The following picture showed up on Facebook's "On this day" feed this morning...
...oh the days (aka 2014-2015) of "fireside chats" at the office and having this spectacular human as my officemate.
Today I learned...
Coarsened exact matching (CEM), a method of matching I used for my MPH thesis (and thus I naturally dug up that old code for this weekend - wowser!), does not work with string variables. I was running cem on a dataset today and was momentarily floored when it seemed like perfect exact matching had worked (!??!)...and then that second passed and I donned my skeptic hat, dug into the data and code documentation, and alas...
Today I'm grateful for...
Annie Haakenstad, former officemate (see above), current/forever friend, and one of the few people I can go to about literally anything: one gchat conversation can cover some pretty in-depth career and life trajectory discussions, while the next is about how to properly implement /ponystream in said gchat window. I'm constantly inspired by her killer combination of non-sensense bad-assery (likely misspelled) and kindness, and well, I'm pretty darn thankful that I get to call her one of my people.
In a gchat today (Annie is based in Boston right now, hence the preponderance of gchat-based communication), Annie told me about a ritual she and her partner would do each evening: share what was the best part of each of their days. Sometimes it was something big ("Oh my gosh, I received this grant!"), sometimes it was something comparatively small ("I finally debugged this piece of code!"), sometimes it was completely unrelated to work or school ("My brother got engaged!"), sometimes it was work-based but had a less direct relation to work ("Our office got Uber Puppies today!"...for the record, this did not happen, but I'd like to imagine such an event would qualify for a day's "best part"). I really liked the idea, and decided then and there to add that to "Today I learned" and "Today I'm grateful for" bits. And so...[drum roll]
Today's best part...
Was talking for an hour plus with my mom after school/work. She had just come back from spending 11 days in Maine with my brother, sister-in-law, and still-pretty-new nephew (!!!) – the incredible saint that she is – and was willing to stay up past 10 pm EST catching up with me. I rarely, if ever, take a call past 8:30 pm, and bless my mother's heart (and delayed bedtime stamina), she was totally game to chat at a time that was most convenient for me. By the time I left the office today, I had begun to feel less like a Positive Polly (I have no idea if that's a thing) and more like a Negative Nancy (yes, I know that's a thing, thank you very much), and honestly, I wasn't looking forward to tackling what I needed to accomplish this evening. Yet after hearing about my mom's time in Maine and my nephew and catching up on various life things, I couldn't help but smile. Thanks mom, for being the best part of my today.
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