writing a paper

Oh blog, how I've missed you so. For the past couple weeks I've been focused on writing a paper that spans a couple years of my research. When I mention to people that I'm writing, I think they get the vague notion that I sit down and put words on a page. What actually happens is I sit down and search through endless terribly named folders looking for some piece of data that might just make a good figure, but I won't know for sure until I see it, which I eventually will and then decide that it was an exercise in futility. On the rare occasions that I seek out and find something worthy of a figure, I then spend a day changing the fonts, thickness of the axes, colors of the lines, angle of the view, sizes of the letter. It's been so long since I've visited some of this stuff that I'll find complete figures, long forgotten, made from experimental data that took me weeks to gather, bam, there it is, like magic. Now all I need is to open up some folder that's titled "future" and find pictures of me with my grandchildren.