Bounded in a Nutshell

Well, not quite, but maybe. Right now I'm sitting here half-tired and half-not, with fragments of evocative but mostly meaningless phrases from the latest Tom Waits album running through my head. Given that I haven't slept well two nights running, you'd think I'd be in bed by now or something.

Spent most of today driving, on my way back from a sojourn down south. It had all of the elements of a good southern trip: friends, math, hand-crafted beer, crosswords, friends. Also the added entertainment of meeting two young children, who decided after a few hours of my acquaintance that I was basically harmless & hence could be safely incorporated into their play structure. (Apparently one of them was quite annoyed this morning at being deprived of the opportunity of waking me up. I'm of the opinion that she owes all of her future birthdays to her parents' prevention of this action, but maybe not. After all, I don't see very well without my glasses, and hence would probably miss a lot.)

I had a truly marvellous play on words in my head earlier today, for the name of a software project that I don't have one-thousandth of the mad skillz necessary to complete. But it's gone now, and maybe it's just as well. I worry sometimes that my memory isn't nearly as sharp as it used to be; then again, I came up with the idea while driving, and most if not all long-distance driving streams of consciousness don't seem to get archived terribly well.

If I ever get around to making the official List of Things What Make Me Happy, I'm sure that day-passes to rail-transit systems will crack the top 20. For a mere $9, I have in my current possession a two-day pass to San Diego's trolley network (plus buses, but that's not nearly as exciting); this will allow me to kill the weekend in style, if by "style" one means "transit goodness Heaven", which I guess isn't how most people would use the word. I'm half-considering taking the trolley down to San Ysidro tomorrow and walking across to Mexico just because I can, but I've heard that sometimes the line to get back in the country is rather long, and I do have a flight to catch.

"Trolley". It's also just fun to say.

One thing I enjoy about vacationing in cities is that it gives my small gift for synchronicity a better chance to operate. Specifically, I left my hotel room earlier this afternoon vaguely wishing that I might happen upon a neighbourhood wine shop that was doing tastings; not two hours later, I had found myself a wine-tasting to experience. Though not in a small shop; this was actually set up at a big outdoor mall (to which I'd gone to visit the Apple Store), and was possibly in conjunction with a cooking demonstration by someone named Alton Brown. Still, I'm not going to complain about the existence of free wine tastings. (I might complain about the quality of the wines in question, though: the Riesling was a little too mineral in flavour for my taste, and both the Shiraz and the Cab on the earthy side of things. The nicest one there was the sparkling Chard/Pinot, but since I'm not that into sparkling wines...)

In other news, my first stint ever as a groomsman came to a successful close yesterday; I'm using "successful" here to indicate that the wedding happened as planned, the bride and groom are safely together and out of the country, and no one died that I know of. There were a couple of minor problems, but I'd imagine that there always are.

• I've been house-sitting for most of the past week; given that there are no pets in said house, it's pretty light duty all things considered. It took me about a day and a half to get over the I'm in someone else's house all alone wrongness sensation, and am now settled in quite comfortably just in time for the proper residents to return and my own voyage to the other side of the continent.
• Is it possible to be allergic to sunlight? I don't seem to do very well on bright, warm days if I spent any extended period outside.
• I got a slightly unquiet e-mail from my department secretary today, asking for a bunch of documents relating to renewing my work visa. Guess I forgot to notify the proper Powers That Be in the Urban Commuter College's System that I am, in fact, a more-or-less documented citizen of the country now. Oops...
• What lese has been going on? Certainly not work; I've got a pretty minimal requirement of What Must Be Done by, say, Wednesday and the flight out West: one paper needs to be fleshed out and rationalized. And hopefully, that's what's happening tomorrow.

...or maybe that's just a false memory of a Golden Age of Blogging. Probably, come to think of it.

I've been back in the birth-country for about a week and a half now, and somehow in that time I've managed to get a bit of work done. (Mostly not research-work as much as money-for-me-work, but who am I to complain? Well, except for complaining about my general lack of M4d C0ding Skillz and general troubles with computers, but I've ranted about that elsewhere, I think.) Actual research-work is coming up soon.

I realise that it's a little odd that I talk about doing so much work while I'm, you know, on vacation. (Nay, more than vacation: by the lights of my current employer, I'm not really even technically working right now, and won't be until mid-August. At least, if I understand my contract right.) But on the one hand, I've got something like eight weeks of time off here, and not enough financial stability to spend all that time in serious tourism or dissipation. On the other, I firmly believe that mathematical research is a leisurely activity (if not actually a leisure activity), and being on vacation means that I can easily devote many placid hours to its pursuit. Besides, it's my vacation and I can do what I want with it; and what I want, among other things, is to do math. So there.

Another thing I'm doing with my vacation which others might see as work, is re-attempting (and successfully, this time) Umberto Eco's Baudolino. I wrote about it in this space long enough ago that I don't want to bother hunting down the reference, but ended up putting it down and never picking it up again. While I think I still like Foucault's Pendulum better, this one's still quite charming in its way, and Eco manages to sneak, straight-faced, an awful lot of subtle jokes into the narration. Makes me wish I knew enough Italian to read the original text.