Were you to look at my ass (which I strongly advise against) you would see a large purple bruise that, if you were able to overcome your nausea long enough, you would identify as a boot print. Had you not yet recoiled in disgust you could examine the print more closely and would eventually discover markings left by raised letters on the boot reading "property of the Fall 2007 term."

I'm doing so many things this term and all of them take lots of time and some of them happen early in the morning which would leave me exhausted even if there weren't so many others. I'm beginning to find myself thinking things like "I'm going to try to make next term more reasonable but if it turns out to be as bad as this one then it will be my last." I probably don't mean that, but it's there in my brain nonetheless.

Quick roundup of things:

Teaching is kind of fun. Running labs is not. Grading is very much not.

Doing graduate laboratory is also, for the most part, very much not. I will admit that getting my first plasma to go yesterday after six weeks of trying was kind of a thrill. However, most of that six weeks was spent doing things like disassembling large pieces of equipment meant to contain and direct mighty energies and looking for a gorram half-centimeter washer that wasn't making good contact with some tiny screw. Much of the next eight weeks is likely to be more of the same, since getting the plasma going was not the experiment but just the first step in getting the equipment ready for the experiment.

Relativistic quantum mechanics is a very beautiful subject. Pity that I don't have time to actually learn much about it beyond the bare minimum needed to keep up with the weekly homework.

I'm making some good progress on the CMB-analysis project and learning a bunch of interesting things about the early Universe and how it is studied. Maybe I'll say more about this at some point (although more likely I won't).

I'm glad I'm auditing the general relativity course, it's been a good refresher of the stuff I did in the independent study last year. But I'm also glad I'm not taking it officially, since I would need to somehow create at least one more day a week in order to do the homework (or give up on sleep entirely, but that never works out well in the long run, where by "not working out well" I mean "at some point they'd find me naked on the table in the conference room writing christoffel symbols on my flesh with dry-erase markers and giggling").

It hasn't been all work. Just before the term started I finished watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and fell deeply, and perhaps a little obsessively, in love with it. I've very slowly been reading the novels, kindly translated here and while the translations often read a little awkwardly they are nonetheless quite wonderful. I'm looking forward to the fansubs of the upcoming second season.

I've also been slowly going through the box set of the first season of the new Doctor Who. I'd seen through The Empty Child around the time the series first aired, thanks to a long weekend and a friend with bittorrent, but decided to start again at the beginning. I'm up to Dalek which I may watch tonight. I don't have enough words of praise to heap onto this series.

I have a new computer, a 20-inch iMac. It feels good to be back on a desktop after 5 years of laptops.

It's gotten chilly. Yay!

Ok friends, see you in December.

The quals (or, as _akenokoru called them, the chuunin exams) are over. I don't like speculating on how I did on tests, so I won't. I'll know within two weeks, probably sooner.

Afterwards I was in the mood to not think about anything for a while, so I took a bus to the (yuch) mall and caught The Simpsons Movie. I really enjoyed it! Perhaps that's due in part to the euphoria of having put the quals behind me, but mostly I think it's because it's actually good. There's nothing profound in it, nor even anything particularly new, but I found it solidly funny and fun in a way the series itself largely isn't lately.

That was the entirety of my break, as the semester started today. And this semester looks like it's going to be even more insanely busy than last year:

• I'm TAing Physics 101, the huge 300+ person intro course. I'll be running three two-hour "studios" (a combination of recitation and lab) per week, each with about 18 students, and grading their weekly homework and lab reports. Plus I'll run the physics "clinic" (a room where students can come for help in any course at any time) two hours a week.
• I'm taking Quantum Mechanics III. Relativistic QM, fun!
• I'm also taking graduate laboratory. Although I'm beginning to think that I should put it off for next term.
• I'm auditing the General Relativity course. I did a GR reading course/independent study with this professor last semester, but it's an important and beautiful subject that I'd like to spend more time with.
• Finally, the most exciting news, I'm starting research! Well, sort of. I'll be working with a professor in the cosmology group on his studies of the cosmic microwave background, but officially I'm doing it as a one-semester independent study and not "research" in the this-will-turn-into-my-thesis sense. However, this did happen as a result of my asking to join the cosmology group officially, so I suspect, or at least hope, that this will evolve into something larger.

So if none of you hear from me for the next 15 weeks, this is why.