Oh, bugger...

I've been working on one critical chapter since about July now. Almost all of that has been the initial legwork, which should be completely finished before I try writing anything so that I don't miss important bits. Methodology and all that. For this chapter, I need to compare five editions of one 544 page textbook and note down all of the changes that were made. Which gets kinda disheartening, especially when I've spent days comparing two versions and the only thing I can put in my spreadsheet is '1986 edition has new intro, no other changes.'

It's a process that takes a lot of time, but a few weeks ago I started wondering why it's taken this much time. It felt like I was looking at the same things over and over. Which essentially I was, but I was approaching singularity levels of deja vu. And try as I might, I have the recall ability of a stunned ferret, so for a while I figured I was just mistaken, or there were errors in my notes.

I only started getting suspicious when I went back to a text that I know I'd compared to three other versions and could only find one set of markings in it. When I mark up the textbooks I do it in hi-lighter, with each edition having a designated color. 1973 is yellow, 1976 is pink, 1980 is green, you get the idea. The copy of the book I was looking at only had blue marks.

I don't own a blue hi-lighter.

Part of the whole stunned-ferret thing is that I don't usually trust myself to remember things correctly - hey, I might have a blue hi-lighter, it might even be my favorite hi-lighter, and I just have no recollection of that right now. So instead of coming to the obvious conclusion, I did an experiment over a weekend:

If that looks green to you, consider adjusting your monitor settings. 

And then I looked more closely at the places that I could have sworn I had already marked up.

Do you see the little elfin footprints that are all that remain of my notes?

Verdict: I am not hopelessly slow and disorganized, or going crazy. The [redacted] paper is eating my [redacted] notations. 

I can't wait to see my supervisor's face when I tell why I haven't had any work to show her in six months.