This was a weekend of potlucks...

I went to a potluck on Friday night and Saturday night. What are the chances of having two potlucks in a weekend? The first potluck was for a gathering of faculty and grad students, hosted by the Ed Psy Society (I'm the sec/treas). The second was for church. And of course, I didn't make enough brownies for both. So the churchgoers got shafted. But they were more appreciative than the profs. Other than that, I got to eat other peoples' food, which is my favorite pastime. I got plenty of compliments on the brownies, which is very good for my ego. We had a speaker at church who even joked from the pulpit that it was the express will of God that these brownies were brought to the potluck. That made me feel pretty good about my brownie-making prowess. Little do they know that I use cheapy brownie mixes. My secret? Following the directions for high-altitude cooking. Otherwise, the brownies turn out funky.

On a completely unrelated topic, I've been thinking about writing up articles for publication on a couple of research projects that I completed a few years ago (for those you who have been harboring suspicions that I must be geeky due to the previous paragraph, your suspicions have just been confirmed). But, my ever-pitiful ego has been telling me that my writing is not good enough to publish, hense my procrastination. So it all started when I was reading an article from class. I could not focus. Every time I read a sentence, it would trigger a thought in my mind and I'd think for a few seconds before I realized that I was still reading. Somehow, I was moving my eyes back and forth across the page, tracking words, and making progress down the page, while my brain was completely ignoring what I was reading in favor of my own interesting thoughts. Eh!

So then I started to worry that perhaps the article was written above my comprehension level. In the reading world, lexiles are one measure of the readability of the text. Children who can read at a certain lexile level are expected to be able to comprehend a text that is at or slightly above their lexile level. So fearing the worst, I obtained a lexile score on a segment of the article I had been attempting to read. It was about 1300 (about 1100 and above are considered beyond high school level). I then selected a segment of my own writing from a couple months ago, figuring that whatever lexile I can write at would loosely correspond to whatever lexile I can read at. It was about 1550. Hmm... maybe I'm not such a bad writer after all. And maybe, that article was just boring. So now I don't have any excuse for not writing those articles. If I can write with a higher lexile level than someone who is already published, then I should be okay. Ego, I'm not listening to you anymore...