(no subject)

Productivity has been pretty low lately, and I've been feeling generally bored. In the mornings sometimes I do experience the sublime pleasure of making good progress learning something, all nicely caffeinated, fed, and fresh, with the stereo blasting in my office (ah, the benefits of concrete walls and an absentee officemate) and the sun streaming in the window. Yes: It's Springtime in Rochester. One day the snow disappeared and the flowers sprouted, all at once. Anyways, as I was saying, productivity is low. I need some exciting project and new, exciting people. As it is it is 03:00 on Friday night and I am reading about the Federal Reserve System! I have been good this week about bringing lunches from home, but I still end up buying supplemental food at school. I keep trying new things in the Pit (a sort of cafeteria, appropriately named) in the hope that something there will be {affordable, edible, healthy} but apparently it's a lost cause.

Maybe I'll learn French and move to Montréal.

plans

I haven't gotten this approved here yet, but I think in May I'll be travelling out to Berkeley for a little conference, and then taking up to two weeks for a trip with Ryan to Barranca del Cobre on the Chihuahua-Pacífic Railway. The rest of the summer I'll be studying for the prelim exams while working on LIGO work (looking for stochastic background of gravitational waves, analagous to the microwave background), probably with one short trip out to LIGO/Hanford, hopefully with the possibility of a side trip across the cascades to see some real mountains, big trees, hot springs, and Seattle. Backpacking trips, camping on a lake in the Adirondacks, and rendezvous in Toronto and Montréal are also possibilities. In Rochester I'll be whiling away the evenings on my front porch, drinking mojitoes (and slapping mosquitoes).

Written up like that, it all sounds so exciting! But right now I'm going to have a honey sandwich. And then, maybe, go to sleep.