Odd Ball

So it was an odd day yesterday. On the one hand, after getting up at 6:00am without prompting, deciding to start the work day, then procrastinating for a chunk of time – including admiring Venus (have you seen it/her recently? beautiful!) – it turned out to be a reasonably productive day. I tried to devote it entirely to The Project, since I’ve been quite busy with Professoring the last couple of weeks and so had not done much. The plan was to ink a page that had been sitting there waiting to be inked for a while, and to continue re-inking one of the pages I did over the Summer. Well, I succeeded in the former, and have punted some of the latter to today. I hope. I pleased with the finished inking which includes a little drawing of the wonderful Planck satellite, which will be mentioned as part of a conversation. (By the way, Planck’s preliminary findings were in the news recently. Worth a look.) I even got some of the colour work started on that successful page toward the end of the day, but lost what I did on that due to a strange computer problem (sometimes the Adobe software decides that there’s just too much going on and declares it does not have enough memory to proceed… then you’re stuck not being able to render, or even save….). I only lost an hour’s work of fairly straightforward painting – I am in the habit of saving relatively regularly.

So what’s the “odd” bit in the title? Well, all through the day I was bothered by something, and it is even more bothersome this morning. My right eyeball hurts. A lot. And I don’t know why. And in a universe that I am quite sure loves playing ironic jokes on me (just look at my dating life the last few years, for example), I find myself extra concerned since I’ve been especially focusing on visual work of late, what with all the drawing and inking and painting for the Project and all. (Yes, I’ve thought of the cause and effect angle, but I’m not convinced – why so strongly asymmetric?) It would be a real nuisance to have to re-teach myself all my drawing skills to take into account that I don’t have stereo vision, for a start. A few things on the plus side: (1) It’s the more severely mypoic eye… (2) I suppose maybe glasses would be half as expensive… (3) I don’t have to shell out for those expensive tickets for 3D movies… (4) People often think I’m either Sam L. Jackson or Larry Fishburne anyway (yeah, I know), so I get a double jump on the whole Nick-Fury-chic thing that is certainly coming… (5) I suddenly have a lot of new eye-patch Halloween costume ideas involving pirates and so forth. The vampire thing was way tired, anyway.

Ok. I’m joking. I’m sure it’ll all be fine (knock wood). But it is kind of ironic that just as I’ve ironed out several time-sinking bugs in my workflow on The Project I might not be able to work on it for a bit.

The eye pain started a couple of weeks ago and I assumed it was maybe related to being tired, of having some sort of viral infection, and waited for it to go away, and it seemed to do so. But now it’s back, and getting stronger. So I’m due at my optometrist this morning, and I hope they can figure out what’s going on. And help me fix it.

-cvj

P.S. For the interested parties among you, I was going to do a little post about the new paper I co-wrote that came out on Wednesday. It is 1102.0554 on the arxiv. Was a lot of fun, with some nice results, and a re-visit to the enhançon – hurrah! But I don’t plan to do much sitting in front of the computer for the rest of the day, so giving you a heads-up here. Eye thing. You know how it is…