Long walks and a troubled restart

After six days of extensive disconnection, we are back to our usual routine of the last weeks, with me working from home and the kids enjoying their summer holidays as best they can. But it has not been an easy way back.

The stay in the mountains was quite relaxing, in part because the promised internet connection (a must-have if we wanted to move Jason and Trevor) was not working at all, so even if we still had our cellphones for quick searches, video streaming or online gaming was completely out of the discussion. The other part is that we had three days of moderate treks (between 4 and 7 miles), which gave me a chance to disentangle myself from the storm of ideas in my mind. On the other side, being with another couple and their two children, it was also a golden opportunity to have a couple of board gaming evenings, which otherwise only come every once in a while. The problem was the way back yesterday.

Arriving home from vacation is always stressful, particularly if you have not had easy access to a washing machine and find yourself with two or three loads of dirty clothes to process as fast as possible. Additionally, coming from a vacation home we also brought a non-negligible amount of food supplies that needed to be sorted out too. But the worst was finding even more work pending at home: the inflatable pool is now confirmed to have an elusive but undisputed puncture, so after working with Karen for over an hour stowing away food and luggage, I had to hurry to do all the maintenance in the swimming pool because it was getting dark and we do not have much light in the garden: remove the cover, pump A LOT of air in the affected ring of the swimming pool, clean the water, set up the garden hose,... But that was not the end of our bad luck. While I was working in the garden, one of the Venetian blinds that we have hung in the living room came down crashing as Karen was trying to open it. She was not hurt, but some of the anchors were ripped off the wall, others were just loose, but still unusable.

The affected window is not terribly exposed, but we are still used to it being closed in the evening, so I got to work on it and drilled new holes for anchors. I do not know what went through my mind, or which kind of curse has befallen us, but I did not manage to drill deep enough and the wall around the new holes was, inexplicably, crumbling. So we decided to let it sit overnight, covered the window with newspapers and went to bed. Of course, at 6 am this morning I was already thinking about the anchors so I went for an early start, thinking of taking care of the wall in the afternoon.

Things at work are still rather slow, so I took care of the pending data processing (it took a bit longer than usual after a week of neglect), read my email (ditto) and then focused on the resolution of one of my walks in the mountains: since I have been out of regular studies for several years, I have fallen behind in matters such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. I have kept up with the concepts quite OK, but not enough to put them in practice for my thesis, so I decided to do a course of machine learning. Luckily, there is one in coursera.org which started today. The first lectures are introductory, so I am dashing over them and hopefully we will soon get into more substantial matters. I will keep you posted. Cheers!