The temperature here have been climbing back up. I spent much of yesterday morning trying to get climate control working in my living room, unsuccessfully. Consequently I spent the whole day hot and angry and stupid.

Today I gave up on the living room, purchased a small $40 computer desk from the local Rite Aid and moved into my bedroom, where the AC works fine. The difference was amazing, I was happy and able to focus on my studies and make some really good progress.

The conclusion is obvious: I'm part troll, in the Pratchettian sense¹.

This bit from Men at Arms is particularly applicable

The rising temperature hit his thoughts like a flame-thrower caressing a snowflake.

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¹For those who haven't read any of the Discworld novels, Pratchett's trolls are silicon-based lifeforms whose brains work something like computers. They naturally count in binary. In warmer temperatures they overheat, degrade in performance, and eventually stop altogether. However when sufficiently cooled they go into overclocked mode and become capable of things like this.

Last weekend was full of productive studying, and by Tuesday I was not only beginning to feel more confident about the quals but was even remembering that I actually enjoy this stuff.

Then I received the TA training schedule.

Most grad students go through training before their first year, I didn't because of the way my fellowship works. I knew I'd have to do it around the time of the quals this year, but based on the TA training at Yale I figured it would be short and wouldn't interfere with studying too much.

Turns out, here, it's seven days, a rather sizable chunk of the time I have left before the exams. That news got me all panicky again, which ended up costing me a few more days, and then we had our first practice exam and that was about as unpleasant as you'd expect.

I admit my natural tendency when faced with adversity is to think "I'm old, I'm tired, bugger this I'm gonna go get a job I don't actually care about too much and enjoy relaxing in the evenings." So I'm working on staying focused on the fact that I do want to do this and finding ways to gather my strength and just get on with it. It would probably help if there were some grad-student equivalent of "I will be the next hokage — believe it!" that I could yell at random intervals.

Okay, moving on to other subjects, I have a hornet update! Although after further consulting the big page of things what can sting you it turns out they're yellowjackets, not hornets. Smaller colony, more aggressive, no more welcome.

I had blocked off the tops of the windows with a combination of plastic bags and duct tape, which worked but was clearly not going to last. So as a more permanent solution I ordered some of that foaming insulation stuff. Which worked perfectly, inasmuch as no yellowjacket born of Earth is going to get through it. However I was sloppy and didn't get to a couple of spills fast enough, so I now have very noticeable blobby yellow streaks on my screens.

These are, so far as I can tell, permanent. No commercial solvent will dissolve them. They can be sanded down from the inside, but extend outside as well. They can't be burned off, at least not with any flame I'd be comfortable using. Maybe a pressure washer would get them off, but it seems more likely it'd just rip the screens out entirely and blast them across the street. Replacing the screens would either require dismantling the windows, a four-story ladder, or spider-powers.

So I guess I win, but probably at the cost of my deposit (at least). I can't help thinking that, unable to sting me, the yellowjackets instead attacked me through my own stupidity.

This, by the way, is why I'm not an experimentalist or artist. I like to think I'm pretty good at understanding things, but I'm incredibly and consistently ham-fisted when it comes to working with the physical world to accomplish anything.

On the plus side, the heat wave has passed and temperatures are more like I'd expect in central New York. Not always cool enough to be comfortable, but always enough to be functional.

I told you I'd shoot, but you didn't believe me! Why didn't you believe me?!

(Aparently they thought the terms of our treaty allowed them to start colonies in other windows. They were very, very wrong.)

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.