There is just no way to balance reading, writing, data wrangling and miscellaneous other academic activities in a 20-hour week, but I keep lurching onward, making unbalanced progress. So, for instance, I have a database schema (above, left) that probably isn’t the one I want ultimately but it’s very easy to load the data in different ways and try out different things. I also have some data, in this case a fragment of the Virgin Islands in plants! It is, as my husband says, ‘Very pretty’. ‘Is it useful?’ he asks next. Strangely enough, that is exactly what my supervisor is going to say when he finds out about it. Unfortunately, what I have so far (or will have shortly) bears the same relationship to historical usefulness as a freshly stretched and primed canvas bears to art. I think I will therefore skip running it by my supervisor in the immediate future, especially as he seems to be a bit of a technophobe. I will have to meet with him soon though, and I was thinking of dropping him a line and asking if he would be okay with reading 10,000 words towards mid-February. Then, I will have to make 10,000 words that are presentable.