Fashion
Purchased a black dress shirt and a pair of black dress shoes to wear at a funeral our three upcoming orchestra concerts. Lost the will to live as I surveyed the racks of ill-cut, over-priced, or badly designed garments (quite often all at once), almost happy to notice that most of them didn't come in my size anyway. Subsequently cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed in said shoes to break them into submission.
Music
Listened to Soulsaver's It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land on repeat, having rediscovered how beautiful the sound is on a stereo system as compared to compressed music played through cheap headphones or portable speakers.
Practiced my viola a couple times on top of the weekly orchestra rehearsal.
Social Life
Went for drinks with a guy on a Wednesday night. It was not a date as I had mentioned several times beforehand that I would bring a friend and invited other people to join. Other people failed to join and according to one of them and to the friend who did come, the guy is hitting on me.
Went to see The Artist on Saturday evening and for drinks afterwards. It was definitely not a date — and I would never have wondered about it if not for the earlier confusion. Loved the movie, which I found cleverly done and very well acted out and was remembered I stopped drinking sex-on-the-beaches because they're too sweet. Ugh.
Failed to attend a Sunday lunch I was looking forward to because of fever and general head-and-throat-soreness.
Miscellaneous
Found out thanks to a bus strike that it takes me fifty minutes to walk to work from home (under moderate rain).
Readings
Some Jeffrey Deaver book I have already forgotten.
A few chapters of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
The first few pages of Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
Quite a few papers on Gaussian processes.
Work
Cleaned up some code. Implemented a bunch of comparison partners. Tried to make sense out of some simulations. Put together a project for students, which took forever because (a) some things just don't work on Macs (b) the simplified version of the algorithm that I thought appropriate for the course just doesn't work on that data. Worked on some grant proposal and resisted pulling out my hair at some people's use of the English language. Made sense out of some stuff "my" MS student has been doing. Silently screamed insanities at how power can be more important than good science — I was not at the receiving end of that particular piece of bullshit, but still, gets my goat. Tried not to cry thinking of my soon-to-be windowless office. ("But it has a window! Sure, half a meter away from the gray wall of another building. Think of all the pictures of palm trees and all you're going to put up on the walls!", says the guy who is never going to have to sit in any of those new basement offices because he's moving to freaking Los Angeles instead. Ass.)
