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.