Student SPHere 2008-09

Okay, so apparently the insanely frigid weather I predicted in my previous blog was significantly closer than predicted. I have to say, I have never experienced snow before Thanksgiving, and I have to add that I’m definitely not a fan. I think it is safe to assert that whatever pioneers decided to first settle in what is now Minnesota didn’t do so between the months of October and April.
Despite the unfortunate manifestation of winter’s beginning, I managed to have a fantastic weekend because my father and stepmother were visiting from Missouri. One of the highlights for my super do-it-yourselfer dad was when I took him to the huge Menard’s on University. There is no such thing as a Menard’s in Missouri (thank God, or my father would probably live there, gleefully wandering the aisles and subsisting off of wood chips and beef jerky). As a reward for spending my morning in a hardware store debating the relative merits of stainless steel vs. brushed nickel, I received a large gift of Bobbi Brown makeup and sweaters from J.Crew on a shopping trip later that day. All in all, it was a lovely weekend (despite the weather’s best efforts) of just lounging around and catching up with family (and ignoring the Steelers’ loss to New York).
Of course, I also worked on my Plan B project this weekend. I finally have all of my outcome variables cleaned up, and so I’m ready to start some factor analysis. I had a really productive meeting with my advisor on Monday, and things just generally seem to be falling into place quite well. Hopefully I’ll be able to slug through quite a bit of the preliminary class analysis and exploratory factor analyses this weekend (thanks to the updated version of M-Plus that I just installed on my computer).
On the RA front, this Saturday was the silent all-day retreat for the experimental mindfulness group in the insomnia pilot study. We had 75% of the participants show up, which is a very high rate of attendance for the retreat, so I feel pretty good about that. We are finishing up the papers for the transplant study, and working on developing some posters on the devices that we used to monitor treatment adherence.
Other than that, I’m just trying to get enough done this week so that I can enjoy Halloween. I am very excited about my costume: Sarah Palin. My husband will be going as a moose (well, technically we have reindeer antlers).