Last week at 3:14: porch sitting

My college has declared that Fridays are half-days, at least for people who work based on the clock and who can go home Friday afternoon without leaving important aspects in the lurch.   So this policy doesn't have much effect on, say, our public safety officers.   Also it has nearly zero effect on professors.  

For me, as an administrator, it means the office clears out and is even quieter than usual.   There's part of me that enjoys banging out work in that particular peace-and-quiet setting.  But last Friday, I decided I could come home and spend time banging out work on my front porch with my faithful companion acting as neighborhood greeter.

So, still "at work" in the sense of activity, but not "at work" in the sense of location or atmosphere.   It's really nice to have a happy place to sit, and lovely weather to enjoy, and random neighbor encounters.  

3:14 Thursday last: At my desk

 Last week at 3:14, at my office desk.

I thought a lot more of my pictures would be right here, actually.  I feel like this desk is where I spend a lot of my late afternoons.

When I was a graduate student, I had a meeting one day with a Dean of Something (dean of students?  Dean of the Sciences?  not sure).  That person had a huge and beautiful desk, almost completely empty.   I remember  being amazed: you could sleep on that desk, it was so large.   I thought right then and there, "I want to be a dean someday and have a desk that big."  

Well, now I am/do.  My desk isn't as clean as hers was (but it's not usually quite as full as this particular photo, either).  

Later in the day, there was a huge rainstorm and then a rainbow.   This isn't a 3:14 photo, but I like it so I'm sticking it back in here again. 

Taking time (3:14 time, to be precise) for myself

I love summer so much -- so, so much.  Even if I love walking through snow or running with my friends in the fall, I feel like I always orient myself towards these days that are just so full of sun and simultaneously so empty of regular classes and grading. Now that I'm here in the midst of summer, I want to really appreciate it and not to let it just fly by me before the next round of fall/winter/spring comes and takes away my daylight runs or sunny porch sittings.

I've decided to try to take a moment out of every single day to just stop and think about what I'm doing. In particular, I want to think about what I'm doing at that moment, not about the main task on my to-do-list or about my background worries. I've noticed in the past that 3:14 seems to be a time of transition for me, although perhaps I noticed that time more often because it looks like the number pi. At any rate, in the morning I'm often barreling through tasks, and in the evening I'm absorbed in family things (if my husband is actually in the country), but in the mid-afternoon I am more likely to be bouncing or searching or resting; it's a good time to stop and check in with myself.

So, at least for a little while, I think I'm going to take a moment at 3:14 to pause and observe this wonderful summer that I've been waiting for all year, and to see what it's really like.

3:14 a week ago, Sunday and Monday

 Sunday last at 3:14:  doing crossword puzzles in bed, with my faithful velcro dog nearby.

My guy loves crossword puzzles, too:  he does Monday-through-Wednesday, and then I get to do Thursday-through-Sunday.  Prewash sits nearby for them all.

Monday last at 3:14:  doing math.   

The night before, as I was trying to go to sleep, I'd had visions of solutions to an old problem I'd been working on.  Then, Monday, I'd gone home at noon to give myself a half-hour to see if the visions had been real or just weird dreams.   I sketched some stuff on the chalkboard in my Command Center, stared at it, re-sketched . . . and then I *saw* it.   That was around noon.  Next thing I knew, it was 7 p.m. and I was still writing.  Yay, math.

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.

Four things I lost (and found again)

My keys

• These, I lost while taking a young friend to the dog park and playground with Prewash.  I didn't want to bring my whole planner bag with me, so I carried my keys in my back pocket, or my hand, or . . . ?  At some point, I stopped carrying them, apparently.   What made this extra worrisome is that I'd been loaned the keys to a theater, and I was in charge of a cast that was getting ready to rehearse.
• I never, never lose my keys. So this felt like a terrible blow to my ego, striking at the very core of my identity.
• This is why I should always carry my planner bag. Because then, I would've known the minute my keys went missing.
• Fortunately, a dog walker found the keys and turned them into our public safety office, so I got them back after only three hours of fretting.

My water bottle

• Actually, not so much "lost" as left behind on a park bench when I went outside to read. Normally, I keep my water bottle in a special pocket in my planner bag.
• As soon as I got back to my planner bag, I realized the water bottle was missing. See note above about why I should always carry my planner bag with me.  
• Fortunately, when I went back to the bench, my water bottle was still there.

My mathematical notes from last summer

• I looked through my filing cabinets in my office at old Main, and couldn't find them.
• I looked through my shelves at home and couldn't find them.
• Then I looked on my bookshelf with my research box in Old Main. Turns out my notes, in a file folder, were between those books. Makes sense, I guess.

A box of blank mailing labels, for the printer

• Eventually, I found these in the drawer underneath the parchment paper I used for my planners. I'm not sure why I had these in that particular drawer instead of in the "supplies" set a file drawers where I usually keep them. 
• I think it has something to do with moving everything out of my math office, and then having to rearrange all of the filing cabinets from the previous owners in my Dean's office.
• I'm extra nervous about next year, because I will soon have three offices: one at home, one in Old Main, and one in the dorms. I'm really going to have to develop a system for knowing where everything is.

planner pages : LaTeX geeky joy

There are geeky things that I just love love love.  Not surprisingly, one of the disappointments of being a happy nerd is that it's hard to describe my math pursuits in a way that other people can understand, so it's hard to celebrate nifty news.  Anyone want to jump up and down about the time that I discovered a geometric quantification of anamorphic distortion?  No?  (It's so cool, I swear . . . ).  

Earlier this spring, I did a geeky thing that just delighted me; and I still think it's so much fun that I want to try to describe it, with some of the weird technical stuff embedded, but to explain to non-Texperts why this was such a cool adventure for me.  

Here's what I did: I designed monthly calendar pages for my planner, using a mathematical typesetting language called LaTeX.

When I first learned LaTeX, back in grad school, I thought its main (only?) use was to allow us to write those symbols that are part of every cartoon about math:  fractions, weird Greek letters, integral signs, arrows, and such.  It wasn't until a few decades later (of constant LaTeX use) that I discovered that there's a language-within-a-language, something called "PGF/TikZ", that lets people draw lines and other things positioned in highly precise locations.  I discovered this through playing with a fabulous graphing application called "GeoGebra", and it thrilled me so much that I'd often tell other mathematicians about it when we were schmoozing at conferences.  

Nerd-aside:
In GeoGebra Classic 5, if you "File:-->"Export" --> "Export as PFG/TikZ",
you go straight from the picture you created to a string of TikZ code.  

By having GeoGebra do the coding for me, I picked up knowledge myself along the way.  I learned, for example, that the command

\draw (10, 15) -- (18.8, 15);

draws a little line segment, 8.8 centimeters long, at a height of 15 centimeters.  Why is this cool?  For me, it was like discovering that mayonnaise jars have the same necks as regular canning jars, or that the fuel gauge on car dash has a little indication of which side the gas tank is on.  It's such a neat new aspect about something I already thought I knew so well!

So, knowing that I can put lines exactly where I want them, I knew I could create the outline of the calendar, and also (on the reverse side of the page) create lined pages for an index of notes and also a place for my monthly to-do lists  (the place to scribble things like, "wash windows", or "pick cherries",  for when I don't yet know which day in the month I'll want to do it).  

One side of my pages

But I don't want to have a line of code for each line in that page.  Shorter code is better, because it allows for easier changes down the road.  To make it easier to tweak all the lines at once (change color, change thickness), I googled "Latex for loops", and came up with the code to do this:

\foreach \n in {1,...,15} { 
\draw [dotted, line width = 0.75, color=browncolor]  (6.6, \n)  -- (8.8, \n);
\draw [dotted]  (6.6, \n.5)  -- (8.8, \n.5);
}

Figuring out this "for loop" snippet of code was like, I dunno, googling "how to fix my dishwasher" or "how to fold an origami frog" -- you know it's possible; it's just a question of learning from an expert.

The next step was to put in the words and numbers. LaTeX/TikZ can do that, too, with commands that look like this:

\draw (11.1, 16.2) node {\tiny Sunday};

This, too, was fairly easy to automate with the 12 month names. LaTeX has a date counter that you can advance, and so for each month, I used the code that extracted the name of the month, putting it first in just the right place for a tab (so cute!) and then at the top of the left and right pages, as such:   

\draw (18.8-\the\month*2/3, 17.5) node {\small \monthname};  % top tab

\draw (4.4, 16.6) node {\monthname\ \the\year};

\draw (14.4, 16.6) node {\monthname\ \the\year};

Months and tabs

It's actually that tab at the top that tickles me the most.   In the past, when I made pages, I'd have to tape on hand-written labels for tabs after the pages were printed, but I realized mid-project I could have the tab be part of the paper and just cut carefully.  Do you ever wonder why math teachers keep asking those annoying questions about when Train A meets Train B?  It's so that you can figure out questions like, "where do the tabs at the top of the page go, and how do you make sure the word "July" is printed in the same place on the front AND the back of the paper?"   Totally geek happiness, adding these tabs that slide along the top!  

Taped-on tabs from previous excel-formatted pages.

Okay, but HERE comes the part that was REALLY fun to figure out: where to put the numbers of the days (and -- especially -- where NOT to put them)?  This part was fun in a crossword-puzzle kind of way, or Sudoko, or some-such.  The reason this is tricky is that, on any good calendar page, there are days that are empty.  There are usually a bunch of blank blocks before "1" and again after the last day of the month. The fact that each month has a different number of days makes this even more fun to play with: the rhym "30 days hath September, April, June, and November" is helpful for memorizing, but not for coding.  So the puzzle is this: how do I tell my program when to write the days, and when not to?

The solution?  Learn the Ninja art of of "If-Then-Else".   For each box in the calendar grid, I built a command that checked whether the month of the counter ("\the\month") matched the month of the current calendar page (which for technical reasons is designated in my code as "#2"), and then drew the day (or not, depending) and then moved over into the next square:

\ifthenelse{\the\month=#2}  {\draw(17.7, #1) node  {\the\day};} { } \AdvanceDate[1]

Lovely, right? That line says if \the\month = #2, then draw stuff, otherwise do nothing (denoted "{}").  

But to add extra degrees of difficulties, every once in a while there's a month that spreads across six, not just five, calendar weeks.  April 2023 is one such month:  April 1 is on a Saturday, then there are four full weeks, and then April 30 is on the next Sunday. Where do I stick April 30?  I don't have space in my usual grid to add the 30th below the 23rd, so I decided to stick it at the top.  

April 30 (Sunday) and April 1 (Saturday) are both in the top row.

How to do this?  [Fast forward past many scratching-my-head hours, and many don't-quite-work attempts].  I finally hit upon a very workable solution: in the first two blocks of each page, time-travel forward 5 weeks to see if it's one of those "special" days, print that date if it is and don't print it if it isn't, and then travel back in time to the normal date to resume normal printing.  This is what time travel looks like in my LaTeX code:

\def\SpecialMonday{\AdvanceDate[35]\ifthenelse{\the\day>29} 

        {\draw(13.3, 15.7) node {\the\day}; }{ } \AdvanceDate[-35] }

I totally feel so clever.  

In fact, I was on such a roll that I decided to see if I could ALSO get people's birthdays automatically added on the right days.  And, what the heck, why not also see if I could add their current age?  More puzzling-challenge-searching, and I finally decided to use lists, together with a command that subtracts the birth year of the person from the current year.  So, for example, a list of events in January might have

 . . . 
, % 25
Lisa \BORN{1991} , % 26
 , % 27
. . . 

and then the command

\draw(11.1, 15.7-2.5) node {\small \em\textcolor{orangecolor}{\DTLlistelement{\Events}{\the\day}}};

would put Lisa's birthday and age on the bottom of the block for the 26th, whatever day (and age) it happens to be that year, while writing nothing on nearby days.

Birthday and age, generated automatically. 
Whoop!

So . . . here's the upshot of all this.  Excel versions come and go, but my LaTeX code is stable enough to last me a lifetime.  From here on in, I can change one line -- just updating what day is the first Sunday on  a new year (2023 begins on Sunday, January 1, 2023; 2024 "begins" on Sunday, December 31, 2023, etc), then hit "compile", and I'll have beautiful planner pages, with birthdays and etcetera all in exactly the right places.  

It'll be super easy to make new pages . . . but, ironically and pleasantly, it was a lot more fun having difficulty writing the code in the first place.