It's Saturday again, time for another update of my progress towards this month's InaDWriMo goals.
I've been sending myself little daily progress report details, but sometimes it's useful to take stock of the larger picture. For instance, until I sat down to write this post, I'd forgotten that I submitted my latest grant proposal on Monday - that's less than a week ago, and already I've made lots more progress on the next task.
So, to review. My goals were to submit a grant proposal (check!), complete major revisions to a paper (in progress!), and get the bulk of data analysis done for my AGU poster (not so much...yet).
Last Saturday, I worked at my office and I spent 1 hour on a new analysis and graphing its results and spent 1 hour writing an email to the co-authors filling them in on the revision process. Hopefully this letter will also serve as the basis for my letter to the editor when it comes time to resubmit.That night I babysat, so after the kids were in bed, I spent 1 hour reading 2 journal articles suggested by a reviewer and 20 minutes writing methods for new analysis (86 words).
Sunday, I wrote 256 words in the methods and results sections, but I still need to go back an add some numbers in replacement of the currently-highlighted XXXs.
Monday, I wrote a cover letter for my grant proposal and submitted it. Yay! Then, I accidentally left my USB drive at school, so I actually worked on my class prep in the evening instead.
Tuesday is my teaching intensive day, and I had an afternoon lab outside. I only managed to spend a few minutes deciding how to restructure results. Then I went to bed early - exhausted from being in the cold all afternoon. Couldn't get warm. Sometimes I think there's something wrong with my night-time thermoregulation. My mom's the same way.
Wednesday I did major work on methods section. New methods: 1118 words, old methods: 488 words. (But I'm double counting some words written earlier in the month). Also, I made a new table. Then I blew off lecture prep to have dinner with a blogger. The next day I gave my worst lecture of the term.
Thursday, I finished off the last niggling details in the methods section and uploaded some files to http://www.earthref.org, a cool web-based database with the potential to contain all sorts of geoscientific data.
Friday, I worked on the results section, but it's hard to quantify what new contributions were made.
Today, I've been working on the results section again. I just did a word count, and I'm more than half way through the text of the paper. I've still got a few lagging critiques to get coauthors help with or argue with the editor, but 6400 words have had all the easy fixes and most of the hard fixes completed. Currently, 4017 words remain to be touched, but I think I'm going to cut that number substantially (and then write an entirely new discussion and conclusions section in its place. Eek!) Also, there's still revisions to be made to almost every figure in the paper. And my goal is to get this puppy done by Wednesday night and off to the co-authors so they have a week with it and then get it back to me on Thanksgiving when the damn thing is due. Cutting it close I know.
And now an end to this long and mundane post and back to the really awesome science I'm trying to explain.
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