Just hard work

Today was a day when I spent a long time working hard - at tasks that disappear as more "finished" work is produced. In the morning I created a diagram for our DMI-update paper, and in the process discovered an article that needs to be reclassified. Then I spent quite a while extracting full papers of articles for our 2008-2009 dataset. (I suppose this is "grad assistant work" except that some decisions need to be made along the way. No doubt a grad assistant would cull lots of papers and then I would delete two thirds of them.)

This afternoon Jack went to a baseball game (the Orioles are the home team so more people were wearing orange than green!) and I settled down to craft a Great Wall. It took all afternoon, between cutting a pattern, cutting the pieces from 8 different colors in the neutral color palette, and then arranging them. I'm not satisfied with the result -- the "first level" colors don't seem right. Maybe it is that the sunlight plays havoc with what a sense of perspective suggests would be the visual hierarchy. And the cutting needs more attention -- as you can see, these pieces are just taped down. I'd better come to my senses and go back to the lilies. The assignment is to demonstrate the effects of the color palettes, not to wow with realism!