Nasty Chocolate

My advice for the day:

 

Don't eat cheap, nasty chocolate.  It will just make you desire real, lovely, buttery chocolate, which you will then have to get. 

Then you've eaten twice the refined sugar and stuff, for only one dose of chocolatey deliciousness. 

 

So go for the good stuff the first time.

Limnal Time!

I so rarely post, but I constantly have a mental thread of things I'd be posting if I happened to be online, but then when I get online I completely forget all of them. I don't know why. Sometimes I can capture it if I post from Gmail. Unlike just now.

We're moving pretty soon, and it's a little weird. I'm excited to go, but of course worrying about some of the arrangements. I noticed I've begun detaching from some things here, such as being trained on new things that will only be applicable for the next week. We are not sure when we will get internet at our new location, so we'll be looking up local information before we leave. Hopefully we will remember to look up all the important things, because I no longer know how to look anything up without the internets.

I will be taking the train overnight with Limelet, while TheLimey drives our car. Limelet is NOT a good car passenger, and is definitely not one of those babies who fall asleep in the car. No matter how sleepy he is, and whether I nurse him immediately prior to a trip, and it's exactly his naptime, and we play his sleepytime CD on the car stereo, he just can't fall asleep in the car. Even if it's several hours. And like many adults, he becomes really cranky and miserable when he's exhausted and can't sleep, so then we have three miserable people including one shrieking, strapped-in toddler. So that's probably the main reason we aren't taking him on a tri-state trip in the car. Also, I just wanted to take the train there.

Our possessions will be driving themselves, with the help of Upack. Our neigbors used it to move to Florida. It's kind of like PODS, but it's moving instead of storage, and also you only pay for the volume you move, so smaller amounts than a train carload are practical. One of my intern cohort will also be using it, it looks like.

A lot of our stuff is still in storage in the last town where we lived, and will stay there a while, waiting for us to send for it in a year or so. I wish that some of the stuff we brought with us was in storage instead of crammed into our current tiny smothering filthy hovel, and some of the stuff that's in storage was with us instead of alternately melting in the summer and cracking in the winter, but...oh well.

Must try to get some more wrapping-up work done here at work now.

Enigmas

Some clients are just hard to figure out. Some, I'm not even sure why they are attending sessions. Maybe just to talk some things out, or just to have human contact, or...I don't know.

When a person doesn't even have a particular thing they wish was different about their lives or themselves, theirs can be a difficult case to approach: "...a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma..." (Wrapped in buttered bacon, no doubt.)

A friend working in a multinational setting stated, "I thought my client was alexithymic. After a while I came to realize he's just Scottish." An anecdote with a very narrow target audience.

Some Explanation Required

Do kids even really know what a pimp is?  If not, why would a parent dress them like one?  If so, why would a parent allow them to dress like one?  Why does this even exist ? 

 

If my kid asked for this costume, there would be a big research project about prostitution in store for him.  Assuming, of course, that he at least already knew what sex was.  And if not, then it'd have to be couched in terms of human trafficking / slavery. 

 

Geez.

Stats Text

From an email I recently sent to my advisor--but I think others should know about it, too.  This is my desert-island stats book now.  (And I have bought a lot of stats texts.)

 

"...I highly recommend the Handbook of Univariate and Multivariate Data Analysis and Interpretation with SPSS (2006) by Robert Ho. 
 
I wish I had it when I started [my dissertation], or [was] even halfway through.  I will totally use it if I ever get to do any further research.  So if you have any students who are doing their theses or dissertations and are not stats experts, it's really clear and practical.  They can even look at pages of it online to see if they want to buy it, at http://books.google.com/books.  (Search for Robert Ho.  Within the book reader, the title page is unavailable but scroll down--lots of pages are available."