Final Thoughts

Well, it was a full day. Since this morning I’ve been putting the last touches on a paper with my student, V. I’ve been working at my home office (something odd going on with my office computer) while he’s elsewhere but present via IM. We can chat, exchange equations, drafts, and so forth, so it is good medium. Then mid-morning, I had a moment of confusion for a while, and progress stopped while I sorted that out. Discussions with V and another student, T, via IM about this and some other matters ensued, and then I was back on track, inputting edits from a session yesterday of reading it with pen-at-the-ready in a bookstore, inputting edits from V, and then another printout and review to add more.

Every now and again, a check of email, a walk around and a pull out of the odd weed in the garden, and then back to it. Somehow this went on until 3:00 – three hours later than expected – and then it was all done. I submitted it to the arXiv and breathed a sigh of relief as another project and paper was done. Sigh… Tomorrow I switch gears and start work on another paper. Feels like it never ends… They are interesting projects though, so mustn’t complain.

Then I had one minute before a scheduled phone call from a filmmaker who wanted to talk about the speed of light, and Relativity. Grabbed the camera and the phone and wandered outside to take a photo in the garden… phone rang while I was making a photo for a birthday card for my nephew. Talked on the phone for 45 minutes about the arranged topics, and then had 10 minutes to make the card, write the card, address the card, put stamps on the card, grab some other stuff, throw it all into my bike front basket, run out of the house with the bike, unfold bike, and zip off to the post office to post the card. Made it to the post office just in time for five o’clock… – hurrah! – only to then read on the postbox that the last post was in fact at five thirty, not five… sigh.

Next stop, over to the Alcove – another office, of sorts. Time for sitting and some quiet contemplation (see photo above) about what on earth I’m going to put on the final exam of my General Relativity course tomorrow. This started with a glance at what I’d asked them to do on the midterms, to normalize things. I’d share some of my musings, but you never know who’s reading. A nice cold Duvel of celebration of the day (appropriately served with the correct glass) was definitely a help in this delicate thought process…

-cvj