Thursday, January 21, 2010

Excited for work

Yep. I'm actually pretty pumped up for going to work today. I spent all day yesterday getting from the very broad "My SER (Society for Epidemiologic Research) topic will be visual quality of life" narrowed down to something really specific that I can work with. While I'm pretty adept at crunching numbers at this point, I had no experience with literature review or scientific writing before I started this job, and I find both of those things HARD. I actually like writing- or at least blathering on about whatever shiny thing has my attention- but when I sit down to do scientific writing I get writers block.

The cure for it, I know, is lots of reading on your topic. So I spent about the first 6 hours of yesterday reading lots of papers and exploring a similar analysis that was done with our data back in 2005. Then I spent the next 2.5 hours trying to write an introductory sentence or two. Ugh. My problem is that I still know so little about medical things that it's often hard for me to understand why my topic matters. And that's the whole point of the introduction. To convince someone your poster or whatever is interesting enough to look at/read. Anyway, I got a flash of insight right before it was time for me to go home, and I've been mulling things over and think I'm ready to go 100% with my analysis today.

Last night's dinner was barbecue chicken pizza brought to us by D.



Tasty as aways and super easy because we just use a pre-made crust from Trader Joe's. Tonight's dinner is mystery fish because we have two pieces of fish wrapped in foil in the freezer. I don't remember what kind they are, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them.

I'm planning for 9mi on the treadmill this morning. The gym was super busy yesterday so hopefully no one will kick me off. I'd do it at home, but it's hard to run that long when going so slow feels so like I'm going so fast. I put in a service request for someone to come out and look at our treadmill, but I haven't heard anything back. It's still under warranty so we are at the mercy of this particular service company.

Hope you all have a good Thursday!