blah blah blah

man, staring at the computer way too long this evening.

what have i been up to? lots and lots of reading... finished that hideous strength a few nights ago and have been ploughing through the man who knew infinity ... it's a biography of ramanujan (famous mathematician from the early 1900s) and i'm learning a lot about him about about hardy (famous english mathematician who worked with him) that i never knew before... it's pretty well written, so yay for that.

been spending more money than i should, but on stuff i need (well, mostly)... last night, i spent christmas money on two movies i've seen a million times before i wanted to have (sweet home alabama & miss congeniality -- man, yeah i am a girl... oops) and the latest POD cd which i've also wanted for quite awhile... durn spiffy... and i did actually pay for them in christmas money out of pocket, so yeah, yay for that... brother actually watched both with me and we split a medium pizza... it was a nice putzing around the house kind of evening.

mom's been obsessed with seeing mona lisa smile, so we finally saw it today, her treat... before that ironically she bought herself a nice dress sweater for christmas programs at her school, and grandma pudwell bought her the exact same sweater for a christmas present, so she went to return one of them and trade it in... meanwhile, i've been lacking on good jeans/khakis/etc., so she went to penneys, i went to sears and got what we needed... i got a pair of jeans to replace the pair that's gaining holes like crazy, a decent not overworn pair of khakis, a new pair of running pants since the current pair is getting old and starting to need patches soon too, and a nice black sweater off the sale rack... good stuff all around.

dad's trying my patience, but i think i'll survive this break without actually yelling at him, although he has a few times at me... sometimes the things he gets mad at me about aren't even worth a response, but he wears my patience and my happiness with being here down to shreds by the end of most every visit... dude... enough said on that.

anyhow, otherwise, besides lots of movies and some shopping lately, i've been working away at saving emails out of my yahoo email account since it's been full to overflowing... i have this thing about saving any email that has remotely any content to it, and twice a year i save them all to floppy disks... it's kinda like when i had lots of penpals around the world i wrote snail mail to... i still have those letters all in a big filing box under my bed here... you just save those kinds of things... this bout of saving things to disk is kinda tiring though... i just went through a whole folder of 41 emails labelled "nicole"... the oldest message was the last mass email nicole sent from when she was getting settled in tampa this july/august, and after that 30+ of them were from responses from friends when i wrote a mass email that she had died, and correspondence with her parents since... bittersweet to go through... had a similar folder for responses i got after stephen duncanson died also this fall... etc., etc., etc.... it's not all sad stuff... there was also a lengthy folder of all the emails all us first year rutgers math grad students wrote over the summer to introduce ourselves before we actually came to campus -- that was actually amusing to read through now that i actually have known them all for months... at any rate, it's just kinda a bizarre way to review the past few months, as if it needs to be done again. =P

ok, the end... time for another chapter of ramanujan, and to sleep.

later.