False start into vacation

After the success yesterday, today has been a terrible day for my PhD. Starting on Monday I will be on vacation for the week (both from my day job and my thesis), which means that technically I started my vacation just two hours ago. However, the vacation mood was already in the air, in the family and in myself, so I am afraid that I jumped the gun and effectively stopped any kind of work around noon, to the detriment mostly of my doctoral work.

Photo: WallpaperFlare.com

Yesterday evening we ended up buying a family-size inflatable pool, which we proceeded to install straightaway. The weather forecast for today hotter than yesterday and everyone wanted to take as much advantage of the heat as possible to warm up the water in the pool. However, we had not manage to find a fitting cover for it, so Karen suggested filling it only half-way in case we found in the morning that the was incredibly dirty and had to re-fill. On the other hand, if the water was OK in the morning, we could continue with the filling process.

This morning, when I woke up far ahead of everybody else, the water was clean, so if topped it up (to 80% full, as recommended) and went into my improvised home-office to work. I was psyched by the success yesterday, so I quickly took care of the few routine tasks from the office and got ready to program the model whose definition I had just finished, but the task proved to be unmanageable. I do not know if it was the heat or the anticipation of the week that we will spend out of town in a cabin in the woods, but the house was in turmoil the whole morning: the boys kept having ideas for unusual things, like having leftover cake for breakfast ("how much cake can I have?"), or tying to sneak out of their usual chores ("can I have the cereal without milk? I do not feel like going down to the basement to fetch a new bottle"), and kept knocking at my door because precisely today they were up before Karen was.

The end result is that, after the fourth or fifth interruption, I decided to leave the coding, which demands much more concentration, and stick to reading a bunch of articles that I wanted to read. That provided some relief, because, even if the interruptions kept coming, it is much easier to get back to your reading where you left it than trying to hold to a hazily sketched idea that you are trying to put into code. But reading is hard nonetheless and I was probably also in pre-vacation mood, so shortly after noon I dropped my reading and went to check on the status of the pool.

Karen and Jason seemed to have been looking at the pool for the good part of fifteen minutes without deciding whether to jump in or continue staring and Trevor was, as usual, MIA (missing in adolescence) crawled in some obscure corner of the house playing videogames with his mates, so I decided to take action, changed quickly and approach the pool with confidence.

Karen: Are you going to get in straightaway?

Me: Yes, of course, why not?

Karen: I have just tried the water with my hand and it is freezing cold.

Me: It is summer, the air temperature is over 30 C, it cannot be freezing.

Karen: Well, go ahead, be my guest.

Me: Well, it is a bit cold at first, but if you just... kneel... down... slowly... it... will... not... be... that... cold... anymore.

Obviously, my stuttering speech was not very reassuring of the optimal condition of the swimming pool, so they agreed to come back to check the water temperature in the early evening, headed back into the house and I sunk into the cold water, which after 5 minutes of being immersed did not seem cold at all. Seeing that everybody had finally decided to go their own way, I read for another forty five minutes on my tablet with my lower half soaking in progressively warmer water, what looked like a perfectly valid expiation for my early bail from work just some minutes earlier.

After that, lunch and the rest of the afternoon has been a continuous brainstorming of what to bring, eat or do in the upcoming week in the mountains, but it felt like a well-deserved change, at least for this week. I am certain that I will not work while I am away, but I might still find the time to register here some of my impressions, because I have grown fond of sharing my days with you here.

I will see you soon again. Enjoy the week.