drained

my day:
wake up
breakfast, shower, etc.
go to math building, and find ben
lunch with ben to discuss my life and give me a pep talk for my meeting with dr. greenfield later on
take scott on an emergency run to his house in my car with ben driving and me freaking out and eating my lunch in the passenger seat :-P
meeting with dr. greenfield (see note 1)
wandering around the math building
meeting with dr. weibel (see note 1 as well)
math at the park with ben
math at the park with ben, eric, scott, leigh, and colleen
playground with ben
pizza with all the above people
talked to roommate (see note 2)
started out watching a movie, but road to perdition really got to me so i went to my room 15 minutes in
complained to ben about stress for awhile :-P
bedtime story with leigh and colleen
now, i'm sitting here blogging while i wait for water to boil to make sweet tea for tomorrow ;-P

now, you really wish you were me, eh?

i am so tired and drained... and in need of about a million hugs.

i learned a lot of math today, but did a lot of thinking about non-math too... two footnotes:

(1) dr. greenfield is the previous math grad director, known for being one of the most personable and sympathetic profs in the department... ben and scott made me email him yesterday to see when he'd be around so that no matter that i'd never really sat and talked with him before, so that i could sit down and tell him how life is these days and that i might have a potential conflict with the qual in another week and a half.
his immediate reaction, "how DO you study when you have this much going on outside of math?.... your friend's story sounds like a horrible horrible joke -- that shouldn't happen to any family..."
our meeting was half an hour long (ben, after pep talk right before my meeting was worried i was about to come out in tears from a chat he expected to take 10 minutes), but ended in greenfield giving me a list of nice parks in the area to study at. :-) can't ask for better than that.

after venting about life to greenfield he said i should also talk to weibel, which i did... not nearly as sympathetic... definitely under 10 minutes of chat, but now... instead of like earlier in the week telling roommate "so any time you need me, other than the 30th and the 31st from 9 til noon, just say the word and i'm there", i can now take out the conditional clause... this is good.

(2) the reports from roommate about her mom aren't the most encouraging, but not drastically different from expected at this point either... they transfered her mom to a nursing home back in OH near their home yesterday... this was traumatic b/c she had a hard time staying flat on her back that long without understanding why she had to do it. today she was less responsive than before, just not reacting to things or showing recognition. this is such a sad, quickly developing, and frustrating story, i don't have much else to say right now.

in summary: life is stressful, but yay for good friends who give lots of excellent hugs. :-)

night y'all