catching up on things that have needed doing for a while

One of the things which has been lurking on the bottom of my to-do list for quite a while now is to go through the literature to find the mentions of talc and see how the natural rocks compare with my experiments. Given how many other work-related tasks I've had to do, it has been put off in favor of more urgent tasks. However, it is something that is important to do, and given the issues I've got just now getting Mathmatica to do calculations, I decided that today is the day. After many hours of work, I now have a table of 34 papers which either came up in a Scopus search for "talc" and "metapelite" or which I already had on my computer. Now that I've got that list I will need to go through it and see which ones are actually relevant and extract the data, but given that midnight is fast approaching, that part can wait for another day.

I am also making good progress on a job application that is due this week--it is pretty much ready to send--the only information that would be nice to include is if I had any idea of the cash value of the tuition waiver I had when at UAF. I filled out an on line form asking them, so with luck it will be easy for them to look up and they can send it to me.

Another task I accomplished in the "been needing to do this for a while" category is the vacuuming. While I left the floors clean before departing for my 3.5 weeks of back to back conferences and short-courses, they got fairly dusty while I was out of town. Yes, I've been home for a week now, and normally I clean the floors more than once a week (they need it in Milan--I think all the traffic outside my window kicks up lots of dust. But whilst in recovery mode from the time away I didn't get to it. But today I did a load of laundry, and I so wasn't willing to take the clothes out of the washer without cleaning the floor first, for fear of dropping something on the floor and needing to re-wash it to get the dust off. I am *much* happier now that the floors are clean again, and intend to keep them that way.

I wound up staying up way too late last night--I finally got the weaving pattern for the project I started at the textile forum, and compared it to the one I'd attempted to re-create. I almost had the pattern correct on my own--I only forgot one important point which made it impossible. The way my teacher does the patterns uses ovals set at an angle to indicate if the cards turn forward or backwards, and which of the to top threads is active depends upon which direction the cards turned. So when I did my pattern always showing the thread from the top front hole in the cards I was correct only for those cards that were turning towards me. Even so I still had the pattern about 85% correct, and it was an easy thing to fix my version once I saw the original and remembered that detail. I felt it was worth doing my version even though I have hers, because my version is annotated with letters telling which two holes are on top for each card after each turn. This will make it *much* easier to figure out where things should be if I make any more mistakes. However, having gone to the effort of analyzing the pattern closely enough to create this diagram, I may not make any more mistakes. Certainly I didn't when I went home last night and picked up the project to try "just one repeat", and couldn't bring myself to stop till I had done three of them. I might not have stopped even then, but it was 1:30 in the morning and I still needed to do my yoga before going to sleep, and I do want to be on day shift this week, since my boss indicated that he might be able to help me with the Mathmatica issues sometime this week.

Now it is not yet midnight, so I think I'll close this here and see if I can get yoga done and me into bed while it is still a reasonable hour...

catching up on things that have needed doing for a while

One of the things which has been lurking on the bottom of my to-do list for quite a while now is to go through the literature to find the mentions of talc and see how the natural rocks compare with my experiments. Given how many other work-related tasks I've had to do, it has been put off in favor of more urgent tasks. However, it is something that is important to do, and given the issues I've got just now getting Mathmatica to do calculations, I decided that today is the day. After many hours of work, I now have a table of 34 papers which either came up in a Scopus search for "talc" and "metapelite" or which I already had on my computer. Now that I've got that list I will need to go through it and see which ones are actually relevant and extract the data, but given that midnight is fast approaching, that part can wait for another day.

I am also making good progress on a job application that is due this week--it is pretty much ready to send--the only information that would be nice to include is if I had any idea of the cash value of the tuition waiver I had when at UAF. I filled out an on line form asking them, so with luck it will be easy for them to look up and they can send it to me.

Another task I accomplished in the "been needing to do this for a while" category is the vacuuming. While I left the floors clean before departing for my 3.5 weeks of back to back conferences and short-courses, they got fairly dusty while I was out of town. Yes, I've been home for a week now, and normally I clean the floors more than once a week (they need it in Milan--I think all the traffic outside my window kicks up lots of dust. But whilst in recovery mode from the time away I didn't get to it. But today I did a load of laundry, and I so wasn't willing to take the clothes out of the washer without cleaning the floor first, for fear of dropping something on the floor and needing to re-wash it to get the dust off. I am *much* happier now that the floors are clean again, and intend to keep them that way.

I wound up staying up way too late last night--I finally got the weaving pattern for the project I started at the textile forum, and compared it to the one I'd attempted to re-create. I almost had the pattern correct on my own--I only forgot one important point which made it impossible. The way my teacher does the patterns uses ovals set at an angle to indicate if the cards turn forward or backwards, and which of the to top threads is active depends upon which direction the cards turned. So when I did my pattern always showing the thread from the top front hole in the cards I was correct only for those cards that were turning towards me. Even so I still had the pattern about 85% correct, and it was an easy thing to fix my version once I saw the original and remembered that detail. I felt it was worth doing my version even though I have hers, because my version is annotated with letters telling which two holes are on top for each card after each turn. This will make it *much* easier to figure out where things should be if I make any more mistakes. However, having gone to the effort of analyzing the pattern closely enough to create this diagram, I may not make any more mistakes. Certainly I didn't when I went home last night and picked up the project to try "just one repeat", and couldn't bring myself to stop till I had done three of them. I might not have stopped even then, but it was 1:30 in the morning and I still needed to do my yoga before going to sleep, and I do want to be on day shift this week, since my boss indicated that he might be able to help me with the Mathmatica issues sometime this week.

Now it is not yet midnight, so I think I'll close this here and see if I can get yoga done and me into bed while it is still a reasonable hour...