I don’t really know where the time went today. I’ve been busy with this drabble contest I’m running, sending out mostly form and some second-round rejections (over 140 emails so far and still have quite a few to go; thank God for Gmail templates). The contest isn’t over yet, but will be soon, and I didn’t want to start sifting through the stories at the last minute, because, you know, COVID.
I also wanted to share some weird (good weird) news. I’d never in my life received anything in any game of chance (raffle, lottery, etc.). I rarely go for these things anyway, because I believe in my fundamental inability to score anything. Yet, in the past two weeks I received not one but two free books in giveaways on Twitter; to enter, you had to retweet (which I did because it’s a nice and easy thing to do, never expecting to get anything) and then the names were drawn at random. Long story short, I scored two really cools books! If the crazy weather and the pandemic aren’t enough, this is the definitive proof that the reality as we know it is unraveling.
I saw my graduate students on Friday, all together after a while, and it was really nice. I missed them, to be honest. It felt good and normal to look at data and goof around and talk about projects for a change.
Middle Boy had his cast removed on Friday, as well. The hothead had gotten himself a boxer’s fracture (fracture in the metacarpal bones of the middle, ring, and pinky fingers) in his dominant hand as a result of punching the floor twice, hard, following some drama that involved doing math. Anyway, he couldn’t participate in the last basketball tournament of the season, had to wear a cast for three weeks, but now it’s all over and hopefully he will soon be back to using his hand 100%.
How was your weekend, blogosphere?
To wrap up, here are a couple of links (courtesy of my Twitter timeline):
xykademiqz 
Ha!!! I used to sing with Sudeep when we were both grad students! Hilarious to see him going viral now (though as he says, that’s probably not the best choice of metaphor at the moment). 🙂 I happen to have plenty of yeast (just used it yesterday to bake challah, which my 4-year-old painted pink using some milk and food coloring — whatever entertains around here these days!), but maybe I’ll take his advice if this craziness lasts for more than a few months.
My weekly bread-and-tea (using the bread machine at work) has been cancelled indefinitely, and I brought home the extra yeast and flour just before the don’t-go-to-the-office order was issued by the university, so I have about 200g of baking yeast in the refrigerator now. My wife has been doing a lot of baking lately, but I’m thinking of baking a loaf a week myself and having a Zoom bread-and-tea with the students.