Fried

I haven't been home long due to working late at the office and I'm pretty much fried. Yet another wretchedly busy day. My only hope is that this fresh cup of strong coffee will revive me sufficiently to take care of the usual slate of housekeeping and/or reading this evening. I could certainly use a beer (or better yet, a top shelf margarita), but, alas, there will be no alcoholic refreshment tonight as it's my week to carry around the emergency pager.

This morning early I met with my graduate committee to go over a section of my thesis which was more or less well received. One professor threw some rather off the wall (yet oddly relevant) questions at me, which I handled well. So the research project is on track and going well and there was lengthy discussion as to publication of various project components, possibly as early as this winter. The thought of publishing original research in a scientific journal that no one ever reads is...ummm....hmmmmmm. To be honest, it doesn't strike me as exciting as it once did. I have a few small articles floating around in equally small journals and I suppose the novelty of that sort of thing has quite worn off.

One of the benefits of today's meeting was that it helped revive (or refocus) my academic interests which had been flagging over the last month or so. I think much of this was due to the distraction of work which still tends to take on this all-consuming life of its own. I'm still keeping it all in perspective (the well-balanced life thing of which I wrote a while back), though it is difficult.

One final observaton: professors have it easy during the summer. There I was today dressed in shirt and tie (I went straight to the university from work) and sweltering in the awful heat an humidity whilst walking across campus and there they were in t-shirts and shorts. It's soooo not fair!