Starting on a high note

The first day started on a high note: in spite of all the undeniable allure of Netflix and the vibrant conversation that comes up spontaneously whenever Karen and I get warmed up, yesterday I managed to get in bed roughly at my target time, around midnight. With both kids on vacation and the prospect of being able to drag myself out of bed and into my improvised home office it is easy to find excuses to stay another half hour, then an hour, then two, until it is irremissibly late and I have to face the decision of starting after my intended time or spending the day in sleep deprivation. However yesterday I managed to overcome all these temptations and hit the bed on time. 

After the first victory with the bedtime, getting up on schedule was (relatively) easy. The afternoon was already booked with errands that had to be run, so I focused on doing a good job in the morning. The email was fairly run-of-the-mill, so I kicked off some data processing tasks and, in the meantime, I went back to formatting and documenting some of the code that I have produced in the last couple of years. The task is far from rewarding, but I negotiated with myself that, if I worked focused for three hours I could devote the rest of the morning to my thesis, so I just plowed through an was done around noon. The blogging effort was already working!

The next half hour went by in searching for methods to automatically classify some of the data for my thesis. Luckily I found a paper from 2010 which looked promising and spent the rest of the time until lunch reading it. I am anxious now to have it implemented and see how well it works.

The afternoon, which always starts late at our home, never before 14:30 or 15:00, has indeed been so full that I have had little time to do any work: I dropped Karen at an appointment of hers, picked up the laptop that Jason is getting for his birthday, set it up with him, dealt with Trevor, who always complains that his online game is lagging because of the sluggish internet connection, picked up Karen again...

Luckily, around 19:00 I found some time to discuss my morning find with Kim, one of my thesis advisors, and she agreed that it was promising, so in the end it has not been a total blank after lunch.

Let us see what the new days brings. Sleep tight!