Final flop and post-vacation blues

I missed my stats final in order to be a bridesmaid in a winter wedding. My professor graciously allowed me to take the final today without any penalties. However, trying to study during a break period is nearly impossible. Luckily, my office is pretty empty, so I managed to get through my notes, redo my midterm, and look over a few homework assignments before I took the final.

As I read through the exam, I realized that my studying was not going to help me at all in this final. I completely studied the wrong material - the final was nothing like I imagined. I literally started laughing because I knew I was in hot water.

2 sticks of pencil lead, a room relocation, and 1.5 hours later, I was almost finished with the final. With only 30 minutes to go, I had about 4 questions that separated me from academic failure or freedom. Then my calculator decided to stop presenting numbers in the usual decimal format, and instead presented the answers as fractions. One of my answers literally reads: 56,876/2,974. Wonderful.

I spent the majority of the 30 minutes figuring out baseline hazard ratio functions, and with only about 2 minutes to answer the following two questions, I knew that humor was my only possible way out.

Here were the questions to which I knew how to figure out the answer, but had no time to do so:

Q: What is the probability of choosing an individual that has a model-generated probability of a cardiovascular disease that actually had a cardiovascular event rather than a individual that has a model-generated probability of not having an event given that no event occurred?

A: About the same as getting a full house with two Aces in a game of Texas hold 'em.

Q: Supposing a new study had 1000 people and the same incidence rates as the previous study, please describe the sensitivity of the new study.

A: Very sensitive.

I handed in my final knowing that I would either be severely penalized for my cheekiness, or that my professor would see the humor in the situation and take pity on my unprepared soul.

I am also feeling...homesick. Which is weird - I usually don't get homesick. Ever. But I'm homesick for 2 places. I miss the coves, cliffs, and sunshine in California, but I also really miss my niece and nephews in Canada. My journal entry on the day I flew home from break reads:

"I miss my niece and nephews."

And that's it.

One of the funnier stories of the break (aside from the horribly inappropriate dinner) is how I taught my niece and nephews that shoving paper into your ear is a good idea. It started with an innocent game of Elefun. Elefun is a game where you catch paper butterflies that blow out of an elephant's trunk. My 18 month-old nephew and I were trying to catch the butterflies (I did most of the catching. He just stood there and waved the net around. So cute.)


The game was getting old, and I was getting sick of cleaning those dang butterflies up. So, I pretended to pull one of the paper butterflies out of his ear. He got so excited! He made me repeat the trick again, and again, and again. And then about 10 more times. And he laughed every time. (So cute!) He then picked the remaining paper butterflies up and tried to shove them into his ear, which was not so great.

His brothers and sister saw what was going on, and they all wanted butterflies to come out of their ears too. So, I had to repeat the trick on each of them. Then they all started picking paper up and shoving it in their ears.

Lucky for me, none of them are actually coordinated enough to stick paper all the way into their ear drums, so they all still have their hearing in tact. But it was still hilarious to see 4 kids simultaneously shoving paper into their ears, and wondering why the butterflies in their brains wouldn't stay there.

If only the butterflies in my brain could have helped me with that stats final...