Under the Weather

I'm feeling pretty under the weather today. I think I caught whatever my husband had, and it's really taken hold of me. Tonight I'm definitely going to sleep as long as I can. Unfortunately, there's a lot to do between now and then: survive one more hour here, and teach both the children's and adult karate class. The adult class will be easy, because I'll just leave everybody to their own devices. Depending on how I feel I may even leave before the adult class is over. Yeah, I'm feeling that dead.

In other news, yesterday I got all my travel arrangements for Sandia ironed out. I'm leaving on Tuesday the 29th, and coming back April 1 in the morning. In most ways this is very exciting. In other ways, I'm terrified about it. I feel so unprepared! I've written some slides, but they're far from complete. Also, I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with my Monte Carlo hack, and just when I solved one problem, there's another. Because I'm tired and under the weather, I grow convinced that I'm never going to solve this problem and therefore graduate. I think I'm going to have to stop working on it for a while and concentrate on something else, such as writing.

Speaking of writing, yesterday I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork for the Sandia interview, and it came on these forms where the boxes were tiny and too small to type in, so I had to hand write the answers. This was particularly cruel, because my hand hurts the most when I'm writing small. Also, I have a special ergonomic pencil, but this had to be filled out in ink, so I had to write with a normal sized writing utensil. What I ended up doing was writing slowly and taking breaks. I would fill out one entry in the employment history, and then wait a few minutes, and fill out the next. I managed not to hurt my hand too much, although certainly by the end of the day I had performed more than my quota of writing.

I've contacted a friend of mine, who defended in January and now works at Sandia. I'm going to get together with him and his wife while I'm out there at Sandia. I asked him for any words of wisdom about the interviewing process, and he gave me a lot of them. It was helpful, but long. I'm glad I asked, though, because he provided me with some ideas of things I can do to be prepared.