aryanhwy | A day in the life of...

The Dragon's Tale for the last few months has been running a series on "A day in the life of..." various officers (and the King and Queen), which I've been enjoying a lot. I also thought it might be interesting to translate the concept into an LJ meme of sorts. I know that my life is way different from the lives of lots of the people who read my journal, and since "different from" is a symmetric relation, it means theirs are very different from mine. So what is an average day in the life of

aryanhwy like?

On weekdays, the alarm goes off sometime between 9:00am and 9:15am (currently I'm using a travel alarm clock which cannot be set very precisely since my usual alarm clock is eating batteries (it goes through a pair a night if I keep refilling it) and I don't know if the clock is finally dying (it's ~20 years old), or if I'm getting bad batteries). I've been trying very hard to get up when the alarm goes off the first time, but often a combination of things (including having been woken up a number of times in the previous 2-3 hours by Joel's alarm going off or Widget pulling stuff off shelves in an attempt to get us to crawl out of bed and feed him; Joel rolling over and putting his arm around me and not letting me get out of bed; and the apartment being too cold for me to contemplate leaving the nice warm nest) means that I either reset mine for some arbitrary amount of time or wait until Joel's goes off again, at some arbitrary future point, which means that some mornings I'm out of bed closer to 9:45am-10:00am. Every other morning I shower and wash my hair, and after that, the computer goes on and I check my email, read OSCAR, LJ, Facebook, and check random assorted blog-like links, including the page that has photos of my niece and nephews. Unless a crisis happened over night that I have to deal with right away, I'm generally through all that and getting ready to head out the door about half an hour after getting out of the shower/out of bed. It's ~20-25 minutes by bike to the Science Park, so if I get out of bed around 9:00am I can be out at the office by 10:00am.

I've given up on trying to eat breakfast at home, because I'm not a breakfast person and generally don't start feeling vaguely hungry until about 45 minutes after I've woken up, so I keep a package of ontbijtkoek at the office and dutifully eat two slices every morning since Dad drummed it into my head that breakfast is The Most Important Meal of the Day and I Should Not Skip It. Funnily, even though the thought "I'm hungry" usually crosses my mind while biking out to the office, I then forget about that thought upon arrival and don't remember it again for half an hour or so, so breakfast is usually eaten between 10:30 and 11:00.

Even when I know exactly what I need to do in the day, I always find it hard to settle down and get right to work as soon as I get out to the office, so I let myself devote the first hour or so to doing heraldic stuff, since then at least I'm still getting things that need to be done done. But then I get into the groove of real work. The average research day involves tracking down papers on the web, printing them off if they look interesting (yes, I still do print off all the papers I read, because I really like (a) being able to hand-write notes on them and (b) have them all spread out in front of me when writing a paper of my own. But I print them double-sided and two-up, so it's not that much paper. I also almost never throw any paper away), and reading them. Less often I'm looking up books in the library catalog; most books in the UvA library system are shelved off-site so I have to request them to be retrieved; if it's an in-library use only book, it can only be used at the central library, so at least once a month I take a morning and spend it up there. Otherwise, I have them shipped to the library that's two floors below my office. I've gotten quite the reputation with the librarians there since the average time between their sending me an email saying a book I've requested has arrived and me showing up at the desk to get it is less than a minute. Once I've read enough papers, or a conference deadline comes up, or I have an idea, I start writing; at any given time, I've generally got about three active papers being written on, and another 3-4 in the burners waiting to be rotated in to active writing when space comes available (either when an active paper gets submitted or reaches a point where I can't do anything more with it until I get past a block). The papers lately have generally been on totally disparate subject matters, which is nice in that when one isn't going well I can switch to working on the other, but also stressful in that I have so much stuff to keep in my mind at once. For example, last week I was working on completing my paper for the Computability in Europe conference, on Llull, Leibniz, and Boole; trying to settle on a concrete topic/plan for a paper on semantics for Aristotelian modal syllogistics that I'm doing jointly with a student as an individual research project; and then I also met with a colleague to talk about some papers we'd both recently read (for different reasons) where we decided we'd end up writing something on lambda-calculus, free logic, and the ontological argument. The CiE paper got popped off the stack when it got submitted on Thursday, and getting promoted into its place is a dynamic logic framework for modeling obligationes that I've been working on since November; it got promoted because a week from Monday I'll be in Lille giving a 1.5 hour tutorial on obligationes at a workshop I'm running, where I'll be discussing some of the work-in-progress material from the paper. In the "non-active, but waiting to be promoted" queue are papers on S5-knowledge and deceit, revising a chapter from my dissertation with my supervisor, and an extension of the obligationes framework to handle a different variant.

About 3/5 of my week (either 3/5 of each day, or 3 days out of 5) is devoted to research; the other is to teaching/teaching prep. In January, I've been doing this directed research project, which has mostly involved reading a bunch of papers and meeting with him twice a week to discuss them. That's pretty much come to an end (now we just need to write a paper with what we've discussed), which is good as classes start next week. This semester I expect that a lot of my "research" time will actually be also "teaching" time, since I'm going to be teaching temporal logic, which I've never taught before so I need to spend a lot more time figuring out how much time it will take to go through the material, and what I should cover and how I should organize it. But temporal logic is pretty much my favorite subject ever, so preparing for this class will also involve a lot of reading of interesting papers and probably coming up with new ideas to explore which is why it also counts as research.

Around 1:00pm the exodus towards lunch begins at the other end of the hall; folks from the farthest office decide to make a move and then collect everyone along the way. Not everyone always joins right away, sometimes people don't show up for another 15 minutes or so, and since we all stay until the last person has finished, lunch runs about 45 minutes to an hour, which is a really nice way to relax and take a break from thinking. When I was a Ph.D. student, I could never get past the guilt of *gasp* taking time for lunch, but would instead take about 10 minutes to eat my sandwiches at the desk, usually while reading the news. I'm glad I've gotten over that.

Then it's work for the rest of the afternoon, reading, writing, thinking, and making lots and lots of tea. Around about 5pm I start thinking about going home: Mostly because we always ate dinner between 5:00 and 5:30 growing up, and it's ingrained in me that that's when you eat, even if I'm usually not that hungry. I'll ping Joel on IM and find out what his plans for the evening are, and tally up how much I still need to do in order to not go home feeling stressed about not having gotten enough work done, and we usually end up heading home between 6:15 and 6:45. Sometimes one of us will head home earlier than the other, if we've finished everything we needed to do, or reached brain saturation, and if that happens, that person is in charge of planning for supper. If we come home at the same time, it's usually just leftovers, or maybe one of us will run to the store to get supplies for something simple. Pasta with red sauce, soup, omelets, and stirfry are our mainstays.

The evenings are devoted to heraldry and calligraphy & illumination. Wednesday nights and Thursday nights are "Bad Chick Flick Nights" on two of the Dutch channels, so on those nights at 8:30 I park myself on the bed with all my C&I stuff and work on scrolls. Other nights are heraldry nights. On winter evenings, if I'm not watching a movie, usually by between 9:30 and 10:00 I've gotten so cold that I decide it's time for a bath; I'll draw the hottest bath I can stand and soak for an hour or so, reading, until either I get too much sweat dripping in my eyes, or the water has gotten lukewarm. Slinky always joins me; as soon as the bath water starts running she comes running in, and she'll stand on the counter until I get my towel down from the rack for her to sit on. She'll curl up on it and sleep there until I let the water out; as soon as I stand up, she does too, knowing that I need the towel.

I'm usually in bed by 11:00, though I generally read for another hour before turning off the lights (more if the book is really good, less if I actually got up at 9:00am that morning or otherwise had a long day). But it's rare that I'm still awake at 12:30, meaning I almost always get my precious 9-10 hours of sleep per night (I've never been able to make do with much less. I can do 8 for a few days in a row before turning REALLY cranky. And you don't want to be around me with less than 8), and that's the end of an average (week)day in my life.

Weekends we sleep late (usually ~11:30 or so), errands are run on Saturday, if laundry is done either day I usually make bread (the laundry room makes a great place for rising bread), Saturday nights I make pizza around 6pm and then we'll watch SciFi until ~1:00am or so, prepping for another late sleep Sunday mornings, after which Joel will make waffles. Sunday afternoons we try to cook something that will make a lot of leftovers for the coming week. And I usually do more heraldry, unless there's a sporting event or a movie on TV, in which case I'll do C&I.

So what about the rest of you?