Out of the frying pan...

It's been a while. I'm sorry.

Conference preparations and teaching got in the way of regular blogging for most of this past term. It also got in the way of the more important (to me at least) activity of thesis editing. Once I got back from the conference, I took a few days to catch my breath. I didn't do much of anything important, aside from tying up the last loose end with my course, between the time that I got back to the time I posted about the conference. The next day, I started getting ready to move and working on the thesis.

Everything aside from a few odds and ends was moved out on 29th of April. I picked up the the odds and ends the next day when I went back to help (now former) housemate number 1 clean up the old place--(now former) housemate number 2 had packed and left a few days earlier--and deliver a carload of her stuff to their new place that the movers, who were already behind schedule when they arrived, didn't have time to deliver. By the time that was done, I barely had enough strength left to lift my fingers to type.

The boxes were mostly left unmoved during the first week in my new place, except to find this or that item that I happened to need, since most of that week was spent working on the thesis, either making corrections or discussing them with my supervisor. Needless to say, after spending that much time thinking about corrections and typing them into the computer, the ideal break-time activity was not sitting at my computer thinking about and typing up blog posts. Besides that, blogging is usually a spontaneous activity, writing posts when things come to mind. There isn't much room for that to happen when my thoughts are focused on my thesis.

On top of moving and editing, I was asked a few weeks ago to give a talk. I couldn't think of an excuse on the spot, so I had to give a talk in the Queen's/RMC discrete math seminar on Thursday. Most of the talk was spent discussing known results, so preparing the talk wasn't difficult, but it was still quite time consuming, and it was yet another thing to do amidst being quite busy already. My supervisor said that it went well, which I take to mean that it went well.

Instead of handwriting the corrections onto a paper copy of Chapters 4, as my supervisor has done so far for Chapters 0-3, he made a nonpaper copy of the file and typed his own corrections to that file. So today the roles were reversed, and I spent the evening reading his corrected version of my file and making my own corrections to his work. It's the first day in about two weeks where a substantial part of the day was not spent typing, so here I am blogging... about why I haven't been blogging.

Hopefully soon I can get back to blogging about things other what I've been up to lately.