Graphing Fun

In addition to drinking instant coffee, Free Cell, and staring at the wall, Sarah has recently discovered the fun of creating nonsense graphs in Microsoft Word. She has a new edition of Office on her computer and determined that there are some very fancy schmancy designs (graphs in 3-D bubbles with all sorts of cool colors) and set to work on making some graphs in her journal with fake data (usually doctored so it would create the pretty pattern that was desired in the graph). These graphs showed things such as the correlation between boredom and mental well-being and actually proved that there is no correlation between the number of tasks that a PC volunteer has on their to-do list and the level of boredom (aka you could have a ton of stuff to do or nothing to do and still be bored). Also a graph of her mental well-being on a gobbledygook (I just used the thesaurus to look up a synonym to nonsense) scale…of course 10 (total elation over life) and 0 (suicidal) being unattainable; I was impressed that she had maintained a rating of 8 throughout training. Then I showed her my PC time tracking spreadsheet that included conditional formatting which I think thoroughly awed her. And I decided to create a nonsense pie chart of how I spend my time here (the largest slice being the stimulating activity of waiting for other people). I will admit that I miss the thrills of using Excel everyday and I’m afraid I’m losing my memory of all the handy keyboard shortcuts in Excel, but alas, I am striving to maintain a little knowledge of these things.

Sarah is visiting me right now and beyond creating graphs in Excel, we engaged in some wonderfully exciting activities…such as a game of cacho (Bolivian Yahtzee), watching several episodes of Sex and the City, trying yerba mate for the first time (this very natural, earthy seeming tea of herbs that volunteers in the Chaco swear by), and a rousing game of Scrabble (travel set). Sarah beat me thoroughly although I was trying to make a comeback, we both had best plays of 27 points (“twigs” for me and “etch” for Sarah, both triple word scores). She seems to be a master of the two-letter words which I will need to improve on if I intend to compete in her league.