can I have these last two days back?
Mar. 2nd, 2010 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aryanhwyI'm not sure I've ever made backwards progress faster than I did yesterday and today.
Yesterday started off difficultly enough by my screwing up my self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm went off an hour early so that I could do my departmental duty and show up to the monthly faculty colloquium at 9:00am. Then my goal was to hammer through the last remaining easy bits on the paper that's due on the 16th and start work on one of the difficult bits. And then everything imploded. It very quickly became clear that not only we were not going to be able to extend what we had for the L-X theory to the L-X-M-Q theory, what we had for the L-X theory wasn't even right. I figured out how to fix that by the middle of Monday afternoon, but the fix resulted in something that was either (a) interesting but trivial or (b) uninteresting. The entire paper could, still, however be resurrected if we could extend the L-X semantics to L-X-M. I worked straight through until 7:30pm when I simply couldn't do any more (yeah, 10.5 straight hours of intense thought is about my limit). At the end of the day when I gave up, this is what I had:
Since it was Monday we had Dutch lessons, this week over at Martijn's, where he made an awesome beef stirfry in black bean garlic sauce. We did irregular verbs this week, and by 11:30pm or so I was nearly falling asleep at the table. I went straight to bed upon getting home.
Alarm went off around 9am this morning, got out of bed and out to the office by 10am, and spent the rest of the day failing to make any progress whatsoever. I finally gave up around 8:15pm, and came home, and now I am absolutely exhausted. I really need to work on the January LoAR proofreading, or finish writing my decisions for February, or at the very least prep for March, but I've got a feeling that as soon as supper is over, it's going to be time for a bath and a book and a strongbow and then to bed with me.
I can't work on this at all tomorrow until I've done at least some prep work for Thursday's class. I'd really love to just not work on it at all tomorrow or Thursday (because I'm fairly certain that our approach is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed, and that staring more at what is currently on the whiteboard what lead me to figure out a new approach), but I don't know if I'll be able to set it aside and not think about it, given that it's due on the 16th. Oh, and have I mentioned I've got two other conference deadlines on the 15th? Yeah. Can I have these last two days back? I'm sure I could put them to better use.
ETA: I forgot to mention that around 8pm when I was getting really despondent, Martijn pointed me towards this. Not only do I think Rube Goldberg machines are awesome (and this is one of the neatest I've seen), the lyrics were pretty apropos. It put a smile on my face and smoothed out the thought furrow in my brow for what felt like the first time in two days.
Yesterday started off difficultly enough by my screwing up my self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm went off an hour early so that I could do my departmental duty and show up to the monthly faculty colloquium at 9:00am. Then my goal was to hammer through the last remaining easy bits on the paper that's due on the 16th and start work on one of the difficult bits. And then everything imploded. It very quickly became clear that not only we were not going to be able to extend what we had for the L-X theory to the L-X-M-Q theory, what we had for the L-X theory wasn't even right. I figured out how to fix that by the middle of Monday afternoon, but the fix resulted in something that was either (a) interesting but trivial or (b) uninteresting. The entire paper could, still, however be resurrected if we could extend the L-X semantics to L-X-M. I worked straight through until 7:30pm when I simply couldn't do any more (yeah, 10.5 straight hours of intense thought is about my limit). At the end of the day when I gave up, this is what I had:
Since it was Monday we had Dutch lessons, this week over at Martijn's, where he made an awesome beef stirfry in black bean garlic sauce. We did irregular verbs this week, and by 11:30pm or so I was nearly falling asleep at the table. I went straight to bed upon getting home.
Alarm went off around 9am this morning, got out of bed and out to the office by 10am, and spent the rest of the day failing to make any progress whatsoever. I finally gave up around 8:15pm, and came home, and now I am absolutely exhausted. I really need to work on the January LoAR proofreading, or finish writing my decisions for February, or at the very least prep for March, but I've got a feeling that as soon as supper is over, it's going to be time for a bath and a book and a strongbow and then to bed with me.
I can't work on this at all tomorrow until I've done at least some prep work for Thursday's class. I'd really love to just not work on it at all tomorrow or Thursday (because I'm fairly certain that our approach is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed, and that staring more at what is currently on the whiteboard what lead me to figure out a new approach), but I don't know if I'll be able to set it aside and not think about it, given that it's due on the 16th. Oh, and have I mentioned I've got two other conference deadlines on the 15th? Yeah. Can I have these last two days back? I'm sure I could put them to better use.
ETA: I forgot to mention that around 8pm when I was getting really despondent, Martijn pointed me towards this. Not only do I think Rube Goldberg machines are awesome (and this is one of the neatest I've seen), the lyrics were pretty apropos. It put a smile on my face and smoothed out the thought furrow in my brow for what felt like the first time in two days.
