still writing

I'm working on rewriting paper #2 (of 4 - #1 is in good shape and can be sent off soon, #3 is waiting on an interlibrary loan article, #4 is a longer term project).

I work with a couple different co-authors who help me with research. Coauthor #1 is very cool, she's like, "Send it off to me and I'll do the editing - you've already written the thing. And I'll fix up the Literature Cited!" (I HATE doing Literature Citeds because every journal on God's Green Earth has a slightly different way they want them prepared, and for some journals, if you have a fricking comma out of place, that's almost grounds for your paper being rejected ("Did not pay sufficient attention to details of Literature Cited.")

Coauthor #2 is closer to retirement and can be kind of a pain. He will look at the paper we've ostensibly written together (but I did 95% of the work in terms of writing, data analysis, and figure-generation, his name is on it partly as a courtesy, partly because he helped some in the data collection, and partly as a "It might be more likely to get published with a known name on it"). He does not understand the software I use to make the figures for the paper (it includes maps and other complex things) and he doesn't get that you can't just snap your fingers and make everything pretty and perfect. I can't tell you how many times he's come back with "but the figures are STILL UGLY." My response is: "The software we have won't make them any prettier. There is no way to prettify them more short of using Photoshop which I do not own and my campus does not have. The figures are as good as I can possibly make them without someone else's help."

Now, this is the point where, if it were me, if I were Coauthor #2, I'd think, "Hey...my campus has Photoshop. And there is an office of people whose job it is to work with profs and make figures and things they've generated prettier" And I'd offer to take the figures to the pretty-making people and have them prettified. I know this is possible because several years ago he had a figure prettified for another paper we were doing (after I point-blank said, "I cannot make this figure as I do not have the software and I am not willing to shell out $800 of my personal money for the software, and we don't have enough departmental budget to buy it.") And I know that office still exists on his campus.

And I don't know if this is a matter of my needing to draw a picture for him (It seems to me that a lot of people I work with are not good at taking what seem to me to be fairly obvious hints) or if he just doesn't want to do any work on this, because his response is, "Try again to make them prettier."

So that's what I'm doing today. Not sure how much longer I can hold out.

For one thing, I find that kind of close detail work singularly exhausting. You'd think someone who liked to knit and embroider and who does handquilting would be good at pushing pesky pixels around on a computer screen, but noooOOOOOooooo. I'm pretty cackhanded at prettifying things using the 'puter. I get to a point, throw up my hands, and say, "Dammit, that's good enough." (Even though I know my co-author will e-mail me back saying, "The figures are still kind of ugly" which is his shorthand for "They really stink, redo them for the hundred and fiftieth time, and don't give me any of that crap about the software not doing any better, I won't believe it.")

I worked on the figures all yesterday afternoon and my brain was so tired when I got home that I just SAT for like an hour. I couldn't do anything. And that's rare for me - usually I walk in the door ready to grab the book I'm reading or start sewing or something. But yesterday it was just all drained out of me.

So I'm not loving working on the figures today.

It's compounded by two facts:

a. In order to save electricity, my campus has decreed that Fridays this summer are to be office-closure days and they are turning off the a/c. So it's hot in my office, already. (It's supposed to be like 90* out by this afternoon; hope I'm gone by then).

(Offices are officially closed but a lot of the profs still come in to work. I suppose next year they may suggest "no lights days" on Fridays to save even more energy, and have us all bring in miner's caps to work by.)

b. Apparently Fridays are the work-day for the landscapers; it sounds like someone's running a body through a woodchipper below my window (Not a real body; I checked. It's tree limbs. But it's still loud and annoying in the same way that I find leaf blowers annoying).

Noise and heat are the two things that make it hardest for me to work (noise even more than heat. I HATE noise, especially things like leaf blowers, or gunning car/motorcycle motors, or someone else's loud music, or someone's loud and pointless convo right out in the hall outside my door [which I often have to put up with during school-times; one of the outgrowths of cell phone culture is apparently that some folks have forgot how to modulate their voices and THEY! SAY! EVERYTHING! AS! IF! THEY! HAVE! A! BAD! CONNECTION! even when the person they're talking to is right next to them].)