I can stop any time I want.

It is an hour and a half past my bedtime; I have been up watching Family Guy and The Office on hulu, which I have finally allowed myself to discover. When I stopped buying cable a few years ago, my aim was primarily to save money but it was to save money on a service that I had begun to loathe for my attachment to it. Aside from baseball and the occasional date with late night off-color cartoons, I used tv as a mental babysitter because I had no idea what else to do with my time. Now that I have a few excellent ways in which to occupy myself, I am drawn back to television shows for the right reason: watching good television is a good way to use my free time.

Fortunately for me, I can watch television shows on the hypernets. This allows me to spend fourteen hours at school and still relax for a few hours at home in front of tv episodes of my choosing, with the guilt-ridding advent of commercials, plus pausarewindability! Of course, I will eventually exhaust the (currently epic) backlog of episodes of Family Guy and The Office, but by that point, we will be at least another season into House and many other shows that cause me to wake up in the night, gasping for the air to exclaim "why haven't I been following this stuff?"

The lesson is not that I have finally been delivered unto free television; it is that I am again willing to accept it as a part of my life. Blissfully, I haven't the room in my budget to consider whether or not I should subscribe to cable and I don't think my roommates are terribly interested in the idea anyway.

School news goes as follows: We had a physics test today. I did well except for one problem on which I totally dropped the ball after second-guessing myself into a corner. I'm not worried (which, if you have been playing along at home, is the greatest success). Linearity is still incredibly interesting. Numerical Methods gives me the mental equivalent of those Elmira College soccer practices: I often want to cry during them but now and then, I do something to impress even myself and after a few days, I feel like I can accomplish things I didn't feel up to a week before.

Go to bed.

Make your lunch first.

Okay.

Okay.

Fifteen Minutes of Freedom.

I'm sitting in one of the DeMeritt classrooms, proctoring the first Studio Physics exam of the semester, and there are fifteen minutes left before Linearity begins. Those fifteen minutes may be increasingly stressful for the remaining students so I ought to make them as relaxing as possible for myself in order to balance the universe.

Ten minutes to go. Here is a nice article about a rocket launch from Poker Flat, Alaska:

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/The-Shining.html?utm_source=newsletter20090917&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ASMSeptember . As you may remember, we do a lot of work in collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks so this article is another in the line of good lay-person descriptions of both how we do our science and what it's good for.

Five minutes left! They're a good bunch; they will do fine.

I'm going to head up to New London this evening to hang out for some delish dinner, then I'll be back in Dover on Saturday and Sunday for school-working, room-cleaning and awesome-having.

Time's up. See you later.

Do they just give these things away?

Another weekend! I'm going to start taking these for granted if I'm not careful. Actually, apropos to not having to go into work on weekends these days, I just had a nice conversation with Richard from Friday's. It seems he only recently got the message that I'm moving on into the physicist portion of my life so we straightened out the mixed signals and I told him I wouldn't be a stranger. In fact, I mentioned that I had been thinking about trying another one of those weekendy things and watching locals sports team football competition on the television so we engaged in manly talk and ended the conversation with a $5 bet on the Pats-Jets game. If any of my readers knows anything of how I can expect this bet to turn out, I ask him or her to spare me the enlightenment until Monday. The point really isn't to make $5.

Melisa and I saw a play called Crush Depth at the Players' Ring last night; it was phenomenal. The show is meant to be a psycho-thriller set in a submarine that was sent, via an uncontrolled dive, to the bottom of the ocean during a rescue mission. Strange things happen. Were the bridge crew unconscious for ten minutes of four hours? Where are the rest of the ships men and why are there strange markings on the walls? There is suspicion that someone put a neuro-toxic chemical into the air conditioning system and there is a Russian sub in the area but the real excitement comes when we learn details of the science mission sent to tag along with the rescue. Seafaring folklore involving Bermuda Triangle-type regions of no return meets scifi hypotheses about a transient space-time rift created by the quantum drive engine of a strange ship, itself lodged among the wrecks at the bottom. I'm sorry that it ends Sunday night so most of you won't be able to catch it!

Now I have a solid day of doing homework and correcting physics activities. I think I will take my work and coffee out onto the porch.

Progress report 1 of many.

I have a few minutes before Modern Physics begins. My updates are of a mundane nature: I still haven't organized my room yet but I have washed all my laundry and the downstairs is very comfortable so, since I can do school work on campus, I haven't been pressed to undertake that chore. I can't put it off forever, though. Classes are great, yada yada. I finished cataloging the polarization sequences of all the events in the first ducting study and am in the process of finalizing the code in order to give Hyomin something to work with. I really need to write my UROP final report, as well. The Studio Physics course is going well and I enjoy being back in a teaching-type role, even if it means re-acclimating myself to the time commitment required for thoughtful grading.

Class time.

Breaking even.

I made it through the entirety of last winter without getting sick and now I can't go ten seconds without blowing my nose. For once, I wish I didn't live in a part of the country with Puritan roots so that I wouldn't have to suffer for my happiness. I don't know if this is the result of allergies or ManBearPig flu but I expect that, at any moment now, I will expel a pine tree or ream of sand paper from my abused nasal passage.

In school news (which, I remind myself, was the original purpose of this blog), I went on Tuesday to my first Studio Physics class as a learning assistant and had to struggle for the first half hour to not raise my hand when Dr. Pohl asked a question. The students were nice and I didn't get in any fights so I think this will be a positive experience.

As far as my own learning goes, there is nothing to report beyond the fact that classes are going well. Jason and I are right back to our old geeky ways, too, which is excellent.

And I'll end it there in favor of returning to my school work lest future blogs be riddled with bad news.

My first weekend.

As Melisa and I were walking through Dover yesterday, I made a comment along the same line as "After so many years of weekend restaurant work, it is still a bit of a novelty for me to enjoy the weather on a Sunday morning stroll." This entire weekend felt like my first real weekend in a while (but if you can think of another occasion, please don't think it wasn't enjoyable enough to remember).

Melisa and I met my parents in Boston on Saturday and had a really great time taking in the Seeing Songs exhibit at the Boston MFA then walking through the city to get lunch and cannolis. She and I even took the train down which counts for double awesome points because 1) we avoided the headache of driving into Boston and finding parking, and 2) I love trains.

We made it back in time to take in most of the final hang of the summer season: BBQ 5: The Reckoning 4: Apocalypse Clow, though we were feeling pretty tame after our already long day.

Yesterday was the real clincher: we slept in, watched "Drop Dead Fred," took a nap and played some pool at the Pub before I had to head off the a Moses gig. That gig took place in a barn in Barrington and, though a pig had allegedly been roasted earlier, we arrived too late for most of the free food and drink. The music sounded good and the fire was still roaring so it wasn't a bad place to be, even if we got home at 2am.

Alright, I'm losing blogging steam. You get the picture of my actually relaxing weekend. Now I need to do some MIRL work.

Polar Eyes

I spent all day doing work as usual in the lab. That usual work has been especially tedious lately, as I have to go through a few hundred polarization plots and mark down how the polarization of the wave changes as it propagates toward the pole. The tricky part is that each event is not entirely polarized in the same way so I end up having to decide how to slice up certain mischievous events into manageable pieces, thereby creating more events than the two hundred or so that are already in front of me. I would love to find a way to automate this - to write a program that will automatically determine the polarization for a particular event or piece of an event - but, as always, I play the cost/benefit game and at this point I think the cost of designing and writing the program would outweigh the benefit of gaining the time it frees up. However, I hasten to remind my readership that I do not love physics and physics research any less :-)

Some good news is that I have been asked to assist in a physics I or II recitation this (and, I hope, next semester). I get the impression that my main duty would be helping students work through problems in class. This is a great opportunity in three major ways: I reinforce all those first-year basics, I learn a bit about physics instruction and I make some money doing something I enjoy.

On that note, I return to homework.

Today again for the first time.

The second day of the semester felt a lot like summer and I'm not talking about the weather.

The Physics III recitation met but we just continued with notes. The lab did not meet and instead, I worked in the Lab, toiling away in utter inefficiency. The reason that I feel down about my efficiency is that I could have solved the problem - it's really more a suite of problems - I ended up having to tackle had I not tried to take some shortcuts this morning. Abstracts for the fall AGU meeting are due on Thursday and I thought that I could get some numbers to put in the abstract if I simply tweaked an existing program to run a batch of files while I did other work and attended class, thereby plunging head-first into a rabbit hole of tweaks and adjustments, second-guesses and sloppy syntax gaffes that are currently lying in a precarious heap on my MIRL hard drive. I find myself worrying that I'm going to get caught spending too much time on a program or group of programs that I cut too many corners when, in fact, Marc would be more interested in me taking the time to get it right initially than to get lucky and spout off a few numbers for him. So tomorrow I may have an opportunity to tidy up my mess but it is more likely that we'll submit the abstract without numbers (a typical move) and I'll get back to the project that Hyomin and I have been working on.

Tu as compris?