Update with a rainbow

Life continues to be rich and full in Enoughsville. The weather continues to be mercurial in all senses of that word; we began the week with temperatures almost at 100°, after which the requisite thunderstorms blew through and left a rainbow fantastically filling up the eastern sky. We ended the week with perfect 70° weather and skies as blue as a Crayola crayon.

The men in my life are switching places, in that the ones I'm usually in contact with are disappearing, and the ones that had faded away are resurfacing.   Nelson is going to be out of cellphone contact for about a month, and OfSnough has boarded a plane for Rome/Germany/Arctic Circle.   He'll be gone for a month, doing the kinds of things he does, which will probably include

• touring concentration camps,
• riding a bicycle in a country he'd never visited before, and
• staying in a Vacation Monastery.

In other words, a very "him" trip.  I'm going to miss him, but I'm also making the most of my chance to do math.  It reminds me of a joke I heard in grad school, told to me by my professor's wife, a woman who looked a bit like and old-world, saintly Mrs. Santa Claus.  The joke is fairly tame, but nonetheless my grad school buddies and I did a bit of a jaw drop to hear it coming from her mouth: 

It seems that a lawyer, an economist, and a mathematician were discussing whether it's better to have a spouse or a lover.  The lawyer argued for spouse (for all the reasons you could imagine); the economist argued for lover (for economic reasons, apparently).   The mathematician shocked them by saying a person should have both. 

"Both?!?", they wondered, looking at the very nerdy mathematician.  "Really?  Why?"

"Well . . . your lover will think you're with your spouse; your spouse will think you're with your lover; and you can finally get some math done!"

Even before my spouse left for all things Europe on Friday, I'd started to have a jubilee of mathematical ideas, and this morning I finished the draft of a paper that my students and I had been working on for a couple of years.  I'm just delighted with what I've been doing on this, especially as I have two other students who will be working on two other papers with me in July, so it's very, very nice to have this particular project pretty close to being Done.  

Meanwhile, Jason texted me out of the blue after having ghosted me for a while.  He's considering going back into boxing and wondered what I thought.  (I think, "heck yeah").  He also went for lunch with his former foster mom and foster brother, and she sent me some photos that just warm my heart. 

And Xavier, down in Haiti, has been texting me.   Life is very hard there, and I still haven't found the magic wand that I can wave to make any part of that life magically easier.  I'm trying to figure out a way to help without accidentally making things worse.  Not easy . . . but neither is projective geometry, and if I can put my head to one, I can try to put it to the other. 

Somewhere in this week, I got to have dinner with a good (mathematical) friend, and then I got to go to the theater with Inkling and OfSnough and a bunch of friends, and to take Prewash for an ultrasound, the results of which we are still waiting for.  (But she's acting fine, so that's good).  

So, that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.