Friggin awesome

In the last senior seminar, which was yesterday, we had a vote. It may or may not have been for best talks, because the criteria were not specified - but everyone got to vote for a talk (for whatever reason they wanted to vote for it). I ended up part of a three-way tie for second, so I won a piece of scintillating fiber. It's pretty cool... when light hits it the ends glow green and if you cover it up so that it's mostly in the dark, it stops glowing. Hours of mindlessly geeky entertainment ensued. :-) I'm very easily amused.

Senioritis

It's amazing what the combination of enough credits to graduate, a plan for the next few years, a recently completed APS talk, and the end of an airplane-aggravated head cold will do for one's motivation. I'm vaguely aware that I should be doing stuff.

Example: I have a comp sci assignment, the due date of which was postponed from last week to this week, that I keep meaning to start but then not starting. Part of the problem now is that last night, I remembered that we have Late Days in comp sci... and I haven't used any of mine yet. So if I don't want to, I don't actually have to write my code until Wednesday. Right.

Then I have some German reading I should do. But that will only take a few hours and can probably be done while I eat lunch tomorrow.

And I need to do laundry because I'm out of clean short-sleeved shirts and the weather is too warm for long sleeves. But it's already too late to start that today because other people will have taken over the working dryers by now.

Ear drum not ruptured: tinnitus remains mystery

So, I haven't posted in a while. There are several things I could, in principle, post about now. But I'm distracted by my head-cold. So I'm only going to write about that.

Basically, I got some sort of head/sinus illness while in Florida for the weekend. I should have been able to see it coming from the fact that every fluid in the vicinity of the horribly dry, over-air conditioned hotel was $5/oz. (I exaggerate slightly) and the tap water smelled and tasted quite awful (I exaggerate not at all). Anyway, the cold peaked shortly before I was due to fly home, so I bought myself some orange juice and Tylenol with extra decongestant things (10oz. and 3 doses, respectively. Total: $11). The flight was going fine (I slept through almost all of it) until 20 minutes before landing. Apparently, the descent was perfectly timed with my Tylenol with extra decongestant things wearing off. It was accompanied by mild loss of hearing (sadly, not enough to block out the children in the next row) and acute ear pain that did not improve with any amount of chewing, swallowing, gently blowing my nose, contemplating my continued existence, etc.

Some time after landing my right ear went back to normal and my left ear stopped hurting so badly, but remained uncomfortably stuffy. And then today, I woke up feeling almost reasonable, but my left ear became worse again and I started noticing an irritating whooshing noise. I went to Health Services. I sat for an hour. I learned that my ear is not infected and that the ear drum is not ruptured, but that I should take decongestants to ensure that my ear can drain, thus allowing the pressure to equalize and my ear drum to continue to not rupture. Excellent. I'm that German tomorrow will be fun on Sudafed.