handling a month and day of the week variable in R
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I am trying to do some data analysis on a dataset which among other things has a column for month (recorded as "jan",..., "dec") and day of the week ("mon",...,"fri"). I have two questions.  My first question is how can I get the mode of these variables using the mfv function in the modeest package. I have a feeling this has something to do with type of variable I need to make it (factor, character etc.). I would rather not recode the data into a numeric variable. 

If I make the variables factors I can get a plot by going plot(data$month), but now my plot is in alphabetical order and not temporal order, how can I change this?

Thanks! 