I feel a little less "I suck" today.

Got some work done on the tension zone paper yesterday - real work, meaning data entry and number crunching and map-generation. I have more to do today, but this is the harder part - trying to remember how to call up county centroids in my data set and use them to generate contours of the species-ending-their-range.

I also was invited to review a manuscript for a journal. Which is SOMETHING, even if it's not getting a manuscript published myself. (Even if it's a journal my graduate advisor is one of the editors for, and I told him the last time I saw him that I'd be willing to do reviews...at least he thinks I'm good enough to do them).

Finished the front of Zelda last night, after realizing a BIG MISTAKE when I went to reclaim the stitches for the left front side. I forgot to do the armhole decreases down low, the ones that shape the arm opening. The bigger problem is that there will be 10 more stitches on the front neckline than the pattern specifies.

So I looked at the sweater front for a couple of moments. Then I got up and had a piece of chocolate. And I thought about it. I saw two choices: first, I could rip back aaaaaalllllll of the "lace panel" section, down to the point where I'd need to do the decreases, and do them, and lose a month and a half's work ('cos really, I DON'T spend that much time knitting after all). Or I could "tweakle" the thing, and figure that those five stitches on each side of the front won't make that much difference to how the sleeves hang (it's a somewhat boxy sweater anyway, and the sleeves are not set-in, they are attached before the side and sleeve seams are sewn) and when I go to do the neck, I could either decrease 10 sts along the neckline front in the first row, or decrease 10 evenly spaced around the neck (it's sort of a loose turtleneck.

So I called my mom. She agreed that "tweakleing" seemed to be the better route (I could not bear to rip the thing back). So we'll see. If the sweater just sucks rocks when it's done, I'll rip the whole thing out and make something new. But I kind of don't think it will - I think this is one of those "galloping horse" mistakes ("if you can't see it from a galloping horse, don't worry about it"). It may even be a "cantering horse" mistake.

But tonight, I probably should clean house IN CASE I am going out Friday to work in the field, and IN CASE it turns out my colleague is working with me and she picks me up and IN CASE she wants to use my bathroom (she lives 1/2 hour to the south) before we go. Because my bathroom is a right pit right now. Actually, most of my house (with the exception of the kitchen) is a right pit right now. No, it's not so much unhygienic as it is just cluttered - piles of mail that I have to decide on, a bunch of projects, books I've pulled off the shelves and not reshelved.

I actually kinda hope that my research students either get done before Friday, or they don't need me, because it's going to be unbelievably hot and I could kinda use the time to work on either the tension zone paper or this review. I have two weeks to do the review but experience has taught me that if I don't start something like that ASAP, some bizarro thing comes up that prevents me from getting it done. It doesn't pay to plan time, I've found.