Update with enough math

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. This past week, my life has been particularly rich with mathematics. I'm in week 3 of 4 of working on two different projects with a pair of research students, and I've been having lots of fun thinking about how to solve problems. Normally, I sleep like a rock, but this week I have had happy bouts of math insomnia, leading to delightful and useful geometric constructions.

I'm also preparing for MathFest, our annual, gleeful summer math meetings. I'll be leading a mini course there, so I've been working on gathering all sorts of materials, plus setting up lunch dates with friends, colleagues, and editors. I love these meetings!

Last week, I shared that my daughter Inkling had made a hat. This week, I made a hat myself, although with quite a different pattern. Here's the background for why I made it: I'm on a search committee for an editor of one of my favorite math journals. The head of the search committee wrote

I'll be at MathFest. . . . In any case, if you're coming to MathFest, please imagine that you're wearing a sandwich sign that says, "Ask me about editing Mathematics Magazine!" Or, I suppose you could actually wear that sign. I seem to recall that Snough specializes in making costumes out of nothing.

And with that gauntlet thrown down, let me give you my recipe for a hat made out of (nearly) nothing.

Ingredients:

• "pre-cycled" card stock, saved from the covers of manuals whose insides have been recycled.
• A cardboard lid from a printer-paper box whose bottom had gotten smooshed
• Elmer's glue from the gallon jug purchased two decades ago at a yard sale for $2.
• 

Directions:

1. Photocopy some of your favorite journal covers onto the card stock. Glue these together into a cylinder that wraps nicely around your head, saving one page for the top of the hat.
2. Cut a large oval from the cardboard lid, and from inside that, cut a smaller oval the size of your head.
3. Glue the page for the top of the hat to the small oval, and then cut tabs on the outside of the oval that you can glue to the inside of the cylinder, to attach it.
4. Cut tabs on the bottom of the cylinder, and use these tabs to glue it to the large oval.

Voila! If you are jealous, I too (like my daughter) can make you one for only $60.

It's reversible! 
(Not inside out, but front-to-back)

Meanwhile, the home next to mine (the bald-faced hornet nest) that was built just last year continues to slowly deteriorate this summer. We had some rather severe rains, and they make this structure really look like something out of a horror movie. It is fascinating to watch.

And . . . that's kind of it.  Unless you want me to tell you more about Steiner conics and force/funicular correlations.  Which, I'm guessing, you don't . . . so that's enough of my adventures, in which I am contentedly wealthy.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

My head is deep in Math Land

My summer experiment to pause and reflect each day at 3:14 has been a delight in many, many ways. It has, indeed, helped me to pause and be thankful for the regular, everyday joys I would have bustled right past – not only at 3:14, but also at other times. My attempt to share these moments has meant that I've also often looked for special experiences to undertake at that particular moment of the day (hitting "send" on my resignation letter is by far the most extreme example of this).  It's been a good way to add appreciation to my summer, for sure.  Highly recommend.

Right now, I'm in the midst of a four-week session of doing research with two different students, and the timing of these projects is just playing all the heck with my 3:14 pause, however. Our daily meeting ends shortly before 3:14, so I'm usually doing something completely forgettable, like opening a door, catching up on email, looking over my to-do list – I'm not even really sure what I'm doing, which is I guess what I mean by "forgettable".

The math itself makes up for the missed moments of reflection.  I am delighted, absorbed, surprised, consumed.  

A figure from a paper I've recently submitted. 
Constructing this image took me about two hours,
I'll guess, and they were hours well-spent.

 

I don't remember a time in which I've had so many different projects going at once, and that's a treat, too.  I'm at a mathematical smorgasbord, and I'm getting pleasantly stuffed with yummy treats.  

I normally fall asleep about 7 minutes after my head hits the pillow at 9 p.m.,
but this elegant little construction was the result of some
happy math insomnia, banged out at close to midnight.
It's the answer to two week's worth of casting about.

One of the things that makes this math so joyous for me is that I have people to share it with.  I have students I meet with daily, and also faculty collaborators I email and zoom with.  So when I come up with an elegant proof, there's someone who has the same aesthetic sensibilities, who can see the same structure arising in surprising ways, who can appreciate the noise that is stripped away and the underlying simplicity. 

Here's one of my students, reacting to the construction above:

I just read it and it is really brilliant! After reading it, I tried to check our textbook first because I thought such a clear and important construction should have existed there, though I didn't find it there. I understand that this is important because it gives a very elegant method to construct the conic through five points. Current methods are either analytical or too complicated. I do not feel surprised by the fact that point D is on the conic, but how you made C and E on the conic are really amazing - simple, but I have never imagined. Congratulations! I really feel this is something worth to be written in the textbook.

How gratifying is that, to make another person so math-happy?!?  And my students are returning the favor, delighting me with their own insights.

This was a figure that my student developed,
something about the pseudo-axis of a funicular diagram
in the non-concurrent forces case.  
It makes me proud to see my students becoming masters of this material.

At any rate, this is why I've fallen off the 3:14 wagon for a little while: I'm too happy to pause and take note, at least for a little while longer.

Bed painting

Putting paint on stuff is one of those things I find calming and therapeutic, so after stress-painting my couch frame blue, I decided to haul off and paint this particular bed frame as well.  I ended up painting it a boring white (reasons below).  If you don't get too close, it looks pretty nice!  

(Actually, it doesn't look too bad even if you do get close,
but I'm not a perfectionist painter, by any means).

 

Why paint this particular bed frame?  There's the typical answer: we've had it for 30-ish years; it's survived multiple children, and while it's a sturdy piece of furniture, it has emerged from the child-rearing years slightly the worse for wear.  

There's also a ickier psychological-bug related reason.  [Gross bug stuff is coming in this paragraph: feel free to skip it if you're squeamish].  The bedbug saga we lived through in recent times continues to wig me out, and this particular bed was not well-suited for post-bedbug serenity.  Bedbugs leave tiny black dots of poop, which blend in well with the markings of unpainted wood.  This means I've been more apt both to miss new infestations of bed bugs, but also to think I'm seeing new infestations when they're not there.  Not a calming situation.  Moreover, the design of this particular bed deliberately had lots of opening between slats, and extra screw/bolt holes to allow different configurations of heights, and that led to lots and lots of hiding places for the buggers and their nasty little egg sacs.  So, even before painting I did a bunch of carpentry stuff:  using wood putty to fill holes, sanding, and adding an extra set of headboard/footboard slats.  I was fortunate (?) that Nelson destroyed another bed just like this one, so I had slats of just the right size at the ready.  I haven't eliminated all the hiding holes, because bedbugs are the undisputed world champions at hide-and-seek, but I've reduced the number of places I feel compelled to shine lights into, so this is good for my head.  Also, adding a new slat into a space where there used to just be a space means that pillows and such are less likely to fall off the bed. 

The second slat down in this footboard is new;
I added it to reduce the amount of hiding space for unwanted buggy guests.  

[Icky stuff is done].

The next step, after puttying, sanding, and adding a new board, was to find paint.  I guess a purist would use glossy furniture paint, but the only such paints I had in the house were dark colored, which was not what I wanted in this situation at all.   Instead, I decided to take a chance with some paint the previous owners had left behind -- a mostly empty can of white primer+paint intended for interior walls.  There was only an inch or two of this left in the can, and when I first opened it up, I was worried it had already solidified.  But it was still usable.  In fact, my initial worry that the paint had outlived its usefulness convinced me that I ought to use it up now, before it did solidify into worthlessness.   

I lucked out and had almost exactly the right amount for the job.  When I was all done,  I used a spatula* to scrape the remaining paint out of the can into a jelly jar, and I figure I have about 1/3 of a cup left for touch-ups.  Is that perfect or what?

[* A year or so ago, I found a really lovely spatula in a "FREE" pile and brought it home, 

only to decide that I had two perfectly good kitchen spatulas already.  But then I realized 

that having a dedicated paint spatula is a wonderful way to conserve paint, and so that spatula 

now lives in the basement with the paint brushes and such.  Highly recommend]

So, now I have a bed that feels "new" to us, which is pleasant.  And also, I want to go crack open all those other cans of paint and pour them into glass jars, so that I know what I might turn to next when I need paint for a random project.  (I'm guessing the next project will be building a curio shelf for cows, but who knows?)

Update: packing it up, packing it in

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  Corn season is upon us, which is a great reason for rejoicing. 

(And also, for flossing!).  

OfSnough has been throwing himself into his volunteer work, a source of joy for him and those around him, as you can see from these photos.  

I wrote in a previous family update that I'd resigned my Associate Dean job; I'm one of four people in my eight-person office who has left this year.  Well, Monday of this week, the president of our college wrote to say there's a fifth "resignation":  my (former) boss.  The pres's letter notes that this former-boss feels the need to spend more time with his family.  I have to say, I'm relieved for the sake of my college that Former-Boss is being resigned, and hope that a much-needed process of reorganization and healing can begin. 

I've been throwing myself into mathematics.  I have two summer research students; we're spending afternoons together getting stuck, and unstuck, and stuck again.  It is delightful.  I very much like these two students, who are incredibly bright and who are not used to having so much difficulty figuring out answers to math problems, so I get to gleefully share that we're doing real math now, and they're seeing what true research is like.  It's like this: not knowing the answers or how to get the answers and sometimes not even what the questions are, but trying to figure something out anyway.  

Inkling has just passed the one-year mark at her job (her boss called it her "yarniversary"), and there is much happiness about how that particular position has worked out for all involved.  

So it looks like that makes three of us doing things we love.  (Four, if you count Prewash, who still loves her volunteer work overseeing food-removal from plates and serving bowls before they head into the dishwasher). 

And that's several ways in which our family continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

An organizing rant

Wednesday, July 13, I was getting close to the end of cleaning out this store room. I love this organizing project so much! I think part of the reason that I love it is that I get to feel so superior (which I know is not particularly good for my soul, so this is a confession of sorts).

This bin pictured below was the particular task that I was tackling last Wednesday. What was wrong with this bin? So much, so much. Number one is the massive use of excessive plastic. The bin itself is plastic -- although reusable for this project and others -- so semi-understandable. Worse, though, is that the contents were packaged in individual giant Ziploc bags, which is just really a crime against mother Earth from a purely resource perspective.

A bin full of paper decorations

The plastic bags and plastic tub might have been semi-reasonable from an organizing perspective, given the right contents,  except the contents didn't match the storage containers:  what this bin actually contained was a bunch of paper products: borders that go around displays on a bulletin board. I have no idea why we have so many of these types of borders, but the plastic bags are really not a great way to store them. For one thing, it's almost impossible to tell what is in this bin just by looking at it. That makes it really hard for a person new to this space (which is most of the people who use this space) to come in and grab something useful. The bags make it hard to put things away in the right place -- indeed, several of the bags were jumbled. The bags aren't the same shape or size as the borders, so the pieces of paper don't lie flat, so they get warped, and they also take up more space.  And again, who wants to dig through a bin to find pieces of decoration that match?  Lining things up on a shelf would make so much more sense.

See what a rant goes through my head when I sort through a box of stuff?

At any rate, it probably took me a half-hour to sort through this bin.  I sorted the contents by like-with-like, folded (rather than rolled) the borders so they were all the same size and could lie flat, and rubber-banded each set together.  All told, they now take up about 1/6 of that space, and are easy to see/sort through, sitting on a shelf in the store room.  The plastic bags are bundled, waiting some new nefarious purpose, and the giant plastic tub has found new life holding Lunar New Year party paraphernalia  that had been scattered throughout my office. 

Math and my don key

On Tuesday, July 12, at 3:14, I was engrossed in my third math project of the day. Just before, I had been working on projects number one and two with my two summer students, each of whom is engaged in a four-week project with me. When my 90 minutes with the two of them wrapped up, I turned to this third project, polishing up a paper that I've been working on for a couple of years. In this case, "polishing" means doing the final touches that the journal requires: listing author affiliations, getting the figures in the format that the journal requires, and so on. This is super absorbing for me, but maybe not so much fun for other people to read about.


So I'll just show you a cute thing that I was doing at a time that was not 314: a little sewing project. This requires a bit of backstory. On our campus, the doors to the main buildings all have electronic card readers, but our interior office doors have locks that use standard keys. That means that to get into any of our buildings and offices, we have to carry both our identification card and also our keys. We're not allowed to punch a hole in the card, as that would deactivate the electronics somehow, so we can't attach the card directly to a key ring.  So I sewed myself a little pouch for my card, with a loop on the pouch to attach the pouch to the key ring, rather than wear a lanyard in addition to carrying my keys. This keeps everything in one place, so I have fewer things to remember.

But also, in my new role I'm going to be what we call the "Don" of a college house. (Think Oxford/Cambridge dons, not mafia dons). And so I decorated my pouch with an image of Eeyore, which I made by 

• printing out a cartoon picture of him, 
• using that cartoon as a pattern, 
• repurposing some rags I'd made (by cutting up old grey, pink, and red t-shirts) as Eeyore fabric pieces, 
• and attaching the pieces with a zigzag stitches on my sewing machine. 

Total cost, $0, but of course. 

Notice that this means that this pouch holds my don key. (Get it?)

Eeyore has my I.D. Card inside.

This makes me very, very (very) happy. I explain this to anyone who will listen, and even some people who won't.

A closer look at my don key.  I love it so very much.

A peek at my office these days

Monday, July 11 at 3:14, I was hanging around in my new office. It still has a lot of cardboard boxes and memorabilia from past occupants, so I still have a bit of work to do cleaning it up and sorting things, but I do think it's coming together nicely.

From the doorway, looking in.

From where I sit, I can see a little bit out into the hallway, but not so much that I'm constantly interrupted. Here's a view of some summer students checking out the maps that hang in the hallway outside my office.

Looking the other way.
Still a few boxes of random stuff lying around.

It's incredibly satisfying to create order out of disorder. It must have been a quarter of a century ago that I impulse-bought a book in an airport called Organizing from the Inside Out, by Julie Morgenstern. I feel like I'm such an organized person that it's hard for me to read a book that teaches me something new, but this particular book has really shaped the way that I think about organizing space. I have since bought multiple copies and happily loan them to friends, often not getting them back again, which is why I go out and buy more copies.

One of the main takeaways I got from the book is to organize something by how I will use it, not by what it is. A second big takeaway is to organize things by zones of activity, and a third is to label the heck out of everything. Since I've moved offices two times in the last two years, I'm getting to put all of my practice at organizing things to incredibly good use.

I very much love the natural light that I get in this office, and also the light colored, warm colored furniture. I was in the same building 17 years ago, and I helped to pick the colors that we would use to decorate the space, so it's not a coincidence that the furniture suits me well. Still, it's nice to be back in a place that feels so pleasant.

Update with hats, drums, balls, brooms, and math

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  The latest news is that my husband has a new hat.  Mostly, a person would not want a new knit hat in July, but OfSnough is over the moon about this particular one.  Behold!

As the photo shows, it is a lovely hat to complement his volunteer work assembling medical supply kits for Ukraine, but there's even more good stuff: it has two additional lovely features that the photo above doesn't show.  The first feature is that this is a design created by, and knitted by, our very own Inkling -- in fact, it's the first article of clothing she's ever knit for OfSnough.   The second feature is that if you fold down the brim, the hat contains a dirty word with a pointed message.

He has posted this on Facebook and already had multiple people asking "how much to get one for myself?"  My adept daughter, who prefers to knit for pleasure, set the bar at $60.    Good for her.

Nelson doesn't have a new hat, nor is he knitting them as far as I know, but he is thriving where he's at; here's a lovely still of him drumming at church.

As for me, I bought a motorcycle.  Or rather, I've sent along some money to Haiti, where X-son will get to buy a motorcycle that he might -- cross-fingers -- be able to use to give other people rides, and thereby earn some money.  (For those who don't remember, X-son is a young man we attempted to adopt from Haiti until bureaucracy and corruption forced us to abandon that route, and instead just focus on supporting him where he was.)  He and I have been chatting by WhatsApp often, which is quite a stretch of technology for me. He was surprised that my own children don't talk to me anywhere nearly as often as he does (but kids-o'-mine, I think but generally I'm pretty satisfied with hearing from you when there's news or cute photos; I don't need to text every day!).  

When I'm not buying motorcycles in foreign countries, I'm gearing up for the new academic year, but doing so at a leisurely pace.  Last Saturday, for example, this is what I was doing at 3:14:  making photocopies of stuff in our very, very empty mathematics building.  Prewash loves trips to this building.  She tears back and forth along the long hallway with her deflated volleyball.   Pure joy!

And Sunday last, at the same time, Prewash and I were with our young friend G., "cleaning" the special space we'd "discovered" the week before.  Our mathematics building used to have its main entrance facing the street.  Now, that former entrance has been turned into a giant window, with a new main entrance on the opposite side of the building.

Some metaphor about closing a door and turning into a window.

The spot where the entrance used to be is now a shady, pleasant spot, although a bit covered in leaves and moss, and G wanted to clean it up so we could have a party there.  The cleaning was not exceedingly effective at actual cleaning, but it was great at occupying us both enough to give his mom some alone time.  

I've been doing some much more effective cleaning, sorting, and labeling of our college house store room, spending a few hours each day, and I think the culmination of these efforts are in sight.  I'm looking forward to showing off for my co-worker B when she returns. 

I've also been cranking out the mathematics. I'm working on three different math projects at once (!). I am a very happy person.

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

Surreptitious quilt puzzles

Friday the 8th at 3:14, I was nabbing a poster from my former office.  I'm mentioned before, I think, that this summer my college is giving employees "off" on Friday afternoons.  This normally doesn't affect me (I do math and such whenever and wherever), but last week I took advantage of the fact that no one would be around to swap some framed art that I do not like from my new office with some posters I'd framed and hung in my administrative office.  

So now the very nice (but not my style) art is in the dean office, and the cheap (but very me) framed poster is in my new office.

I love this poster not just because it has happy colors and is of a quilt, but because it's secretly a math lesson/math puzzle.  Here's the back story.

A quarter of a century ago, I went to a cool and very inspiring math/art talk by a quilter named Margit Echols. Her talk at that conference was about how she'd figured out how to make interlaced, hexagonal weaving patterns in a quilt: the revelation she had was to make a gazillion triangle "blocks" and then sew those together appropriately to make something that looked like an Islamic tiling; just gorgeous.

She also mentioned, as an aside, a "puzzle quilt" she'd designed. Here's how Echols described the math puzzle:

The quilt contains 30 squares that can be matched to make 15 pairs. Each pair is made from a well-known traditional pattern such as Log Cabin, Tumbling Blocks, Snail's Trail, and Monkey Wrench.

Although both squares in a pair are based on the same pattern (that is, the same arrangement of pieces of the same size and shape), the choice of colors and the placement of lights and darks change their appearance so much that they are almost unrecognizable as the same pattern. This is why identical squares often have different names.

Can you match the squares? Example: the squares in the upper left and lower right corners are of identical construction.

I loved this quilt very, very much: I used her idea in my abstract algebra class and in several of my early math/art classes to teach the idea of subgroups within symmetry groups, and students had a lot of fun. I bought a copy of the poster, which I subsequently lost on an airplane (or thought I did; it turns out I'd left it at my sister's house, and two decades later she returned it.)

Echols died not too long after I saw her talk, alas. If you do a web search for her, though, you can still see references to these cool things she's done.

editorializing

Thursday, July 7 at 3:14, I was learning the ins and outs of an editorial manager system. I've been appointed to the editorial board of a kick-butt journal, which I'm both very excited and very nervous about. I'm excited because I get to hang out with a bunch of amazingly cool people – the other editors – and also because, as I said, this is a kick-butt journal, and it's incredibly gratifying to be part of it.

I'm nervous because all-of-a-sudden I get to be one of the people making decisions about other people's papers, which indirectly, means making decisions that affect other people's lives. Somebody has to, and now those authors and those readers out there have me. I hope I do a good job.

Walking (etc) with a friend

Wednesday, July 6 at 3:14, I was walking with a friend. The weather was hot enough that she asked if we could walk indoors, so we did many laps around the track. She is a colleague as well as a friend, so of course we were spending much time deconstructing my recent time in the administration and the circumstances of my leaving, and also the general mood among the faculty.

As is often the case when we're passing through hard times, there come a silver lining, – or in my case, even perhaps a shiny golden rainbow-glitter-sparkly lining – which is having friends come out of of the margins of my life back into the center of it. I have lunches, brunches, and coffee meetings decorating my schedule, like ornaments hanging off a Christmas tree. Each one of those makes me very happy. It was good to be walking with my friend.

Tuesday July 5 at 3:14: I was lost in a storeroom

I'm not exactly sure what I was doing Tuesday July 5 at 3:14, because I was having so much fun cleaning up a storage room. This is a space in our college house that's used for storing art supplies, games, house clothing, forks knives, cops, decorations … the list goes on and on. 

As often happens when you have a space that's used as storage space by many people, it gets really cluttered and really disorganized. The clutter is compounded by the fact that there are things one person puts in there that nobody else feels like they have the power to get rid of.  And the disorganization comes from people putting things in hastily, followed by boxes blocking other boxes, followed by it being so hard to get to the space where you're supposed to put things, or even identify the space where you're supposed to put things, that things just get piled on top of, or inside of, or on the opposite side of the room from, other things.

The administrator I'm working with is out taking care of an ill family member, but told me that she really wanted to get this space organized and cleaned up.  I assured her with utterly honest delight, that I was On The Job. I have been having so much fun putting like things together, organizing the heck out of stuff, labeling boxes clearly, and getting rid of random things we no longer need. I am totally in my element doing this, which is why I don't know exactly what I was doing at 3:14, but I'm sure but I'm sure it was a lot of fun.

3:14 in a stairwell

Monday, July 4 at 3:14, I was in a stairwell. It's a transitional space in a lot of different ways.

Of course, a stairwell is not the kind of place somebody just hangs around for the sake of being in a stairwell, so in one sense what it meant was that I was in-between walking from my home and heading into the math office.

And the math office itself was a transition spot; it's where I'd stored some boxes between moving out of the administration building into my new office in the College Houses.

And time-wise, the reason I was heading into the math office was also a transition: to finish up one project (chair invitations!) and start a new one (fixing a rolling cart).

The chair invitation is for a party that a math friend and I are throwing for myself because I'm now an endowed chair. My friend who's planning with this with me strongly encouraged me to read The Art of Gathering, and this book really made us both think hard about ways to make this party a lot of fun. We're going to have rules for the guests, including but they have to sing the "chair song" before we cut the cake – and of course I have now written a chair song for us all to sing.

Repairing this cart was another whole fun activity in itself. A few years ago, while my husband and I were on our evening usual evening post-dinner stroll, we passed by two rolling market carts. The red one had a really warped wheel and looked like it was on its last legs (or last wheel, so to speak), but the black one looked like it was in great shape. We took them both home. 

paper-clip cotter pin: works for me!

Looks are deceiving: the red one with the wobbly wheel has worked just great, whereas the black one keeps having Issues. One of those issues was relatively easy to fix: the wheel fell off because of a missing cotter pin. So Fix Number One was to grab a paper clip--a sturdy one that I think of as too ugly to actually use on papers I care about – and use that and a pair of pliers to make a new cotter pin. 

The other fix was a weirder one to try to figure out. When we open the cart, it didn't want to stay in one position, but the basket kept sliding back-and-forth along the wheels. I finally looked at the red basket to see how that one managed to stay so rigid, and it turns out that there are two metal swing arms that the red one has that the black one didn't. 

Hanger-becomes-swing-arm

So I went and rescued a hanger out of my scrap metal bucket. It's the kind that you get from the dry cleaners for pants, where the metal that doesn't make a whole triangle, but rather the base is a round cardboard tube, and the metal part just grips those two ends of the tube. Once the cardboard tube folds, the hanger is worthless. That's what happened to this one. Well, it was worthless as a hanger, but it was just about perfect for becoming two little metal arms market basket! A bolt cutter, two pairs of pliers, and a little bit of squinting and grunting, and I had a working market basket for hauling things back-and-forth, all for free.

Prewash the Dog approves.

Coming back from the (non) dog park

Sundays, I often take G, the son of my friend who had passed away, to the dog park. G is full of energy, and often seeking multiple new adventures. This week, he decided that he was done with the dog park. It's too hot out, or he was bored, or some other motivation that made sense in his six-year-old brain.

So I took him to a "secret place". It's actually a place that is very much out in the open and visible to people, and yet it's a place that nobody goes. The math building on our campus used to have a grand doorway facing the street; that doorway has now been converted into a giant window, and the entrance has been moved to the opposite side of the building, facing the rest of the campus. The old entrance still has its paved patio, with beautiful steps leading up to it. Our campus landscapers have planted trees and bushes around it, so the spot is now a beautiful, shady glen. It's perfectly visible to the road and people walking by, but as I said nobody ever bothers to go there. It reminded me a bit of descriptions of Terabithia.

G was delighted with this wonderful, special place. He has the intense curiosity of many six-year olds, fascinated by the moss growing in blotches on the paved patio, by the different colors of the leaves on the ground, by the peeling paint on the banisters. He confidently declared that we need to have a party there, but first we will need to clean the moss off the porch, and also the leaves. We will need to paint the railings (what colors, I asked? He eventually decided blue on one side, and yellow on the other), and lay down stones for a walkway. I asked what kinds of stones: round? Flat? He decided bricks. I read him two books – the adventures of Isabel, and Possum come-a-knocking at the door, and we tickled the dog a bit, and we explored the space some more until the gnats finally drove us away. We agreed that next week we will bring a broom, bug spray, and more books to enjoy the space.

As I was dropping G off at home he told me he'd painted me a picture. It's an island, with a tree on it. There is a fox with several baby foxes. This is the picture he handed me at 3:14 last Sunday.

3:14, huzzah for summer reading.

Last Saturday (July 2) at 3:14, I was reading a book:  Ageless.  This is a book about how "getting older" (that is, living longer) and "aging" (that is, degenerating in overall healthiness and vigor) are two different things, and about how scientific/medical researchers are starting to figure out ways to combat the latter.  It's  a dense book, but I'm finding it fun to slog through.  

Example of a sloggy sentence from page 228, which is what I'm currently reading: 

Exactly how we'll disentangle the different kinds of epigenetic and other changes which occur during the wide-ranging process of induced pluripotency and transdifferentiation is yet to be seen.

Example of the peppy parts which make the sloggy parts worth slogging through:

Aging is a phenomenally complex process. Nonetheless, as we've seen in the last few chapters, we have good ideas as to how we might treat it. All these ideas have, at a minimum, precedent in the lab, and most of them aren't just speculative treatments based on theory or experiments on cells in a dish. 

Before this book, I read a much less rigorous, but much more peppy book:  Daniel Pink's When.  (The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing).   Of course, here "secrets" aren't at all "secrets"; they're discoveries and/or knowledge.  My favorite takeaway from that book is the "nappucino":  a mid-day cup of coffee, setting a timer for 25 minutes, and then a brief nap.  

While reading Ageless, I also read The Art of Gathering, at the urging of a friend who is helping me plan a party.  That was a truly fun read, especially because my friend had read it so we could compare takeaways, and doubly especially because it gave us lots of good motivation to think about planning this party in strategic [ = fun!! ] ways.   Highly recommend.

Walking home after a rain storm

 Friday, July 1, I was walking home after a rain storm.

I'd originally intended to head home a little earlier, but I didn't have an umbrella in my new office, so I waited out the storm and then left. 

Did I say "new office"? Yes, I did! Friday was the first day of our new academic year, and I had moved into my office in one of the college houses. After resigning my Associate Dean role on Wednesday, I had already had so much boxed up and ready to go that it was relatively easy to clean out the rest of my office in the administration building and move things over into the new place. So, in several ways this rain storm -- washing everything clean, with the sunshine coming out afterwards -- felt quite metaphorical.

In the 10 days since I resigned, I haven't had many reasons to regret this decision. For one thing, although my boss clearly got my resignation letter, and in fact told the president that I had stepped down, he hasn't sent an email or tried to talk to me once, and he hasn't told any of the faculty, who keep writing to me for dean-ly concerns.  What's up with that? Aside from confirming that being further away from him is the right place for me.  

The rain was so hard that it knocked branches
off of trees onto the ground.

One of my happy delights in this new space is it there are things that are just a real mess. The store room that multiple people have been using is just so disorganized that it's hard to walk around in.  B, my coworker in this building, had said they were planning to organize this as a summer project, but they're out with an ill family member, and I could tell from the way they said it but it was not one of their happy projects, so I have been plunging in to organizing All The Stuff myself. It's highly therapeutic.

There are puddles after such a hard rain, but they reflect light,
and they'll dry up and go away.

Outdoors zooming

Thursday, June 30 at 3:14, I was meeting outdoors.

Another zoom meeting. The weather was gorgeous enough, and I was feeling disconnected enough from my soon-to-end job, that I thought it would be nice to go sit in the Adirondack chairs outdoors and do my meeting there. I was right. It was lovely.

Resignation.

Wednesday, June 29 at 3:14, I hit "send" on a resignation letter.

So, every once in a while I have hinted at things with my job as an associate dean have been a little bit turbulent. They have.  I'm going back into the faculty, leaving my administrative job behind.

After hitting "send" at 3:14, I walked around outside, because outside is a beautiful place, and decided to take a picture of my office – soon-to-be former office – from the outside. It's the end of a really interesting year.

More people in boxes

Tuesday, June 28, 3:14: In a zoom meeting about sustainability. People in boxes. That kind of meeting.

The day before, I was on my computer at 3:14; this Tuesday, I was on my computer . . . that's what I do, peeps.

Talking about sustainability is one of those hope/frustration kinds of things. Most of those people in the boxes on Tuesday really want to do the right thing, both for now and in the future. But of course, constraints and politics and finances complicate the picture. By the time I'm writing this now, we've entered Plastic-Free July, a global movement to try to reduce our use of plastic, especially single-use plastic. Almost every piece of advice on that website and in their cheery emails is old bread for me. My life is definitely not plastic free, but compared to almost everybody I know in real life – and maybe even actually compared to EVERYBODY I know in real life – I have much less plastic surrounding me than they do. I'd love to reduce even further, but I know at this point my own personal reductions won't make as much a difference as creating structures that allow for other people to reduce their use without feeling deprived.

The same goes for energy use. Rising gasoline prices definitely make for great headlines, but since I use my car only a handful of times each month, and since my food largely comes from local sources, so far I have not been personally touched by this.

Maybe I'm actually Amish? But no; if that were the case I would not have been on a zoom call at 3:14 on Tuesday, which I was. Back to work.

3:14, learning about a file upload/shared drive glitch

Last Monday, June 27, at 3:14, I was at my computer, a place I am at a heck of a lot (although it doesn't make for good picture-taking, really). At this particular moment, I was learning about a weird glitch.

I've mentioned before that my college is going to be redoing our webpages. Part of this is that we're going to have essentially two sets of webpages: one set will be for external audiences, and the professionals will actually be managing those. Another set, accessible only with our college username and password, will be an internal set that helps us to navigate things that matter once you're only actually on campus.  

Obviously, the external webpages are more important, so as a temporary hack, I'm trying to move stuff about a committee that I oversee into a shared drive system where I can create temporary webpages for just us that will eventually join the suite of the new internal pages. [Technical geeky side note: my College is going to a "Shared Drive" system (as opposed to "Google Drive with shared folders" -- what a bad naming system!).]

I was most of the way through setting up the Shared Drive, when I ran into a problem. Our committee uses a lot of forms, and when I tried to create a form in the new space, I got this error message:

Forms containing File Upload questions are not currently supported in shared drives. Please remove this form from the shared drive.

Yeesh. So, for now, we're forced to leave the application forms back in the old shared (not shared drive) folder. Until Google can fix this glitch, we'll have some things in the shared drive and other things in the shared folder, which is quite annoying (and confusing).

Changing a shower head

How many mathematicians does it take to change a shower head?

Just one.  That's what I was doing last Sunday at 3:14.

I've been wanting to do this for a while (like, two years, maybe?), and of course for me the difficult part was *STORES* and *buying things*.  For some reason, maybe because my husband is away for a month and I have summer-related freedom in my schedule, I finally broke down and got this baby over here ---> .

What I wanted: (a) something relatively low-flow, to conserve both water and energy, of course; (b) a "pause" button so I could easily stop the flow if I'm doing something like shaving and don't want the distraction of getting pelted with water while I'm doing so, and (c) a hose, so I can use this to help with things like rinsing the shower tub after I clean it.  (When I was a kid, I used to be in charge of bathing our Irish Wolfhounds, who Did Not Want To Be Bathed.  A hose was super helpful for that project, too, but I'm all out of Irish Wolfhounds, dirty or bathed, these days).  

Here's the old shower head:  perfectly functional, but without (b) a pause button or (c) a hose.

Changing a shower head is just as easy as changing a lightbulb -- or, in this case, as easy as changing three lightbulbs.  I took the supplies hanger off of the pipe, unscrewed the old head, and then screwed on three new things:  the holder onto the pipe, the hose onto the holder, and the head onto the hose.

No special tools needed; in fact, the directions specifically caution to not use a wrench.  The first time I screwed the head on it leaked like crazy, but then I unscrewed it and tried again, and it worked like a charm.  

All told, this project took me 20 minutes -- and that includes opening the package, bringing the wrench up from the basement, reading the directions, taking the wrench back to the basement, doing the actual change-over, photographing things, and cleaning up the box and such (the old shower head will go to Habitat Restore. )

A lovely Sunday project.

Enoughing it with travel, plus stress painting

Life continues to be rich and full in Enoughsville. Much of my family has been rich and full with going places (not me, so much, but I'm getting vicarious travel experiences, which is fine for me).  

The farthest flung is OfSnough, of course.  My guy called me from a train heading from Germany to Lyons this morning (his evening). Flights within Europe keep getting canceled, so he's having a hard time getting back to Rome, where he's supposed to eventually hop on a plane to come back stateside early next week. He loves trains, and he loves adventure, so having both as he is racing to catch an airplane is almost certainly making him very happy.

Also far away, but not quite so far, Nelson called me, and he's doing well.  He is living my dream life right now, working in a Salvation Army – but not just any Salvation Army: a Salvation Army "by the Pound" store, which of all the kinds of thrift shops so-called thrift shops that I will visit, is by far my favorite kind. And Sizzling corroborated his report of general happiness by taking a photo, while they were traveling out and about with him.

Badly's BBQ and the Elko car races!

Inkling, too, has been moving about, and sent a long, lovely update (although item "C" comes with a frownie face).

Hey Mama! 

I wanted to give you an email update on my recent adventures. You're welcome to pick and choose from it for  the family update.

A. I went square dancing for the first time in 3 years! The Square Dance National Convention was in Evansville, Indiana and I had a great time. It was wonderful to see my friends again and be dancing again . I didn't take enough pictures, but I never do. 

Pictures I do have: 

1.arriving in Evansville 

2. Evansville needs more trees

3. Dance buddy (Ray)

4. More dance friends (the Zev family)

5. Good at following instructions

Note: instructions say, "Hug Here -->"

B. After I got home from Nationals, I had a bit less fun and did test positive for Covid. (This was not a surprise to me and makes me feel good about my decision to not go dancing before now.) I had an uncomfortable week, but I believe I'm well on my way to recovery. (No more fever, stuffy head, body aches, or general blah feeling )

C. While I was home with Covid, the chorus had its end-of-season/Goodbye Jonathan party, which I did not attend. But Mary was kind enough to pick up my farewell/thank you gift and deliver it to our beloved Director, and take pics for me. (Img 6+7)

Inkling knitted this blanket herself, naturally. 

D. Yesterday was kickoff day for the Tour De Fleece, so I'm hoping to do a bunch of spinning this month (no pics yet.)

And that's the adventures from this daughter. I love you bunches and hope you've been having almost as much fun (and less illness)

Ink

I have had rather different kinds of adventures, some of which I can't go into here.  One amusing piece of mail I got was from the American Mathematical Society, telling me about royalties from a book I published decades ago:

Attached, please find your 2021 royalty statement(s). We apologize for the delay in processing royalties this year. The AMS has experienced unprecedented staff shortages related to the ongoing pandemic. If any payment is due, and we have your bank information on file, you may expect a bank transfer into your account shortly. Paper checks will be mailed out shortly.

And here is a snapshot of the royalty statement that apparently I've been biting my nails to get my hands on: 

Just think how much I could buy at the "by the pound" store with $12.13!

What else?   I found a couch out at the curb the other day.  The frame (etc) wasn't at all of interest to me, but the cushions looked nice and they were much firmer than the cushions we have on our 30-year-old couch from, I think, the "This End Up" store. 

One problem with getting nicer looking cushions than we've had for a while is that they make the wooden frame look old and beat up, although that might possibly be because the wooden frame is old and beat up. So, a week ago, I sanded it down, and then, at 3:14 on Saturday I was painting the couch (frame only, not the cushions).

I actually in my head called it "stress painting",  and if I do say so myself, painting a couch blue is a very enjoyable way of dealing with stress. 

I think it came out nicely! Huzzah for neighbors willing to share their couch cushions, for belt sanders, and for cans of blue furniture paint!

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