A selection of things that are raising my ire at the moment:
- I’m sick, and have been all weekend. It’s not bad enough that I need to go check in to a hospital or anything — really, it’s just a cold with some annoying refinements — but it’s bad enough to kill my ability to think in a concentrated fashion. (Anyhow, being sick in a city where you have no friends close enough that you can call them up and say, could you return my library books for me?… is pretty sucky in general.)
- Speaking of killing, my desktop at work chose to die today. No idea why; I was unplugging an unmounted FireWire drive when the thing shut down and refused to start up again. Since about 90% of the things I need to do right now are on computer — and better than half of those really benefit from the large screen of my desktop, compared to the tiny screen of the clamshell — well, it’s a good thing perhaps that I don’t have the focus to work today, since I also don’t have the tools either.
- The other 10%? Grading. Damn you, grading…
- I’m supposed to be giving a colloquium talk in about a week and a half at my doctoral institution. Pretty cool, right? Well, it would be if I had anything to talk about for the better part of an hour. I’ve sort of got one reliable standby for such things — a whole complex of topics which are being spun out into papers over time — but my principal partner in this endeavour is defending his dissertation the day previous and will be talking about precisely this stuff. I suspect that having too much overlap between our presentations might reflect badly on at least one of us.
I suppose that’s really it, on top of the baseline crap that one puts up with. On the other hand, I’m meant to be giving tests in two of my classes tomorrow… so I only have to prepare one lecture for tomorrow, and can sit at the front of the room and sniffle silently through the other two periods. That’s something. And hey, at least I live in a country with a sane, sensible governm– um, well, never mind.