Because it is unprofessional for me to scream and whoop and wave my hands around while I run up and down the halls, I'll do a version of it here:

I FOUND THE MISSING FILES!

I FOUND THE MISSING FILES!

What they were, was an NMS analysis of data. Now, unless you're in a very particular branch of plant ecology, that will probably not mean that much. NMS is a complex analysis procedure where you get kind of a unique situation each time you run it (so it's not 100% valid to do a "reconstruction" and pull stuff from there).

But when my co-author (and this is why he is my co-author, and in calmer retrospection, I don't think he's trying to spike the paper; he had no way of knowing the stuff he was asking for was not right at my fingertips) ran the analysis he COPIED the results to a CD that he gave me - and I promptly forgot about until I was looking through some other CDs of stuff. And I found it. And I saw the cryptic label he had written on it. And I thought - wait, did he tell me he was copying the thing to a CD in addition to giving me the print out?

And yup, there it is. So one of the big major sticking points of this project is not a sticking point any more. (And maybe I dumped the printout all those months ago because I knew I had the CD.)

Moral of the story: do a big complex analysis - save it as a textfile somewhere. Preferably on a CD or thumb drive so when the Computer Gurus change out the computer, your file doesn't go with it.

And I really truly don't believe horoscopes - and in fact, if you ask some people of faith about them they actually say horoscopes are kind of heretical - but the one for me in the paper last night did say something like "Stick with a difficult project and it will become much easier." I kind of laughed cynically at the time.