weekends are supposed to be fun

I ended up spending most of the weekend pottering away at preparing data for reanalysis for the second paper (which is now being urgently demanded... sigh...) for DataCrunchingProject (see recent rant on the subject).  Not very exciting. 

I spent most of the time doing things two or three times to correect small errors (or large errors)... which is actually a GOOD reason to do this sort of thing AT HOME, where I am less distracted and can more easily walk away when it gets maddening and think things through. 

But doesn't make the process any less annoying, boring and fiddly.

Especially when I am essentially revisiting materials prepared by someone else, for a different purpose, 4+ years ago, so waste a lot of time trying to reconstruct what is going on.  I've dropped one sample from the dataset and flagged several others as potentially problematic because I just can't work out the datasheets.  If I can get publishable results from the remaining data, I don't really see the point of trying to sort it out (if it's even possible, which it may well not be this far removed).  IF.

Also, some bread got in the house and got consumed. :-(

So not the best weekend ever!

Next week:

• grading arriving in dribs and drabs
• complete two refereeings of articles and one summary-of-literature
• planning for summer teaching week
• at the end of the week I have two days of visitors/data crunching for odds and ends paper
• catching up meeting with PDF and hopefully re-submitting her first thesis paper that came back as minor R&R
• two lots of back-poking (chiropractor - no doubt good for me but at the same time costly and painful!)
• must chase up blood test results

 So I'm not likely to make much progress with DataCrunchingPaper2.  Oh well, there's always the weekend...