fat-free half and half

Well, it's been a fairly blah couple of days. I'm off one of my two medications at the moment, so I've been sleeping a lot and feeling a bit sluggish and unmotivated. You would think this would make me eager to go refill my prescription, but for reasons that I don't entirely understand it tends to have the opposite effect. On the other hand, I'm entering the final stretch of the semester, and I have quite a bit of work to do, so I need to be a bit more on the ball than I am right now, so I'll probably be on my merry way to the pharmacy on Monday.

On Thursday night USF had a graduate program open house, which I attended at the request of Prof. K, who has been my professor for two different courses, and is also the IDEC program's co-director. It was actually kind of cool, because there were a not-insignificant number of people there that were really interested in the IDEC program and what I had to say about it. Talking about my research boosted my enthusiasm a bit, which is good, because I've really been neglecting my data lately. My enthusiasm was further rekindled when E and I (M is out of town) met with our advisor on Friday afternoon. He is, as I may have mentioned, on sabbatical in Santa Barbara right now, but he was in town for various reasons, including to talk to his advisees (I'm not even entirely sure how he's getting away with having advisees while he's on sabbatical, but it's to my benefit, so I certainly don't mind). I may have also mentioned that a few weeks ago, he sent us a copy of a paper that he and one of his colleagues from UCSD wrote using the data of an IDEC student from last year. He instructed us to read the paper, and told us that he wants us to use the methodology used in the paper on our own data. I was a little cranky (okay, very cranky) about the wording of the email and the implication that I have to do whatever my advisor says.

I was, of course, totally overreacting (hard to believe, I know). The methodology makes a great deal of sense, especially given the unusual nature of our data (that it's a backcast panel, i.e. data that was collected at one point in time but nonetheless spans a period of time). Also, nothing else I've done econometrically with our data so far has gotten me anywhere. Obviously my advisor, whose idea it was for us to do a backcast panel in the first place (and as far as I can tell practically invented the technique), is the person to listen to when figuring out what the best way is to deal with the data. I was just not very receptive to the manner in which he made his recommendation (Dr. J's rather astute observation: "You don't like to be told what to do, do you?").

Speaking of Dr. J, I'm mildly worried, because he had to cancel class on Wednesday night because his one-year-old daughter had a 104 degree fever. I am aware that it is not uncommon for young children to get surprisingly high fevers for reasons that are not serious, but he also cancelled his Thursday morning classes, and he hasn't gotten back to us about when we can turn in our homework and take the quiz that would have been on Wednesday night (this coming Wednesday night would be logical if it weren't the day before Thanksgiving, when no one is likely to be around). On the anxiety front, there are also two different friends that I'm worried about, but in both cases I'm increasingly doubting my ability to do anything helpful. And especially in my current state of mind, it's hard to separate out the part of worrying that is motivated by concern for others' well-being and the part that is more about my own generalized feelings of anxiety and guilt.

This post is a bit drearier than I meant it to be. Things are, as usual, generally good, and the things that aren't so good can be fixed or coped with well enough. I get to see my family next week, I get to be dragged out of bed at 8 a.m. to go shopping with my mother, and I get to enjoy my yearly ritual of mashing five pounds of potatoes. (Mashed potato anecdote: I asked my mother to buy half and half for the potatoes. She actually called me from the grocery store last night to find out if it was okay for her to get fat-free "half and half". Putting aside the fact that I don't even want to know what the other "half" is made out of if it's not made out of fat, the whole point of putting half and half in mashed potatoes is to add fat. Luckily my mother caved easily to my "it's just once a year" arguement.)