Thanks Steve -- my bad for dropping the thread, because I failed to point out that I was using Residual PL with Newton-Raphson with Ridging as the optimization technique, so if I understand correctly, likelihood based fit statistics are not valid. I would love to use LaPlace or Quad (with the added benefit of getting the repeated measures onto the G-side), but those versions give the "not enough memory" message. I spent a chunk of time back with that problem, but that's a boring issue because it's clearly just the imbalanced, sparse nature of the data set. But I like the approach, and when I next have a better behaved data set I intend to put it to use! ... View more

The model still doesn't run, but that is clearly because of additional/spin off issues (which I may come back soon and ask about as a separate post, if I cannot resolve them). With respect to this one -- I wish I could mark two responses as correct. The idea of creating a season_year to eliminate the different start time problem among "samples" labeled 1-8 clearly addresses my major motivator for beginning this thread, but the idea of thinking of real_loc as being nested within environment opened up a different approach to the problem. Neither model will run at this point, but two options to optimize are better than one. What is interesting to me is that both of these insights have to do with thinking about a sort of nesting that I had not considered. I hope to be able to generalize that to different situations in the future. Thanks for your help! ... View more