looked for how what they said they were doing correlated with our codes—all in an effort to write up the results section of my paper in terms of the activity, not in terms of the “numbers.”
At 11:46, a response e-mail came in from Jason apologizing for getting back to me so late, but that he had been administering a final exam for one of his other classes. He’ll be around tomorrow and Thursday for help.
I stopped working on my paper at 1:30AM. Two more days of this grind. Who’s counting? I am.