joint weekly plans, WIPs, and brooding
I've no idea, at this point, why I continue to bother with trying to understand what is happening with my experiments. I said it in my conference, I've said it in a million blog posts, and I'll say it again here.
There. Are. So. Many. Factors.
And the thing is, I can decide to focus on one. (I did decide to focus on just one.) I can say that I'm going to hold x, y, and z constant. I can do my best to follow through. Lovely as that sentiment is, though... it's not realistic.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really don't know what's going on at this point. I have mocked up some explanations -- minimum ply width for stability, degree of felting, potential fibre loss, time elapsed, strength of knot, temperature, five million other things -- but I most certainly do not have any proof that they might be correct.
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I'm kind of thinking about doing some more experiments, honestly. Maybe work with a bunch of lengths of commercial yarn, and see how consistent my results are. Maybe fill the bucket with some 10 increments, and then just see how long it takes to drop.
However... it proves problematic that I have neither the time nor the energy to do that. I am scarcely managing to fulfill my tasks as it is, and I think my laptop (whose keyboard is currently boasting a high temperature worthy of a fever) would agree.
That, of course, means that I do not have explanations. I will not have explanations by the time this project is due. Maybe I will find them by the time summer break is over, though it's far more likely that I will get distracted with university stuff.
Letting go of this pursuit for actual answers feels so wrong, but it's also entirely necessary.
(Side note: background music for the video has pretty much been finalized. It's not perfect -- in fact, I kind of... don't like it -- but it's done, and that's what matters right now.)
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I probably shouldn't be shocked by the fact that this quadmester has not been easy. In fairness, I'm honestly not shocked -- chemistry is not a strength of mine and frankly, neither is physics. That's besides the fact that I've never really made it this far in a school year, between my health crisis and then the world's health crisis. The issue, of course, becomes that health crises do not simply end and disappear, never to be seen again. Unfortunately, they leave lasting scars, especially if it's a chronic illness that's weird enough that the doctor is "not comfortable using the term 'remission'".
Naturally, I was arrogant enough to ignore this, high on the knowledge that I'd made it through 75% of a school year with a full course load and done... well enough-ish... (The realization is slowly dawning that I did not do so hot this year. Which was, well, really obvious, and yet I have managed to apathetically forget that fact.)
I suppose that in hindsight, that was certainly a poor excuse to get cocky. (Hindsight is 20/20, and we all know how 2020 went.)
There are far too many weird fun facts about my high school education for comfort. Who knows if I'll ever actually step foot in a physical high school during June? Will I ever take a science or English exam?
Perhaps it's more that I was simply not prepared.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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So. Here we are. I actually started writing this post weeks ago, you know, before my body decided to take up my poor life choices in court -- but right now, it is Wednesday (no WIP post because I do not have time for that, and also the only updates I have are 'more crashing editing software, video is too long'), and I have approximately seventeen million things to do. I need to finish both primary and secondary research for Friday, which includes making summary posts.
Then, editing needs to be completed on the full-length video (I'm not even done adding content, and my video is predictably over time), which precedes working on the experiment vlog (because I have become a firm believer that watching water being poured into buckets for 5 hours should be optional), and then the 10-15 minute video.
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I have forgotten the original purpose of this post, but my yet untouched lab report Google Doc is currently calling me, and I must go.
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