I can't sleep until the superglue on my alarm clock knob dries so I can set it for the morning.
This evening I was sitting near the entrance of Walmart, waiting for the rest of our party to finish shopping, watching an employee neatly arrange shopping carts in lines parallel to the path of entering customers and greet everyone who passed with a believably sincere "good evening". A woman passed pushing a 3 or 4 year old girl in a shopping cart, and the girl looked straight at me and asked, "Where's your kid at?" I heard the mother explaining as they walked away that not everyone had children like her. I must be getting old.
The ETSU mascot is a buccaneer, which rather unfortunately lends itself to all sorts of cheesy names for student services. There's a system to add small amounts of money to your student ID, which you can then use in soda machines. It's called Buc$. The campus shuttle, which I've never actually seen, is called Bucshot. The radio station call letters, WETS, seem especially appropriate, if not buc-related. (It's been raining a lot, if I haven't been complaining enough.)
Everyone drives here. They drive from one corner of campus to the other to go to class, and apparently if the parking lots near the classrooms are full, they will drive to the bottom of the hill, park, and walk the rest of the way to class. It's around a 15-minute walk to the math building from the apartment, and we have yet to see anyone else actually walking it. One morning, we saw a guy who appeared to be walking to class, but then he stopped and got into a car that drove up to him. I asked the maintenance guys at the clubhouse to do some repair at the apartment, and instead of walking two minutes to my building, he turned around, got into his truck, and drove there. I walked, and we arrived at the same time.
I'm told us REU kids are actually identifiable as the nerdy-looking people walking anywhere.
In math news, my favorite problem has now been officially been deemed "hard" after we managed to show that it was resistant to the most high-tech probability tools, and we were given a bunch of new papers to look at for more approachable subjects. I'm sad. So what if it's been open for 25 years?
My list of goals for the summer now has two items:
1. Embed the graph of pairwise sums and products into a Klein bottle.
2. Work "forcing" and "domination" into a serious paper together.