12 of 12, January 2018

Today was a bits and pieces-y sort of day. As a consequence you will end up with a quirky/boring mix of fairly ordinary photos, accompanied by too much information, a bad pun, and banal commentary.

I’d had a tiring day yesterday, and so my rising this morning was leisurely, and my morning ablutions included some reading in the tub as an extra indulgence (Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly, which is the book about African American women mathematicians who worked in the early days of the US space program, upon which the film of the same name is based).

One of the things I did when I got to work was to set up my new 2018 desk calendar so that I would know what day it is. If truth be told, however, I basically use the calendar as a source of note paper!

At lunchtime, I went for a walk. I came across this x and I wondered what it was doing there. It’s still unknown.

A friend rang me while on my walk, so I proved I can walk, talk and take a (bad) selfie at the same time (normally I use hands-free earphones when I’m on the phone, but I didn’t have them with me today).

Towards the end of the walk I passed the old maths building where I used to work 20 years ago. Since I wasn’t sure whether or not I had a digital photo of it, I decided to take one. For most of my time, I was in the office behind the just visible third set of windows on the ground floor, but I think the place has been refurbished since then.

The afternoon’s work intentions didn’t go to plan. My computer is playing up, and every so often it gives me a black screen when I try to restart it. There are a few things that are supposed to work to make it behave … but they don’t; the only solution is to wait for an hour and start it somewhere else (yes, it seems to get sick of my office, and won’t start until I take it home).

So, I abandoned the computer work, and did some work on a thesis chapter from one of my PhD students. I hope she can read my handwriting.

Just before I left the office, the first drops of the promised much-needed rain started to fall on the window.

Shortly after I arrived at my parents’ place, it became much heavier. This is what it looked like pouring onto the bonnet of my car in front of the fence.

My parents made rude remarks about photographing my food, but what I was really trying to do was photographically capture the recent tradition of having Friday night dinner with my parents. Often it’s take-away baked potatoes (“Praties”) that I pick up after work, but tonight it was home-cooked — and home-made/grown — hamburgers and vegies (the hamburgers and relish are home-made, and, of the vegies, all but the corn were home-grown). Nom.

Later in the evening I did another short walk to get my 10000 steps for the day. Some friends had suggested I carry a weight to build arm and core strength, and so that’s what I did. 

And, to finish the day, I tried to take a slightly artier shot, a half-second exposure in the fading light, braced on a large rock on the foreshore.