(Gordon Rees, personal communication 2009)

So Tuesday afternoon I'm working on calculations for a soil physics lab. Then I stop thinking about it all together because I've got this monster paper due Thursday by midnight, right? So, it's not exactly on my mind, if you catch my meaning.

At least, that's what I thought. Turns out: no. It was on my mind. As evidenced by the following:

Wednesday night I went to bed earlier than I maybe should have. I hadn't made a lot of progress that day on the paper I was supposed to be writing for my Pedology class. At least, I'd made very little progress in the actual writing part. That is, I still hadn't concluded the research portion of the paper, let alone started writing it. The good news from Wednesday, however, was that, after a long early-afternoon nap, I woke up to the conclusion that I'd picked the wrong topic for my paper, and that's why it wasn't coming together mentally or emotionally for me. I changed the topic a little after three that afternoon from gleization, shrink-swell, and ferrolysis to clay synthesis, shrink-swell, and ferrolysis. This was a huge comfort to me, and I became, almost instantly, a much more pleasant person. Unfortunately, there was no one else there to enjoy this dramatic change.

At some point, while I was in bed (and I honestly can't tell you when - maybe just when I'd gone to bed before I'd actually fallen asleep, maybe when I had a brief textersation at about 1 am, maybe waking up randomly during the night, maybe after my alarm had sounded in the morning but before I'd really awakened... Maybe in a dream) the thought came to me: Wait, we did all those calculations using the Q value as if it were our q value. We have to divide by the surface area of the column. That's why our saturated hydraulic conductivity (K) values didn't come close to matching what we'd calculated earlier.

It wasn't until a little later that I realized how bizarre this was. The K value disparity hadn't really bothered me at all. I hadn't been thinking about it at all. And suddenly, in a state of partial consciousness, not only did this lab randomly come to mind, but an error in my calculations that I hadn't been looking to find.

I'm not sure that makes any sense to anyone else, but I can't get over that. A day and a half later. Bam. I have to divide by surface area. Bam. When was my mind thinking about that enough to process all my calculations and come to that realization?

I haven't ever really had a fried pie. Maybe I can remedy that. Maybe not...