nawl

The last two weeks went by in a flash.

Kevin came and went, breaking the doldrums I'd fallen into. We went to visit some of his relatives in Knoxville. We came back. He gave people ideas. He left two days ago.

Sometime around Tuesday, Anant's last-ditch effort for a new problem for us fell through, and I gave in and began writing up our one decent result. The fluff-less version was five pages before references. Once I prove a final example, we'll submit it to various journals. The abstract has already been submitted as a talk to a conference in September.

Last night I made spätzle for the first time, and melted some cheese over them. We had little else to eat left in the apartment.

We all went out for a big group lunch today at a Palestinian-run Italian restaurant, the *gasp* third Johnson City eating establishment I've patronized the entire time I've been here. The big news is that Anant won't be continuing the REU next year. We joked that we killed his spirit, but he apparently has big plans to start it up again as an international program in some exotic location like Greece or Sweden and focus more on discrete math.

The big excitement of the day came when I realized that my California id was still in Kevin's wallet (I gave it to him when we went to a movie a week ago) and that he was by that point at the Toronto airport getting ready to fly back to San Francisco. My flight is tomorrow morning, and I have no other form of state-issued id on my person. Oops. After a bit of frantic calling around, I managed to arrange for a picture of my passport to be emailed from home, and for a picture of my id to be emailed upon Kevin's arrival. The current plan is to print those out and wave them, along with my various forms of non-valid id such as my ETSU visitor card, bank card, and insurance card, in front of the airport security people and beg them to let me on the plane. Interestingly enough, a bit of rooting around on Google turns up several people claiming that it is not actually a federal law that airline passengers must show id before boarding a plane, though it seems to require quite a bit of bureaucratic nonsense to circumvent. There are scary references to secret laws regarding this sort of airport security issue, and fuzziness about whether the regulations actually changed after 9/11. I suppose it might be possible to play the civil liberties warrior, but that would seem to be a bad idea in a tiny regional airport in Tennessee.

My room is clean. We've regulated finances in the girl apartment. We had dinner at Pal's Sudden Service, a strictly local fast food chain in a hot-dog shaped building just outside of the campus here. The milkshake was pretty darn good, and the others claimed that the specialties (a hot dog covered in ground beef?) were actually good too. I made myself a "non-pebbler" shirt as a souvenir. I emailed the girls recipes for the various things I cook.

The biggest controversy of the last couple weeks, pitting girls against boys: is a wet oven mit more effective than a dry one? Girls say no, boys say yes. Girls argue that water has a higher thermal conductivity than air, boys argue that water has a lower specific heat than air. Tonight we had an official scientific experiment involving an iron and two identical washcloths, one wet. The consensus? Both right. So disappointing. The wet washcloth became painful more quickly than the dry when folded in two, but beat the dry washcloth when folded in four.

The summer in review:

Worked on 5 problems. Did not make as much progress on any one as I might have hoped, but it sure beat banging away at one of them for the whole summer.

Learned TeX. TeXed one baby paper.

Cooked at least 6 vats of black beans, 10 pizzas, 16 cinnamon buns, 6 avocados of guacamole, and managed to avoid eating all the spaghetti that the girls bought on the first week when they expected we'd be living off of pasta and canned sauce.

Saw more movies in two months than I have probably seen in the past two years.

Learned that going to the mall actually is the most exciting thing to do in Johnson City, Knoxville, and Atlanta.

Did not do any pebbling.

Read many scary, pretty, deep, and fun papers. Also read many dumb papers. Confidence in my own abilities decreased by intimidating papers, increased by papers I could have written myself.

All in all, I'm very glad I came.