Light and Momentary

The post you've been waiting for

Have you been fretting, oh my friends, about the difficulties of making a nice-looking figure in R? Fret no more, because I am here to help.

I think I felt so crummy yesterday because I was coming down with a cold, or maybe a cold-plus. Today I am sniffly and achy and wobbly, but I am optimistic about getting my groove back once my immune system is less overloaded. I'm working on that R&R I told you about, and my revisions table has about 30 items in it. Earlier this week I spent a looooong time on just one of them: making a figure suitable for reproduction in black and white.

One of the things people rave about with R is its graphics. And indeed, you don't have to do very much googling to see beautiful R graphics. Just between you and me and the internet? They are a big pain. The closest I came to throwing over the whole PhD idea was when I had to fix a figure in R. It would have been pretty dumb to quit at that point, since I had successfully defended my dissertation, but I certainly thought about it.

So. You have a figure that awaits your attention? Here's what you do. First put your numbers where R can find them, like so:

> bored.stats <- c(3.2, 1.8)
> bored.nostats <- c(2.8, 4.7)
> sobored.stats <- c(4.8, 1.2)
> unbored.nostats <-c(1.2, 3.8)

For this figure we are going to imagine that your reaction to this post varies, depending on how bored you were when you started reading it and whether or not you have some stats background. Let's suppose that you are rating your before-reading boredom and your after-reading boredom on a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 is SO EXCITED and 5 is CRUSHED BY ENNUI.

If you are planning to save your finished figure, then you need to tell R about your plans at the outset. If you just want to mess around until you get it right, you can skip this step: 

> png(filename = "bored.png", height = 300, width = 225, bg = "white")

Now you can start plotting. Lay down the first set of points, without the stupid default labels, and then add your scale and your labels for each axis. Like so:

> plot(bored.stats, ylim = c(0,5), axes = F, ann = F)
> axis(1, at = 1:2, lab = c("Before reading", "After reading")
> axis (2, at = 0:5)
> lines(bored.stats, type = "o")

Hey, presto, you have a start. Now let's add those other lines, with different lines and point markers instead of different colors.

> lines(bored.nostats, type = "o", pch = 22, lty = 2) # plain English: square points, dashed line
> lines(sobored.stats, type = "o", pch = 23, lty = 3) # diamond points, dotted line
> lines(unbored.nostats, type = "o", pch = 24, lty = 4) # triangle points, dashed/dotted line

All of this I figured out with only a modicum of facepalming. The thing that tripped me up was making a legend. Just for you, my friends*, I am sharing the legend knowledge I ferreted out today.

*okay, okay, it's actually for me. Guilty as charged.

Once you tell R what to label your items, like this--

> legend.labels<-c("Bored, stats background", "Bored, no stats background", "Very bored, stats background", "Not bored, no stats background")

--then the following line of code will give you a legend:

> legend(1.15, 1, legend.labels, cex = 0.4, pch = 21:24, lty = 1:4) 

Translation: at the point (1.15, 1), use my legend labels to make a small legend (that's the cex = 0.4 part) with the specified sequence of point types and line types.

If you did that optional line of code above so R would save the file, then you need one more line of code at the end:

> dev.off()

If you're not sure where R put your file, just use getwd() to find the directory in which it lurks.

Tada! If it looks like the dog's breakfast, do it on a Mac instead of a Windows box. There's a way to deal with anti-aliasing issues in Windows, but I...am pleased enough that I figured out how to make a legend.

Whelmed

I'm not sure why things feel so chaotic right now. The first week of a new semester is always busier than I think it ought to be, but we're in week two now and I am just keeping my head above water. I'm not prepping anything new; I'm just tweaking classes I've taught before. We only have three kids at home, and one of them can drive himself around town. And yet I'm still feeling like my head might pop off.

I'm keeping up, just barely. I wouldn't say I'm overwhelmed, but I'm sliding in that direction. We'll call it whelmed, for now, and we will hope that it gets better soon.

Untitled

This is a fluffy post on a day when many people are facing devastation, so let me begin by suggesting that you consider supporting the Texas Diaper Bank or Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

Here is the fluffy part. Ysolda Teague is releasing her fourth Knitworthy collection. Every two weeks, starting today, she'll release a new pattern suitable for December gifting. In the past, these patterns have been a lot of fun: a little bit of intriguing technique-y stuff on a small canvas. The first year was great. In the second year her team offered me the patterns for free when they used my year 1 Ravelry pictures for a publicity post. Last year was mostly frustrating, though, and so far this year I have hardly been knitting at all.

Project #1 is this hat. I love fine-gauge Fair Isle knitting with a fierce and fiery kind of love. But is there anyone on my Christmas list who would wear a slouchy beanie? Slouchy beanies on my own personal head tend to have an unfortunate Jane-Curtin-as-a-Conehead kind of look. Maybe tomorrow I will do some actual math: projects completed across the three years of Knitworthy, along with their KSRs (that'd be their Knitter Satisfaction Ratings).

I'm sure you can hardly wait for me to return with my graphs.

Hurricane history

My youngest kids are asking me to put Hurricane Harvey in context for them. I went looking for a summary of fierce hurricanes, but I'm having trouble finding just what I'm looking for. Any links to share that compare powerful hurricanes and their aftermaths? Any favorite organizations that are helping in Houston?

A Visitor

Tuesday night: I lay down next to Stella to say good night. We heard a funny noise, something fluttering or skittering like a bird. Or a mouse. Or a bird-mouse. It was gone when we looked at the window. Maybe it was a really big moth, I thought to myself. "Mom," she said, "what's that high-pitched noise?" I couldn't hear it. "There it is again," she said. Dang, I thought, I must be getting old and decrepit if I can't hear a mosquito whining.

Wednesday night: I was toast. The first week of the semester is always busier than I think it ought to be, and yesterday I skipped out of a meeting early to race to piano, race to soccer, race back to piano, and then head over to soccer with Stella. After Pete was finished we went to a little Mexican joint for dinner, so I didn't have to deal with dinner or dishes. But I was still feeling weary when we walked in the door. "I will put on my pajamas and wash my face," I thought to myself. "Then I won't be tempted to stay up too late."

Stella got ready for bed quickly and I lay down next to her again. Flutter-skitter-flutter-skitter, said the window right next to us. That was not a moth, said the rodent-hating voice in my head. I sprang up and scooted the blind aside, shining my phone at the window.

Bird-mouse, it turns out, was a pretty good guess: there was a bat stuck between Stella's storm window and the interior pane. It was frantic, scrabbling wildly with its claws along the glass. "Okay, sweetheart," I said to Stella in my best impersonation of a calm person, "you need to go lie down in Joe's bed."

In the stories people tell about bats, they can squeeze through improbably small spaces. The windows in our house date from 1923, and -- what is the opposite of "tight as a drum"? is it loose as a muumuu? leaky as a colander or perhaps the Trump White House? -- whatever it is, that's what they are. I was worried that in its panic the bat would squeeze through the wrong tiny opening and wind up in Stella's room, in which circumstances I would lose my remaining ability to impersonate a calm person. I closed Stella's door and thumped downstairs.

"Hello," I said to the person answering the non-emergency police line, "I need some assistance dealing with a trapped bat." (In the moment I thought it had been stuck there since the Tuesday night flutter-skitter episode.) The animal control person called me back immediately, saying he'd head over as soon as he finished dealing with his current bat. He'd call me again when he was on the way.

Elwood was gone, did I mention? He was at games club with our 17yo, leaving me on my own to impersonate a calm person. I wanted him to come home IMMEDIATELY so that I did not have to face a bat or an animal control guy without another adult or even a bra. I also did not want to be a wimp. I thought, "I will just express a few thoughts about this on social media. And then when I know he's coming over I can put a bra on. And maybe some armor too. Anti-rabies armor." 

Except, ha ha HAAA, the animal control guy apparently dispatched his other bat in record time. He did not call to say he was coming, and when the doorbell rang I was still in my pajamas, having failed to don either a bra or my anti-rabies armor. I suppose if your working hours are filled with potentially rabid bats you're unlikely to be alarmed by a pair of unholstered breasts, BUT STILL.

In Stella's room we discovered that our visitor had fled the premises. Once the light was off and the voices were gone, the bat got himself sorted out and squeezed back through the storm window. Mr. Animal Control assured me that he could not have squeezed into the room. Let us hope to heaven that he was correct and not merely Confunded by my extraordinarily vivid pajamas. It's bat season, he told us. They're very active. The bugs are drawn to the windows because they see the lights inside. The bats are chasing the bugs.

In the abstract I can appreciate that bats are part of a healthy ecosystem, and I can worry about the impact of white nose syndrome on insect populations. I have even posted about appreciating the beauty of bats before. But face to face? No. In my space? No. (Huh, that rhymes. Like Green Eggs and Ham, only the prospect of being fed a bat is causing me to flap my hands in horror.) I am still the same person who wrote this post about mice in 2004. I can be curious in the abstract about whether Stella's 8yo ears were picking up some of the bat's echolocation noises, which bottom out at 20kHz. I do not really want a definitive answer to that question.

So. I am going to go upstairs and see what I can figure out about the storm window. I know that bats are nocturnal and thus unlikely to come swooping in to tangle themselves in my hair while I work. I know that I can deal with the droppings that this one left behind, even if they give me the shudders. I know that my adrenaline hangover will fade. It will probably fade faster if I refrain from thinking about bats in my hair.

Off I go. I have no armor, but at least I have a bra.

Happy new year

My enthusiasm did indeed return overnight. I am really lucky to have my job. I spent the whole summer with a bad taste in my mouth after those two deeply unpleasant conversations at the end of the spring semester. But tonight I am remembering that if 1% of a person's students cause trouble, that means 99% of them are usually engaged and pleasant and eager to learn the things I am eager to teach. Math FTW.

I often flinch a little when I check my work email on Monday, because I do not ever check it on Sundays. But! This morning! The manuscript I submitted in April to the Journal of Human Lactation? R&R, baby. The editor is calling it a major revision but the comments are 100% manageable. JHL!

Peer review is not an enterprise for the faint of heart. The focus is on addressing weaknesses, improving rigor, straddling the line between thorough and concise. An encouraging piece of feedback from the editor is not common, but you'll never guess what she said in her email. She said, "I would really like to publish this manuscript. I think it makes a meaningful contribution that our readers will appreciate." Which, in peer-review-ese, might as well be, "Here, Dr. Most-Gladly, print this comment out and staple it to an aluminum foil crown that you then wear all week."

I watched the eclipse with my second son, who is taking math at Gladlyville U. this fall. We snagged glasses on campus after his class, and walked down to Stella's school. The kids were mostly inside for fear of retinal damage, but we sprang Stella and watched on the sidewalk as the moon slid across the sun and the shadows formed themselves into crescents. It made me think of the scene in Prince Caspian when Tarva and Alambil meet, and of the psalm where justice and peace kiss. Oooh, wouldn't it be cool if the meeting of these two celestial bodies presaged the end of the dominion of our real-world Miraz?

The Catholic high school is causing a new and unpleasant flavor of trouble, but I am not going to blog about it tonight. Elwood is heading up the current effort. I will just show up at the meeting and resolve not to say regrettable things. (The youngest kids are determined to go to public high school. They've heard quite enough about the Catholic high school.)

All right, friends, my 5:00 alarm will not care if this blog post is adequately edited, so I think I will fling it up into the internet instead of tweaking it. But do you know, I am looking forward to being back in the early-rising groove. Off to set up the coffee...

Countdown

I am teaching bright and early in the morning. I am still feeling like there is a hole in the world -- I am missing Joe a lot. Alex went back to school today too, leaving us with a painfully diminished dinner table census. Let's hope I can find my missing enthusiasm overnight.

Reset

All right, you guys, the election and its aftermath have done a number on my food and exercise habits. Time for a change. Whole 30 is my favorite way to change things up, even though it's a pain. I also just signed up for another training program with my local running store, targeting a 10K in early November. The registration form asked me, What is your goal? My goal: get off my enlarging butt and stop eating my feelings about DJT + his troupe of treacherous clowns. No time like the present, friends.

Weekly Re-Shrew

If you've tried out the Getting Things Done system, you're already familiar with the weekly review. It's one of the GTD cornerstones. I see why it's a good idea. I just hate doing it.

Mystie Winckler describes her approach in this post -- the basic idea is that you need to empty your inboxes, knock out any quick and easy tasks that they generate, and plan for the following week. Set your priorities, she advises. Review your calendar. 

My problem is always the inboxes. By the time the inboxes are empty, I don't want to do anything else. I want to set my auto-reply to LEAVE ME ALONE UNLESS YOU ARE LIKING MY SOCIAL MEDIA POST. Who has time to PLOW and POPULATE and POSITION when there's so much email in the world?

I am just going to think aloud at you, friends-- okay? Because this seems like it shouldn't be so hard and yet I do find it hard. Right now in my personal inbox there are four messages that require me to think about Joe's new school. How are we going to handle transportation for him on long weekends? How often will we visit him? Answer: I do not know. There are two messages that involve tasks for a boy with a follow-through problem. I should deal with the follow-through problem and with the tasks, but [cue wailing inner three-year-old] I don't waaaaant to. There are two messages about Boy Scouts that require me to talk to a boy who doesn't really want to stay in Boy Scouts even though I think it's a good idea for him to stay in Boy Scouts, and one about Girl Scouts that requires me to make stay-or-go choices about Girl Scouts. I have also been avoiding the five messages reminding me that it would be a good idea to accomplish some non-essential work tasks like reading a new issue of a journal, and the four messages about the Mystie Winckler course derailed by our NYC trip.

Four of the messages represent conversations I want to have with people I care about. They're just buried under the decisions and responsibilities that make me weary.

Are you a GTD-er or a weekly review-er? Do you have any inbox secrets to share?  

Move-in Day

Joe left this morning. Elwood drove him to his new school and moved him in. "It's a good place," he said when he came home. "I think Joe will do well there."

I'm really proud of his determination.

Just between you and me and the internet? I'm also really sad. 

Bounty

We split up after Mass this evening: Elwood picked up Alex at his friend's apartment, and the CSA veggies from their drop-off site, while the kids and I dashed home and pulled our picnic fixings out of the fridge. I'd made a pan bagnat with tuna and another with egg, and I sliced up a couple of melons to go alongside. We all met at a park near our house.

I've been taking my kids to that park since we moved here in 2005: first 3, then 4, then 5 of them. I watched the kids playing a variant of structure tag tonight and remembered the day in 2008 that 6yo Joe coaxed his hugely pregnant mom into playing. (It ended badly, with a symphysis injury that laid me up for a week and didn't really resolve for the rest of the pregnancy.) I remembered the year I took our Christmas picture with the boys atop the climbing rock. "It's so much shorter than I remembered," said one of them. We reminisced about the boy who declared himself King of the Underworld, asserting that the secret entrance to his kingdom lay under that rock.

I was feeling teary as I watched them play together. School starts tomorrow for the two youngest kids, and new school years always leave me feeling a little wistful. Joe leaves for boarding school on Thursday, and Alex goes back to college this weekend. A year from now all three of the big kids will be gone.

I made them take an awkward picture before they ran off to play "you got melted by the wood-chip lava NO HAHA **YOU** GOT MELTED." Perhaps I should shed a tear in memory of their melted extremities too.

I went back to the car and discovered pounds and pounds of CSA produce: I knew we were getting a half-bushel of apples, but I had forgotten how very many apples that actually is. I didn't know that this was the week of the thank-you edamame, but there they were in the trunk too: 9 pounds of them.

It's the time of year here when the farmland is overflowing with goodness-- our portion was too much for me to carry. Here on this feast day I am thinking about all I have been given-- my home, too, is overflowing with good gifts. And I am trying to tend them carefully, and preparing to send them out into the world.

Afterward

I didn't know anything about Charlottesville until after I wrote that fluffy post yesterday -- not until I boarded the train and connected to the wireless, and sat there agog trying to make sense of it all. Trying unsuccessfully, you probably don't need me to add.

We got back to Gladlyville just in time for 5:30 Mass this evening. I was sure our pastor would talk about the events of the past week, but he said not a single word. What about you? Anything from the pulpit today?

Tomorrow in Gladlyville there will be a rally organized by a person who has sparked local ire with Confederate flag displays in the past. There's also a group planning to protest that rally, but their event invitation doesn't sound like something I want my kids to see. (I can't be the only person wondering if it's prudent to take kids near a counter-protest at all.) I was joking around with Alex about it over Messenger--

--but I just don't know.

I am thinking about seeing if I can organize a little group willing to meet on a nearby corner and say a quiet rosary. Vigil of the Assumption, feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe-- it's a good day to say the rosary in opposition to evil.

There's certainly plenty of evil to oppose.

From Penn Station

I took Pete and Stella south this morning, and accidentally prowled through the West Village when I turned the wrong way at Christopher Street. When I am Empress of the World, my friends, 4th St. will not be allowed to intersect with 10th St. Because some things are just wrong.

We browsed through Murray's and the neighboring shops, and then picnicked at Washington Square. Pete and Stella chased each other around the playground and splashed in the fountain while I looked for the ghost of Henry James. (I spotted no specters.) How tall were those lovely plane trees, I wonder, when he was visiting Washington Square himself?

To my surprise, Elwood and our 17yo turned up there too, and we all walked over to the Strand together. In our Uber I was fretting about what might have happened to Joe, who had gone to a magic shop alone. We were speculating about how hard a person would have to work at getting eaten by bears in Manhattan, when I said, "Okay, now I'm going to obsess about why Alex didn't reply to my messages from last night after he got home from Sleep No More." (Does everybody else know that it's based on Macbeth? I did not.)

"Maybe they mistook him for Birnam Wood," I said. 

"Maybe he was eaten by bears," said one of the kids. 

"No," Elwood said decisively. "That's Winter's Tale."

Joe was at Penn Station on time, and Alex picked up my call at the airport to assure me that he had not been eaten by a bear either. Our train back to Chicago leaves in an hour. 

One per day

Tuesday: Staten Island 

Wednesday: Manhattan 

Thursday: Brooklyn

Friday: the Bronx.Took the three youngest kids north on the bus. Met two high school friends at the zoo and we talked for hours and hours. So delightful. Dinner on Arthur Avenue afterward; gelato in the theater district while we waited for the hotel shuttle. 

We'll have to save Queens for our next trip. 

Day 3

Part 1: The beach! "The ocean! The ocean!" exclaim the kids from landlocked Gladlyville. Thumbs up. 

Part 2: I go alone to Governor's Island, where my dad was stationed in the early 70s. Solitude! Castle! Waterfowl! Thumbs up. 

Part 3: The boy who planned our Singaporean dinner misses the whole thing after two consecutive subway errors. I retrieve him from lower Manhattan, realizing that I am not, have never been, will never be a free-range parent. WHERE IS MY HELICOPTER?? We are reunited. Thumbs up for reunions. 

Day 2

St. Patrick's. Central Park. The Met. Ethiopian food. Goodness sakes, I am tired. 

Day 1

The Staten Island ferry is the frugal family's strategy for Statue of Liberty viewing: close enough to admire, far enough from the ant-like hordes of selfie-snapping visitors. Snug Harbor is not a popular tourist destination, but the botanic gardens were right up my budding horticulturist's alley and the Staten Island kids' museum made Stella happy. Frugal family bonus: free admission with our local kids' museum card, both there and at the Museum of Math. (Who knew there was a Museum of Math?) I took two of the kids to the 9-11 memorial, and we all met up for dinner at Lombardi's, where we were seated above the immense inferno-esque tile oven. Hot floor below, aggressive AC above. We ended the day with a stop at Dean & DeLuca. Normally I would double-check that spelling, but Lincoln Tunnel phone-blogging is making me a little queasy. Time to stop and gawk like a proper tourist. 

Roadblogging

Oh, wow, what an array of stories in yesterday's comments! I am not sleeping on a train tonight, so I will not complain that the sleeping arrangements are crowded. Flat and free of sudden jerks: my favorite kind of sleeping arrangements. 

Poll

What's the most uncomfortable place you've ever spent the night? 

A good update

I have been grumpy all summer about the Catholic high school. If you are new here, the nutshell version of the saga is that my 17yo complained all year about anti-semitic epithets being thrown around among a subset of the junior boys. The principal told us in December and again in February that he could only intervene if our son coughed up a list of names; our son remained adamant that he wasn't going to rat anybody out. I called the diocese to ask for advice the day after I received that February email, and on their recommendation I left a message for the chaplain. When I found out that the chaplain had a lot on his plate due to a local pastor's illness, I scheduled a meeting with the junior theology teacher. He had just issued a detention for this selfsame offense to a clueless junior boy -- "You can't give me a detention for that!" -- and we had a really encouraging conversation. He told us he'd get back to us immediately after his conversation with the principal. And...nothing. No reply to my follow-up email. Insert an unpromising phone conversation with the chaplain in there somewhere, and fast-forward to my husband's May exchange with the freshman theology teacher. He was really fired up; he said all the right things. He was going to meet with the principal that week and would get back to us right away.

And...nothing.

I wanted to flounce in a big way, you guys, to say, "My kids will be better off in public school!" I wanted to blab; I wanted to kick up a fuss. My fingers were itching to pen a letter to the diocesan office about the utter failure of the school to respond to legitimate concerns after months of effort. But more than I wanted to be right (and OH do I love to be right -- not my most attractive quality), I wanted my son to feel listened to. To preserve whatever faith he could preserve in the willingness of adults to act in his best interests. To have the best senior year he could have. And he felt that the best of the bad options was to finish up at the Catholic high school. 

"Are you sure?" I asked him repeatedly. "What if we homeschool until you're 18 and you enroll in college right away? We could take the Catholic school tuition money and spend it on a graduation trip to Edinburgh." (This is the boy who was born in Edinburgh.)

He was sure.

So I wrote them a deposit check, bitterly and after the deadline. I filled out the paperwork, sputtering under my breath all the while. I rolled my eyes every time someone in my Facebook feed said anything positive about the school. We weren't asking for the moon, you guys. We didn't expect them to chase after offenders with pitchforks and Orwellian re-education schemes. We just wanted them to say, "Hey, there is a long and ugly history here, and we expect you to do better now that you know better."

Just yesterday I learned that most of my summer angst was unwarranted. My husband did hear back from the freshman theology teacher when he sent a follow-up email in mid-June. He wasn't impressed with the email, which read to him as "We'll form a committee to discuss this further." That's why he didn't even mention it to me. But I am MUCH more satisfied with this response than he is. The freshman and junior theology teachers met with the principal and decided that they are going to address this. They agreed to meet over the summer to make a plan. (Underpaid theology teachers, who are not getting paid over the summer, are willing to do this on their own time.) They are resolved to include students, so it's not a top-down thing. They want to change the culture, and not just call it good after an all-school assembly. They asked us to pray for them.

Will it work? No idea. Will I send Pete and Stella there? Doubtful. But has it eliminated my angry arsonous thoughts? Pretty much. PHEW, that's a relief. Plotting arson is not my favorite state of mind.