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Lousy, then better
Aug. 2nd, 2017 08:26 pmThis week started lousy, but it's looking up.
Had a bit of a slow start on Monday. I had one important thing to do: write up my AGU abstract and get it submitted. That would get it done two days early, and clear things up for the rest of the week. I had already sorted out with my coauthors what we we're gonna do last week, so it was just a matter of writing it all out, finding the right session, and filling out the form. I decided that once I got that done, I could head home early and do a bunch of wedding errands along the way.
And then I just... didn't. I sat there in my office dinking around on the computer and getting nothing done until it was evening. Burned up most of a day's PTO on nothing.
I came home mad at myself for squandering the day, and then the next morning I woke up with sore lymph nodes and a little bit of a cough and realized, oh, I'm coming down with a cold. So I forgave myself for being useless the day before and sucked down 4 zinc lozenges before I left the house.
Got the abstract done and submitted. Yay! Ahoy New Orleans, I'll see you in December! (Moscone Convention Center in SF is being renovated, so AGU won't be back there until 2019.)
Came home early once that was dealt with (managing one errand along the way), did some more cooking (Mexican cabbage, which turned out better than the mushroom-spinach mixture I made Monday night, which was tasty but not enough so to warrant the effort invested), and otherwise just took it easy last night.
Today I decided to take a half day and go in late. I had a leisurely morning, and when I got into the office mid-afternoon with nobody else around, I Accomplished The Difficult Thing: I sat down and finally (FINALLY!) organized all the tasks for building a test system that will let me compare all the different tweaks to improve my code that I need to try out. This is the thing that I've been putting off for weeks in order to deal with all the urgent things that kept popping up. So now all I have to do is code up all the pieces that are written up in my nicely organized plans, which is a lot easier and more appealing than trying to figure out what to do when all the pieces are flying around in a tangle in my head.
Of course, I still haven't dealt with bills, but enh, tomorrow is another day.
Other stuff that happened: Star Wars on Saturday, which ate up my brain for a day and a half. Monkey helped Douglas drive a moving van to Phoenix on Wednesday, then flew back Thursday night. We had a work dinner at the Chautauqua Dining Hall that night; the view from the porch was lovely, bit to took forever for them to seat us and the food was kinda mediocre. And our waiter kept doing one thing and then vanishing. Anyway, I left from there and drove all the way to the airport to pick him up. I arrived a little early and tried to pull off into the cell phone lot, and either I missed it avoiding a massive line of cars coming off a side road or it's waaaay off out of the way, because it turned into a huge detour around the services area. Ack! But I got there in the end. Our second committee meeting got postponed, and then instead of postponing it again we decided that to just wrap things up over email.
Oh! And we saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets on Sunday. I give it a B-minus. The biggest problem was that the titular character was horrifically miscast. If it had been just Valerian's partner Laureline, it would've been a lot better. Otherwise, it had great visuals, a lot of neat ideas, and a weak script. It was a bunch of good individual bits that were combined into a lousy movie overall.
Had a bit of a slow start on Monday. I had one important thing to do: write up my AGU abstract and get it submitted. That would get it done two days early, and clear things up for the rest of the week. I had already sorted out with my coauthors what we we're gonna do last week, so it was just a matter of writing it all out, finding the right session, and filling out the form. I decided that once I got that done, I could head home early and do a bunch of wedding errands along the way.
And then I just... didn't. I sat there in my office dinking around on the computer and getting nothing done until it was evening. Burned up most of a day's PTO on nothing.
I came home mad at myself for squandering the day, and then the next morning I woke up with sore lymph nodes and a little bit of a cough and realized, oh, I'm coming down with a cold. So I forgave myself for being useless the day before and sucked down 4 zinc lozenges before I left the house.
Got the abstract done and submitted. Yay! Ahoy New Orleans, I'll see you in December! (Moscone Convention Center in SF is being renovated, so AGU won't be back there until 2019.)
Came home early once that was dealt with (managing one errand along the way), did some more cooking (Mexican cabbage, which turned out better than the mushroom-spinach mixture I made Monday night, which was tasty but not enough so to warrant the effort invested), and otherwise just took it easy last night.
Today I decided to take a half day and go in late. I had a leisurely morning, and when I got into the office mid-afternoon with nobody else around, I Accomplished The Difficult Thing: I sat down and finally (FINALLY!) organized all the tasks for building a test system that will let me compare all the different tweaks to improve my code that I need to try out. This is the thing that I've been putting off for weeks in order to deal with all the urgent things that kept popping up. So now all I have to do is code up all the pieces that are written up in my nicely organized plans, which is a lot easier and more appealing than trying to figure out what to do when all the pieces are flying around in a tangle in my head.
Of course, I still haven't dealt with bills, but enh, tomorrow is another day.
Other stuff that happened: Star Wars on Saturday, which ate up my brain for a day and a half. Monkey helped Douglas drive a moving van to Phoenix on Wednesday, then flew back Thursday night. We had a work dinner at the Chautauqua Dining Hall that night; the view from the porch was lovely, bit to took forever for them to seat us and the food was kinda mediocre. And our waiter kept doing one thing and then vanishing. Anyway, I left from there and drove all the way to the airport to pick him up. I arrived a little early and tried to pull off into the cell phone lot, and either I missed it avoiding a massive line of cars coming off a side road or it's waaaay off out of the way, because it turned into a huge detour around the services area. Ack! But I got there in the end. Our second committee meeting got postponed, and then instead of postponing it again we decided that to just wrap things up over email.
Oh! And we saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets on Sunday. I give it a B-minus. The biggest problem was that the titular character was horrifically miscast. If it had been just Valerian's partner Laureline, it would've been a lot better. Otherwise, it had great visuals, a lot of neat ideas, and a weak script. It was a bunch of good individual bits that were combined into a lousy movie overall.
