Hallowe'en Cometh

Mid-week. For some reason I just caught myself feeling like this was a Saturday. That would be less understandable if my daily schedule consisted of more than a rotation between staring at various screens in the house. Saturday is Hallowe'en, though. And it looks like I'll be in Madison, WI for the weekend. That'll be a nice change of pace from the past couple weeks.

From my most recent read - Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There" (reflecting at the end of a couple months of traveling Europe alone):

"...tired of existing in a world of strangers... tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk out on myself?

At the same time, I had a quite irrational urge to keep going. There is something about the momentum of travelling that makes you want to keep moving, to never stop."

So, most of the book is much lighter than that. It's a dangerous book to read; it makes it very easy to catch the travel bug. And worst of all, whether Bryson loved or hated a particular place, the way he describes it makes you want to see it - to go there and experience the same minor horrors associated with traveling that he faced. Mostly it makes me want a job where I get plenty of vacation time (and what I'm doing now doesn't count as a job with excess vacation - it's only vacation time if you earn money on either side of it and know when it'll be over).

Anyhow, quick update on the job search: unless it takes another two months to find a job, the position I'd applied for in Chicago is likely out of the question - funding was delayed until the end of the year. I'm still waiting to hear about the job in Knoxville at the lab, but apart from that I'm ever so slowly finding jobs here and there to apply for in whatever parts of the country seem interesting for whatever reason. But whatever happens, the GRE general test is out of the way, I'll see a couple friends this weekend, deer season opens in a couple weeks, and I have some very tasty no-bake cookies in the kitchen downstairs.

Huh. And for some reason I just realized that the distance formula you learn in geometry or algebra or whatever is just the square root of the Pythagorean theorem.