lindseykuper

It would be hard to feel much more relaxed than I am right now. The semester is over, and I'm in Tallahassee, Florida, at Alex oniugnip's mom's house, where I've been for the last six days. A week is a long time to spend as a guest in someone else's household, but I don't feel like a guest here; I feel like family.

Various family members keep pointing out how thin I look -- I think someone actually used the expression "skinny Minnie" -- which is interesting, because I hadn't noticed that drastic of a change, but I suppose I'm about ten pounds lighter than the last time any of them saw me. I lost some weight while training for the race, and for some reason it's stayed off, even though I've hardly been running at all since then -- until this week, that is. Alex and I have been taking advantage of the warm weather, the copious free time, and the fact that his mom lives next door to a pretty, woodsy, swampy state park with lots of trails that looks more or less like the setting of Pogo. We did something like four miles on the 23rd, seven miles on Christmas Day, and another seven or so today. It doesn't hurt that Alex gave me some new shoes¹ for Giftmas. I also received a large pile of other gifts, such as Founders at Work; that quirkyalone book; and a beautiful hat knitted by Alex's younger sister. We don't really do gifts much in my family, and I'm sort of bowled over by his family's generosity.

Aside from running, we've been sleeping a lot, eating, reading, and playing a truly unconscionable amount of Rock Band. Yesterday, though, we tore ourselves away from the PS3 long enough to visit Alex's stepdad's place of work. I'd had an inkling of what Anthony's job was before, but I'm so glad we actually went to visit. He works at a mental hospital and coordinates the efforts of several art, music, and recreational therapists, as well as leading some art therapy sessions himself. Pretty much every wall of the place is covered with dozens of drawings and paintings that patients have done in art therapy sessions, all of which have been beautifully matted and framed by Anthony. I don't mean that he, like, took them somewhere to be matted and framed; I mean that he personally built each one of the frames in his wood shop. As we walked down the halls and admired the art, he was able to tell us stories about the ones that had been done by his patients. But it didn't stop there. In the front hallway of the hospital, there were a bunch of framed photos of staff members; it had been Anthony who had taken the photos and built the frames. All of the hospital's art supplies were neatly organized; that's because Anthony had built the shelves they go on. A few rooms even have furniture that he built. Basically, he's spent 22 years making the hospital feel less clinical and more comfortable by filling it with beautiful, functional, thoughtfully handmade things. See, the thing is, that's what he does at home, too, and it was just awesome to see that this thing that he most loves to do when he's not at work is what he's essentially made his job into, too.

Being in a different household for a while has also made me take notice of the way I eat. I notice, coming from Alex's and my vegetarian household, that the kitchen here is full of meat: ham, fried chicken, turkey, pulled pork barbecue. Meat is the centerpiece of every meal. I usually think of my diet as something like "what omnivores eat, minus the meat", but after a few days of eating that way at meals, I was unsatisfied and craving food around the clock, to the point where I opened the fridge this evening and really wanted to take a big ol' bite of one of those cold fried chicken legs. That was the last straw, and I finally realized that I needed to stop relying on other people feeding me and actually make some food for myself, so I sauteed some onions and broccoli and threw in a bunch of cheese, salsa, and cooked rice. It was unsophisticated, but it was exactly what I needed in terms of complementary proteins and flavors, and I finally feel sated (and the chicken now looks unappealing again, as I was hoping it would). Yay!

nibot_lab

1. Each firefly has a "charge" that builds up at a regular rate.
2. When that charge exceeds some threshold, the firefly flashes and its charge is reset to zero.
3. When a firefly observes the flash from another firefly, it gets a little increment of charge.

lindseykuper

Earlier today, as Alex onigunip and I were driving home from Chicago, I was complaining to him about how the folks we'd just been to visit¹ did a better job with furniture and household-maintenance tasks than we did. My complaints included things like "We've had a non-working lamp in our living room for six months" and "Our table is rickety and only seats four, making it impossible to have more than two people over for dinner simultaneously". To rectify this, Alex has started a wave²: "things to do to the house".

So far, the only thing on his list is "install taco dispenser".

This is basically why I love him.

lindseykuper

The last thing I had to do for the fall 2009 semester was an epic 48-hour take-home final for B522. I think I was able to work out almost everything, but the very last part of the last question had me stumped. It was an "Is it possible to produce a term of type X in language Y, and if so, what would one such term be? If not, then would having a value of type Z on hand make it possible, and if so, what would one such term be?" sort of question. I was able to figure out that the answers to those questions were no and yes, respectively, but damned if I could actually work out what the term would be. I tried for hours. When I finally went to turn in the exam yesterday with the problem still unfinished (I had written something flippant, like "Yes, you can produce a term of the given type, but I can't"), two of the other students from the class were there, and none of us had managed to figure it out. Then Amal showed us a (gigantic) term that would have been a correct answer, and I was actually pretty relieved -- first, that what I had managed to figure out had been correct as far as it went (and, in fact, that I had even been correct in my understanding that said mysterious value of type Z corresponded to a proof of the excluded middle law), and second, that the answer wasn't actually something incredibly short and cute. I mean, I don't feel nearly so bad about not getting it now!

So, as of yesterday, I'm done for 2009, for some value of "done". With three semesters down, I'm now just one course away from being finished with a master's degree.¹ (A full graduate course load is three per semester, but you need ten courses for the master's. That's how they get you.) After having spent most of the spring semester hanging on by my claws, it was a relief to find that things went much better this fall. For most of the time, I was standing firmly up on the edge of the precipice instead of hanging down into it by my claws. And my grades, as they trickle in, seem to be fine; evidently the final exam for my AI course went, um, just as badly for everyone else.

No rest for the wicked, though. Over break, I need to read some papers and start hacking Coq in preparation for the research project I'm doing with Amal in the spring. We're hoping to get a paper out by May, and there's a large amount of stuff I need to get up to speed on in order to make that possible.