Partially Ordered Thoughts

I’m sitting here at the end of the weekend and wondering if I actually had a weekend. Yesterday I spent about five hours sitting at my desk working on the textbook Tom and I are writing. The recurrence relations chapter was in far rougher shape than I recollected it being, so I needed to just hunker down and get to work on it. I made some really good progress, but writing for that many hours in a row is damned hard work. Fortunately, I had a good time last night hanging out with friends. We went to dinner, then chatted, then played Settlers of Catan (Cities and Knights expansion) and had panna cotta that I made.

Today was even more work. Since I’m moving (yeah, don’t know that I ever confirmed here that I am moving to Dunwoody, but it’s now just under three weeks away) rather soon, I’ve started some of my packing efforts. In all honesty, I’m really quite ahead of the schedule on packing. My books are packed, wine glasses packed, out-of-season clothes packed, and more plans on packing made. This has produced some work for me, as the bookcase that I got a few years back never got fully coated with polyurethane. I did the four remaining shelves over the past couple of weeks, but I still had to do the supports. To top it all off, I decided to expand the bookcase when I move into my new apartment by adding another unit with seven 32″ shelves and two doors to cover the bottom section, which also requires another support. Even with my new electric hand sander, it still took forever to sand all the remaining pieces, first with 120 grit then 220 grit. After that, I had to wipe the darn thing down with mineral oil to get rid of the sawdust. Then I had to apply the polyurethane. It took four hours to get from start to having the first coat on, by which time I was exhausted. I’ve now decided that the second coat will have to wait until later in the week. Fortunately I have some mosquito spray to try to kill, or at least chase away, the mosquitoes that have invaded my porch, making working out there on a weeknight possible.

Gonna be a busy week. Try to pack some more, work on a couple more chapters, accuracy check another chapter of this book I’m working on as an independent contractor, work on more stuff for TA orientation, more woodworking, try to preserve some sanity. Hopefully I can make it to the weekend.

So I spent the bulk of the past week in Burlington, VT, at the SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics. It was definitely a nice trip. Our research group (at least the student members of it) flew to Boston Sunday and, despite flying on three different airlines, arrived within a 30-minute time span. Dave’s mom picked us up, and we drove to his house in Arlington and hopped in a different car for the drive to Burlington. It was a really great drive. Vermont in particular is a lovely state. Lush with green, mountainous (east coast mountains, that is), and great temperatures. At the conference, we had the chance to talk with some other researchers working in a similar area to some of the stuff we’ve been doing, and hopefully started some connections outside of Georgia Tech. One of those people will hopefully come visit this fall for a week when she’s on sabbatical.

I definitely had conference fatigue by Thursday afternoon, and so I sure didn’t object to the idea of heading back to Boston early. We went for a nice (short) hike through a gorge on the VT/NH state line, which fulfilled Csaba’s desire to go hiking. After arriving back in Boston, we headed into the city. We had dinner at Faneuil Hall. (I had clam chowdah and a shrimp salad roll, which was tasty.) We then ventured into an area of town known as the North End (an area of town full of Italian restaurants) for pastries at Mike’s Pastry. I had a great chocolate mousse cannoli after I finally fought my way to the front of the line. We finished the evening by walking through Boston Common, the public garden, and to Fenway Park. Friday I went to the Museum of Science with Marcus and then headed back to Atlanta at 1800.

I’ve lived in one place for almost four years know, which has been great, as I love my apartment (especially the kitchen) and its location. However, being ~12 miles from campus and needing to drive every day is getting tiring, especially with gas hovering around $4/gallon and little sign of a change there. I’ve been looking for a different apartment for a couple of weeks now, focusing on places where I could be closer to the subway. I again enlisted the assistance of Promove to help in screening out large complexes and monitored craigslist to look for more independent type of places. There’s a place that I’ve had my eye on but had been waiting to get a solid price and specials for August move-in. Finally, when I called yesterday, they were able to give me specific information, and it was good. I went and visited and loved the place. By official space numbers, it’s about 170 square feet larger than my current apartment, but considering that I think there’s a lot of space cheating going on in the number used to rate my current apartment’s area, I think the new place will be even bigger. I’ll post more details once I know for sure that my application has been approved. I had to provide a lot of documentation of my finances to them, since they want you to make 2.5 times the market rate of the apartment, which I don’t (I make over 2.5 the leasing rate, but not this mystical market rate), but they’re willing to take documentation of the money I have in the bank to show that I can afford the place, so hopefully I get good news tomorrow. I’ll post more details once I’m sure that everything works out. Looks like the move will be 16 August, if all goes as plans, so go ahead and start making your travel plans to come help The new place will be right on a MARTA bus line that runs every 20 minutes and takes 10 minutes to get to a MARTA rail station, giving easy access to campus. My commute will be longer than it is right now, but I’ll be able to read or make other good use of my time then, rather than focusing on driving every morning.

Today’s been kind of blah. Had no idea what I wanted for supper, just knew that I needed to bake bread to use for sandwiches this week. Even on that front, I feel like I’m stuck in a rut. I should probably sit down with The Bread Bible and identify a new recipe to try next week. I wound up just making a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, which was tasty, but not inspiring. It sucks when you’re tired of eating out but have nothing in your kitchen to cook and don’t know what you want to eat. Hopefully things get better this week.

need to lighten up. Last night was bridge night, but at Amanda’s this time instead of Dave and Teena’s. This was the first time I’d been to Amanda’s place, and the building numbers on her street were kind of hard to see, so I didn’t part exactly in front of her place. There were two cars (including mine) on both sides of the street for that whole block when I parked. When I got out to my car, I found the note below on my windshield.

Apparently, some people are incapable of walking ten extra steps, since they could have parked directly in front of or behind my car without any problems. It also seems highly suspect that they could get anyone to two my car, which was perfectly legally parked. I wasn’t blocking a driveway, there were no “Reserved Parking for John Doe” signs there, there was no fire hydrant. If the street had been completely full, I could see some grousing, but still, contrary to what this dufus wrote, in Atlanta people always park wherever they can on the street. We just hope that they do it legally most of the time.

Today my registration card for my car arrived from North Dakota. It was very exciting to get to put real license plates (particularly North Dakota ones) on my car. (Thanks to my dad for going over to Dickinson to pay the sales tax and fees for me to expedite the process, rather than me mailing the check up from Atlanta.) However, when I got the receipt for the taxes and registration, it quickly became apparent that someone in the Motor Vehicle Division office had decided to overtax me. Sales tax in North Dakota is 5%. I knew about what this should be for the purchase price of my car, but it seems that it was about $150 too high. I ran the numbers, and it came out exactly $150 too high, as if they hit the key a row above the right one on their adding machine, making my car cost $3,000 more. I called the MVD at the number that I had in my cell phone from which I’d received calls previously. It turns out that this is the friggin’ cell phone of this nice old lady named Gladys who works there, and she wasn’t at work today. I was thoroughly confused, but she explained that she can’t call long distance (even to Fargo, apparently) on her work phone, since it’s a state phone, so she has to use her cell phone to make such calls. Is it just me, or does this make absolutely no friggin’ sense, especially in western North Dakota, land where you can’t call anywhere outside a 20-mile radius of your present location without the call being long distance? Anyway, Gladys called in to the office, but since the paperwork had just been processed Friday, it wasn’t yet in their imaging system so they couldn’t see it. I’m faxing the bill of sale and receipt to them tomorrow in hopes that someone there can figure this out and get me my $150 back.

On another note, it’s about a billion degrees here. At present, it’s 2046 and still over 90F at my apartment. This should not be happening. I want snow drifts. Great big snow drifts.