kareina

Wednesday I worked in the morning, but was tired enough by lunch that I just took my trike home and took a 1.75 hour nap. When I woke I wasn’t inspired to work, so I did useful things around the house till time to head to Parkour, where it was only Anton and I, so he trained on flips and gave me some exercises to start getting better at vaults and then to improve my handstands. After that I went home and had some inspiring emails from my advisor in Durham, so I settled in to work for the evening, taking a break for yoga, then back to work till a bit after midnight. Even so I managed to get up on time to trike in to the office Thursday morning early enough to meet the service technician who was here for routine maintenance on the laser. He also changed us over to the new bottle of ArF gas, which gives us much better laser power than the old bottle (as expected). He was getting close to done with his work when it was time for me to head over to meet Johan for our lunch time acroyoga session, and had just finished when I returned. So I called him a cab and sent him off to check out the church village in Gammelstad before he needed to catch his afternoon flight.

Then I did a few more hours of LTU work before biking home, curling up with a book (in Swedish) for an hour, and then settling into an evening of work on Durham stuff. I did take a break when David came over to work on the Server to sit in his lap a bit and visit for a while, but then went back to work and failed to notice when he went home (though part of that is being hard of hearing, and thinking he had said he was going back downstairs to do something else with the server, when what he really said was that he was going to go home).

I managed to reach a breaking point and go to bed before midnight, which meant I got up today just after 07:00. I managed a couple hours of Durham work today, and a couple of loads of laundry, but didn’t get as far as the vacuuming or dusting that would have been nice to have done. But then, before I knew it, it was time to head to uni for the Ore Geology seminar, which took nearly two hours this time, since it was a presentation of one of our PhD students, who is getting close to wrapping up his project and wanted a chance to discuss various big picture thoughts that tie in to his research. This meant that I needed to hurry straight over to Phire practice from the seminar, where I had much fun doing acroyoga with Johan (there is a noticeable improvement in just the just the two weeks we have been practising together, but then we did meet three times last week and four this) till the Phire officers pulled him aside to get his information to become a member of the group. However, by then Ellinor and Bjorn had arrived, so we were able to do some of the standing acroyoga stuff with him. He was feeling a bit tired, having just spent 2.5 hours in the gym, but was still able to toss us around fairly easily.

After practice Johan and I came back here and played a couple of games of Go. I haven’t played since I lived with Colin, who is a serious Go player (4-dan at the time, no idea if that ranking has changed in the years since). Colin had started teaching me the basics of the game, but even when he gave me a nine-stone advantage he was still able to win. It has been long enough I needed a refresher on how it works. The first game I only managed to take like three of his pieces and he captured quite a large handful of mine, and when we finally counted points I had 30 to his 120 something. The second game I was more confidant in what I was doing, and tried more things. I still lost, but this time I managed to also capture a good handful of his pieces (as he did with mine). At the end of the game I had only 17 points, but he had only 60 or 70, so I didn’t mind dropping my score in half since his did, too.

After that we played Othello. He had played before, but it had been years, and he very kindly gave me the corner early on, since he hadn’t remembered how very important they are and he was enjoying the early part of the game where the board was mostly his colour. As a result he managed only 22 points, to my 42. Somehow, I think that the next time we play that game I won’t have it so easy. He is certainly never going to hand me a corner so early in the game again.

After that I drove him back to Porsön and then continued on to the grocery store to stock up on a few things, managing to finish up just before they closed. Now it is just after midnight, so perhaps I should do my yoga and think about getting some sleep. My advisor has sent me some more feedback on the grant proposal we are working on, but I think I had better be fresh before trying to do anything with it.