Coasting along at a Positive Neutral

It was another busy but interesting week for the most part. It's been hot here - and very humid - and I'm not convinced the air conditioning works in our office. Monday was a "day off" so to speak because of Labor Day and I used it mostly to read. There doesn't ever seem to be enough time to read all that you'rea sked to for classes and still keep up on the literature so that you know where the rest of the field is in terms of the topics of your own research. So after 1 week of classes, I was using my extra day to catch up. That can't really be a good sign.



I've been coming along on the analyses for my thesis. Essentially, I've looked at my data to see what the best behavioral indicators are to create groups that will tell how well kids regulate their emotions. This basically uses all the behaviors that we coded, looks at how they co-occur, and then shows the most "natural" groupings of the data. For our meeting on Tuesday, Kristin wants me to look at "who's in the groups." I'm not going to lie...I'm not sure what that means. I can look to see if the groups differ in terms of the gender of the kids that make them up, but other than that, it's tough to become overly familiar with the data for 80 kids across a bajillion variables. So...I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to figure that out, I guess :)



I've been give two undergrads to help me with the projects that I'll be proposing to ICIS. I have a lot of data left to code, but I need to pull together what's done for my abstract. I'm really nervous that it's going to be too incomplete to make for a convincing abstract, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone will like it. It's just nice to have the help for now, though.



Sheri's charged me with creating an outline for the paper that we'll be putting together this month. Since this isn't the literature that I'm most familiar with, I'm a little nervous about it, but I've found a bunch of articles that I hope will be helpful for me. I'm thinking of asking Lacey if she wants to go on a "working date" with me to the coffee shop at Wegman's (our fancy-pants grocery store) since we'll both be working on pulling together outlines for meetings this week. I will say, though, that my meeting with Sheri this week left me feeling really good about things in general. I'm not sure if that means that in order to even out karma overall this week has to be bad, but I'm hoping that life can sort of subsist at positive neutral for me; it would be a better match for my optimism.



I think you'd be most interested in how CRAZY things were on campus just because this week was the week before the PSU - Notre Dame football game. Notre Dame, of course, being one of PSU's favorite rivals (although people seem to hate OSU and Michigan almost equally as much). Literally there were people camped out at the stadium on Tuesday night. I had traded my ticket to get an extra ticket to the Iowa game, so I babysat for Kristin's two boys, Will (8) and Charlie (3). We actually had a really great time and I was introduced to Wii sports, which was AWESOME. I can see my dad and I playing Wii golf and Wii baseball for hours. And I can see myself trying to challenge everyone else I know to a good game on the Wii. It's just too easy to be competitive with things that are that fun. I dare say it rivaled the tailgate...although that big-headed JoePa will always be one of the coolest things I've seen.

The only other excitement is that I've been having conversations with various people that appear to have real interests in making the trip out to Happy Valley. This, of course, makes me slightly nervous about times, but overall leaves me sublimely happy. There is nothing like having a little bit of home on the east coast, after all.

And I have to get a cavity filled in the morning. I don't remember the last time I had a cavity, so I don't remember if getting a filling hurts, but a little part of me thinks that it might - particularly since I'm kind of a baby about such things. I'll let you know.