happy saturday?

here's my day

*up at 7, out the door by 8:15 to meet up with bonnie and alexus at church and clean/set up everything for tomorrow morning... since it's the last weekend of the month, we got to polish all the communion silver too... lots of fun (actually, totally a highlight of my day)

*back to my corner of the world around 10, then grocery shopping then home

*studied from 10:30-1:30ish, during which time i
(1) remembered how to show an exponential bound on the number of 1324 avoiding permutations of length n
(2) learned how indecomposable 1342 avoiding permutations are in bijection with beta(0,1) trees
(3) learned the proof of how the furedi hajnal conjecture implies the stanley wilf conjecture

*around 1:30 i was super excited about understanding (3) for the first time in my life, so i called eric and told him he had to have lunch with me during which i'd explain the proof... he agreed and we walked to quiznos, talking about my studying the whole time

*around 2:30 i was back to learning new stuff -- mostly
(4) the proof of the furedi hajnal conjecture works -- it takes a minute to work through it, but once you see it, it's awesome.

*that took me up til 4:30 by the time i was happy with it, and then i went off on a 5 mile walk to think through the proofs better, when i came back..., before dinner, it was
(5) the proof that a ring is noetherian if and only if every ideal is finitely generated

*then dinner, and then
(6) the proof of the Hilbert basis theorem

after that i got tired and grumpy... i tried to understand primary decomposition of ideals better, but got irritated and put it off til tomorrow... it was 9:30pm already anyhow.

instead, around 9:30 i totally switched gears to

(a) read 3 sections in my bioinformatics textbook and do most of the programming assignment that's due on monday

and

(b) read a section in my students' calc 3 book and do the last 12 homework problems i needed to look at before i teach them on tuesday.

... and that brings me to now.

you'd think after all this i'd feel quite accomplished, but actually, i feel rather overwhelmed.

my qual is in 18 days, and although there are spurts of the day (most of it) i feel pretty good about what i know, towards the end of each day when i get tired, i look over my syllabus and get worried that there's plenty more i don't know as well as i wish i did, and the next 2.5 weeks are going to be mathematical hell. we'll see... right now i'm definitely in a grumpy mode.

it would be nice if i'd finished either (a) of my own homework, or (b) of my stuff to prepare to teach before i totally gave up for the night just now, but alas (a) there's still a bit more programming to do before monday, and (b) i still have to write a quiz tomorrow to run off monday to give to my students on tuesday, and then tuesday i get to have fun grading too.

add to that that this wednesday i have my first meeting with the undergrad i'm supposed to mentor this semester, and students begging to see me on monday for office hours too, not just the tuesday and thursday i'm officially supposed to have them, and it's gonna be a heck of a month to get through.

word to the wise: don't try to call me before february 17; you're not going to get an answer.

night y'all.