Here is a snapshot of a typical recent day:

• 8:00 am: Wake, plan to jump right into studying for the qual
• Some time later: wonder how much of the decopodean life cycle has been documented on wikipedia
• Some time after that: "Ok, just one quick game of Gunpey."
• 12:00 am: Go to bed, lament having done basically no studying for the qual, promise to do better tomorrow.

Repeat seven or so times. I've been better since Sunday, but it's been a fight to stay focused. No doubt a part of this is whatever has caused students to procrastinate since the first amoeba attended college. But another, more tangible, part is the heat. The horrible horrible heat. As noted earlier my brain basically ceases to function at about 85 degrees, and works best at something like 68. I'll spare you the tedious details, but suffice it to say that all my attempts to cool my living room down have failed. Clearly the next step is "ship this AC back and get an even bigger one."

Now, yes, there are places I can go on campus to escape the heat during much of the day, but it's psychologically important to me that my apartment be a place to which I can escape from the world when I need to, and part of that requires that I be able to be comfortable. If I don't have that I get tetchy and whiny. Like I am now. Obviously.

So, in other words, I really hate summer. I hate its heat and its stickiness, and I also hate its bees.

Which brings me to the bees. Hornets, actually.

This morning when I went to the living room window I saw a hornet between the screen and the window. "Crap," I thought. Then I saw another. Then, like in any horror movie, I raised my eyes in slow motion to the nest in the upper corner of the window.

I'm pretty easy-going when it comes to the little critters of nature but I have my limits, and apparently one of those limits is a nest of hornets on the inside of my screens. Which, morally if not legally, constitutes "in my apartment."

It was a small nest and, again sparing you the details, I was able to kill the hornets, remove the nest and block off the gap in the screen. This was not pleasant.

Then I though to check the other windows and, yup, another even bigger nest in a completely inaccessible corner of another window. As it happens this other window is the one with the AC (the one which does not, as previously noted, work too well) and is already sealed off, so I added another layer or two or eight of sealing tape around the entire window and made a pact with the hornets that so long as they don't enter any further into my apartment I won't have to destroy them all. I don't trust them though, I know even now they're plotting to break in and sting me and eat my miso and sell off all my textbooks on eBay.

Well, okay, they probably want even less to do with me than I want to do with them, but this is just another thing that makes me feel not safe-and-comfortable in my own damn home, and this is the last thing I need when I'm supposed to be studying for the biggest exam of my life and not attending peace summits with bees or blogging about peace summits with bees.

I owe a few of you emails. I'll try to get to them in the next few days.

Once the ridiculous bureaucracy was out of the way the summer job wasn't bad. In fact I might even say it was close to the perfect job: they put me in a quiet dark private office and let me do to the code whatever I thought was the right thing, without a lot of meetings or micromanaging. I made good money, although at some point I found out what other consultants there were making and realized I could have asked for 1.5 times what I did and they wouldn't have blinked. I could even have asked for twice what I did and they would have blinked and then given it to me anyway. Ah well.

The downside is the commute was over two hours door-to-door, so adding those four hours to the hours I worked and the time needed to get ready in the morning and eat dinner and such and subtracting that from the hours in a day left, basically, nothing. I haven't been reading lj anything like regularly, so if I missed the announcement of your engagement/marriage/childbirth/ascension to godhood I apologize.

I wish I could say this would change, but the Ph.D. qualifying exam is only... let me check... 8 weeks away. EIGHT WEEKS? AHHHH! QUICK, SOMEONE HELP ME SHOVE PATHRIA STRAIGHT UP MY NOSE AND INTO MY BRAIN, IT'S THE ONLY WAY! Okay I'm better now.

On a somewhat-related note, since returning to Syracuse two days ago I have determined that the temperature at which I lose the ability to think coherently is about 85 +/- 2 degrees F (not accounting for variations in humidity). I have determined this thanks to highs in the 90s and the fact that my top-floor apartment traps heat so efficiently that even a carefully arranged series of fans can't keep it from being five degrees hotter inside than out.

That's about it for now, but I leave you with this short list of Things That Are Good from the previous month

• Katamari Damacy (and sequels, and soundtracks)
• Recieving lengthy, poetic, incomprehensible equations in the mail (thanks mellawyrden!)
• Sour cream and onion pringles
• Lumines
• Hot tubs in New Hampshire
• Bowling
• Gunpey
• Grilled vegetables
• Grilled Morningstar Farms veggie burgers (other brands turn... strange and disturbing when grilled)
• Pickle rounds!
• Bloomin' onions — in moderation
• Spending time with friends