one of *those* days

all excited because i was actually staying put this weekend... no big talks to give, etc., etc.,... just research meeting on monday, seminar on thursday, teach on friday, and plenty of time to get stuff done the rest of the time. that's still true but...

today, i spent 4 hours at church. a couple weeks ago i signed up to help out with fall work day. that means i spent the morning helping do random things that needed to be done around the church property... delightful stuff like helping dig ditches for new drainage pipes, cleaning out the area around the dumpster, emptying out a giant shed in search of church christmas decorations, and refilling said shed, and picking up litter around the church property. free bagels and donuts all morning as payment. :) i actually rather enjoyed that part of the day. i felt productive, and i like the other people i was working with.

then i spent 2-10pm programming in maple at my computer. a giant part of my thesis will be to write a computer program that finds enumeration schemes for multiset permutations. my advisor wrote a program that does it for something else, and my job is to modify it. only after this being the 3rd day of sitting at the computer working on it, all it does is take your input, think for awhile and output "FAIL". that's no good. i actually gave up in tears from being tired and frustrated tonight. hopefully tomorrow's shot at it will go better. i feel incompentant that i haven't managed to properly edit nicely written code in the past MONTH. we'll see. this is what i get for having a job that depends quite a bit on creativity and inspiration,... AND that is right or wrong, not just effort... some days, weeks, months, whatever, all the effort in the world produces nothing but headaches.... in an effort to cheer myself up, i did my students' calc 3 assignment for the week. it cheers me up to do problems where i understand the connections and can actually do it. but seriously, who, besides me, does a dozen lagrange multiplier problems to cheer up when they're sad? surely not too many of you... :P

speaking of headaches, i think my dvd player murdered itself today. i think i'm stopping by circuit city on the way home from church to replace it. it was a free gift from my brother last fall when he got himself a better one so i can afford to replace it.

books make me happy lately. i finished one minute stories and more one minute stories by Örkény earlier in the week and am now in the middle of calculus and pizza. i know it all already so it's a very fast and easy read.... and all the examples they give have something to do with pizza... what could be better?

alas, time for sleep. hopefully programming goes better tomorrow....

night y'all