Caffeine buzz

*jitter*

Woof. Way too much coffee this afternoon. One of the big boss men stopped by our office today to let us know that one of the staff members in the Operations Research area was giving a short presentation on how to structure a thesis and how best to use Word to write it up. I went because it seemed like one of those things that I shouldn't skip, even though I'm not doing anything related to Operations Research and I'm planning to write my thesis in LaTeX, not Microsoft Word.

I picked up a couple useful things about Word, but overall the meeting was sort of a bust. Afterward, I got some coffee with another girl from the meeting that I haven't seen in a long time, and it was really nice to catch up. I haven't met many new people in grad school, but there are a couple people that I think could be really good friends if we had more time to get to know each other. I haven't been drinking coffee much lately because it dries out my eyes, so my caffeine tolerance, much like my alcohol tolerance, is at an all-time low. So now my feet and fingers are jittering like nobody's business, thanks to the medium mocha.

The good news is that things may finally be looking up in thesis-land. My advisor is out of town at a meeting this week, but I'm hoping to have a lot of good data to share with him when he gets back.

~~~

Josh came to visit this weekend, and while most of it was blissfully uneventful, we did get out to see Babel on Friday night. It's essentially this year's version of Crash, except it was a lot more depressing and featured a lot less underwear. The cinematography was really cool in parts, but it was heart-wrenching enough that I probably wouldn't watch it again.

It's hard to believe that next week is already Thanksgiving. A couple months ago I bought a plane ticket to go to D.C. for the holiday, but a few weeks ago, an unexpected opportunity popped up to visit my little sister in Spain during that week. My dad is already going, and he generously offered to help pay for my ticket if I decided that I wanted to go also. I considered it pretty seriously, because it would be a fantastic opportunity to get a personal tour of Seville, complete with bilingual tour guide :), and it would be really neat to see what Laura's life has been life for the past few months. But by the time I actually looked at tickets, they were already over $1000, which seemed excessive for a 5ish day trip. On one hand, it's an opportunity that, in all likelihood, I won't get again, and I do have the money to go (although it would eat into my savings for the potential post-graduation trip), but the idea of paying that much for such a short trip, not to mention the expense of eating out and staying in a hostel for the whole week, just seemed like too much. So Laura, if you're reading, this means you should live in Spain again sometime, preferably when I have the money, vacation time, and good sense to plan ahead. I'm still keeping my eye out for last-minute deals for next week, but it's looking unlikely.

Professionalism

We've gotten a lot of rain recently, the kind of rain that necessitates stripping just inside your front door, because if you don't, you'll leave a trail of leaves and dirty water anywhere else you walk. Usually, I don't bike in the rain because in addition to the regular amount of wet socks, wet shoes, and drenching that occurs when your umbrella flips inside out while walking, you also get splashed with wet road grime when cars, trucks, and busses drive through ginormous puddles on the road.

Today the rain had stopped, so foolishly I decided to ride my bike to work this morning, forgetting that the ginormous puddles remain after the rain, and they have an irritating tendency to splash water in a neat little line up your back tire and onto the seat of your pants when you bike through them.

So now I'm walking around at work with a giant wet spot on my butt. Real professional. To counteract this, I feel compelled to sneak the words, "I rode my bike here," into every conversation with anyone at work, just so they don't think I peed in my pants.

And just to add that extra level of embarrassment, I noticed when I got up just now that the wet spot on my pants has partially transferred itself to the seat of my fabric chair. So now it looks like I peed on myself AND the chair.

Great.

One of the many reasons I should stop watching "Extra" while waiting for my dinner to cook

My dad occasionally has celebrity dreams. He meets all kinds of famous people in these dreams, both living and dead (I think), and the next morning he'll regale us with adventures and conversations he had with these people the night before.

I don't know many other people who experience this sort of thing - I definitely haven't - so I chalked it up to one of those things that just happens to you or it doesn't, sort of like dreaming in color.

So imagine my surprise when I met not one, not two, but THREE celebrities in my dream last night. First I met Angelina Jolie. I went over to her house to borrow a textbook, and I ended up babysitting her three kids. Except that her youngest was that African boy that Madonna just adopted, not the baby that Angelina just gave birth to. I don't remember meeting Brad Pitt (too bad), but I do remember her house being surrounded in the front and back by paparazzi. Eventually Angelina gave me the textbooks that I needed and told me that I didn't have to return them if I didn't want to because she had hundreds, so I left her and the kids and got into a taxi.

At that point, it was somehow decided that I was going to attend Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's wedding. ?!? No one was supposed to be there, but I ended up getting there some boat with three women from People magazine. Once we got to the wedding site, they wrapped themselves in sod to blend in with the grass so that Tom and Katie wouldn't notice them on the way to the wedding. Once we got to the ceremony, however, Tom and Katie didn't seem to mind that the women were there, along with some random Asian family and a couple other people I didn't know. If this wasn't weird already, here's where it becomes completely random: After the ceremony, I gave both Tom and Katie hugs, but when I hugged Tom, he somehow morphed into my 7th grade band teacher. On the way to the reception, I sat with Katie in the back of an enormous van while Tom and the driver sat up front. At that point, Katie confided to me that Tom could be "a little harsh" sometimes, and so I asked, "so why are you marrying him?"

So either I have a hidden desire to attend celebrity weddings and play marriage counselor, or my brain was just so scrambled from the day before that it needed an opportunity to wrap people in sod to let off steam. It reminded me of one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons: