Drowsiness and back-to-school craze

This morning has been busy but OK, with a video-conference over an hour long but no data processing pending, I had plenty of time to complete the Octave tutorial and submit successfully the first programming assignment. Now that I have started to develop my own small programs and not just copying the the examples I can confirm that Octave pretty much provides the full power of Python Numpy, but with significantly less constraints. It is also quite rewarding to get the computation done and plotting the results in a few minutes instead of spending over an hour poring over the source code.

The problem today arose after lunch. Trevor had been insisting on ordering take-out burgers for a couple of days in a row so we finally decided to comply. As usual, it is delightful to see the pleasure they can derive, even at age 13, from such a basic action as eating a hamburger. The downside is that I was overcome by a terrible drowsiness. It was so much so, that even after having the mandatory cup of coffee I had not choice but caving in (for the second time in the day) and gear up for a short nap. Karen had an appointment with a friend to chat on the phone and the kids were trying to squeeze the last hours of the summer holidays before the school starts tomorrow, so I was pretty sure that I was not going to be missed.

Photo: L.A. Shively

However, when I woke up after barely having closed my eyes, an hour had gone by and I appeared to be in a completely different planet. Karen had just hung up with her friend and decided that it was time for the kids to get ready for school, so they all trudged upstairs to get the backpacks and the clothes ready. I tried to sneak back in the office to try to regain some of the time lost to the nap, but Karen kept asking me to check one thing or the other killing any leftover concentration that I might have, so in the end I decided to set up the ironing board and fill the gaps between my assigned tasks by ironing a bit.

The back-to-school craze lasted little over an hour, but it left me so depleted that I just called it a day and decided that tomorrow, after the kids are truly back to school, I will have a better chance to make progress with my work.

Now I just have to survive the family video-conference, but that should not be problematic. I will tell you about it tomorrow. Have a good night!