Juneteenth

Happy Juneteenth everybody!  I had no idea that was a thing until I just looked it up on Wikipedia, but it's a nice way to open a post.  I just saw that some other people had updated recently, so I thought I would ride the mini-wave and let people know what's up with me.

The spring term is over here, and summer term doesn't start for another week or so.  It doesn't really matter to me, since I'm not teaching or anything during the summer term, which is when the math majors are on co-op, so there are few classes.  Not that there are many math majors, anyway, but summer classes are always in demand by the faculty so that they can continue to get paychecks all through these dog days.  Incidentally, it's probably not the dog days yet, technically, but it is awfully hot, so I'm going to pretend that the etymology is from dogs panting or something.

My research is going pretty well.  I typed up a giant (well, like 10 pages or so) document with a ton of computation on it, and now I'm just sort of reformatting and adding some signs (don't ask).  It's mostly a well-known computation, but nobody seems to ever write it out, or is ever even clear about what they are using the results for specifically, so it is good to be clear.  As you can imagine, making a bunch of little changes to a ton of code is not particularly interesting, so I won't bore you with the details, but it has given me a bunch of opportunities to take breaks, and since I'm not on campus, I use those breaks for things other than drinking coffee.  Things like making this:

As always, apologies for the weird coloration provided by the inadequate lighting here.  It's a strawberry-banana pie.  Actually I was short one banana, so I threw in a very ripe peach, as well.  I haven't actually tried it yet, except for a little bit of the crumble stuff on top.  Incidentally, it was also baked in a pi-tin.  Well, pi-plate.  That is, there's a big letter pi on it, and the digits around the rim.  It's not mine.  It just happened to be the only thing that looked like it would work for making pies.  The pie crust is also made from scratch, so haha!  I'm like a real homemaker or something.  Again, I haven't actually tried it yet.

In other news, there's not really any other news.  There are some shows that I've been watching, but nothing that anyone would be interested in.  It's too bad because Young Jutice (this is a children's cartoon) is actually quite good and the current storyline is pretty twisty and the creators were kind of bold in some of their choices, especially considering it's a cartoon running on Saturday mornings.  Unfortunately, I don't really have any friends who are that interested in amekomi = American comics, as Mie-chan calls it.  Ah, well.  Everyone else's loss.

I don't think anyone reading this has an iPhone, but I do want to mention that recently I got to play Ticket to Ride on one, and I have to say it is awesome and pretty much the only thing I've seen on them that really makes me want one at all.  I mean, siri is cool or whatever, but I can't see myself using much of the functionality.  Ticket to Ride is an awesome game, as you probably know if you are reading this blog, but it's even cooler when all the shuffling and whatnot is taken care of for you.  You can pass the phone back and forth to play with other people or play with multiple phones, but either way, it speeds the game up a ton.  I think only the America map is available, but there are some expansions and whatnot.  Anyway, I think it is pretty cheap to buy.

Alright, I guess that is pretty much all of my news.

Update: the pie is delicious (^_^)