kareina

Yesterday, as I've already mentioned, I devoted my working energy to creating a single figure, which resulted in 146 new words written for my thesis for one sample. Today I created two more of the same sort of figures for two other samples, netting another 214 words. This is *not* sufficent progress for the day! However, the tedium of importing one photo at a time into CorelDraw, assigning it a name (whilst I can still remember which monazite grain it is, shrinking it to a reasonable size, cropping off the extra unneeded background, repeating for each of the other monazite grains for the sample (generally about 30 per sample) and then looking up the exact spot on each grain which was analysed, marking the spot on the photo with a circle and adding the date to the photo is just bad enough as to make me need to take frequent breaks and make me disinclined to pick it back up after the break. Therefore, though it is necessary, I think I'll postpone doing this step for any other samples, and switch to some other aspect of my project which needs writing, to increase the number of words per day, if nothing else. Perhaps it is time to return to the problem calculations of a few days back...

One good example of how mind-numbing a repetitive process like the above can be. I know that my brain was, at least, partially working, because on one of my breaks I read an e-mail to a list wherin the poster started by saying "This is probably a stupid question to a lot of you, however, please bear with me.", followed by several statements of fact and her signature. I laughed at the fact that there was not actually a question, stupid or sensible, and deleted the message, since I didn't happen to have an answer to the question I guess that she meant to ask, based upon the facts she stated. Not five minutes later baronsnorri got home and mentioned that he wanted a short rest before going for a walk, and said he'd go lay down for a bit. So I commented to him "go lay down, I'll wake you when it is time for the nap". He repeated my words back to me, and I failed to notice the error and said "yes". It wasn't until he asked if I were a nurse ("wake up, it is time to take your sleeping pill") that I realized what I'd said!