May 2015 Review

You are reading the words of a man with braces on his upper teeth. Small, enamel-coloured bits of plastic stuck to the tooth to locate a piece of wire that is pulling my front teeth back and together. Later I will get braces on my lower teeth, which is what I and the orthodontist really want to do, as my lower back teeth look like a wall that’s falling in. I am not going to describe what it’s like having sharp bits of plastic and metal in my mouth. But it’s something that has to be done. Already the gaps between my front upper teeth have closed up so that I don’t get food stuck there. Now I get food stuck in the braces. I have to brush my teeth every time I eat or my mouth feels like there’s a three-course dinner stuck there.

And I had my first session of personal training. I’m going for increased flexibility and giving weights a rest. This means all sorts of odd exercises using the vipr and those weighted balls with grips. My actual flexibility is almost zero. This means I don’t wake up so ache-y from the previous evening’s sessions.

There was a power outage one night, which means my Roberts CD/Radio lost all its settings and I woke up at 06:25. By rushing a bit and not cooking breakfast, I made it to the 07:15 and into the office about ten minutes late. I felt much better than if I had woken up at 05:30. I’m now going to try 06:00 and a light breakfast as my new wake-up time.

I’ve been coding in Python, using IDLE. There are a couple of file-handling utilities I wanted, one of which is to copy imported photographs to the relevant month-year directory of the photo archive. I’m going to write about using and writing Python later. Home coding is relaxing, time-passing and I never feel like I’ve wasted time.

I visited my friend over in Utrecht over my birthday weekend. Hence the Zandvoort photographs. The Monday after I left, he and his partner went to Patmos. They were going to do that anyway.

I drove my mother down to a hotel in the middle of the New Forest (so called because it’s mostly moorland) one Sunday so she wouldn’t have to sit on replacement rail service buses for hours on end. On the way down I got confused by the junctions outside Portsmouth and we did a quick detour back to some junction, turned round and took another shot. On the way back, there were no complicated junctions at all. Whizz. Straight through.

Sis and I had supper in Polpo at Notting Hill. Pleasant and good food. Being wonderful, she brought me the catalogues from the Christie’s February Contemporary sales, which they get where she works. If you’re not checking her site (On The Fly on the blogroll) you’re missing some good photography.

Not a single movie. Lie to Me S3 on DVD.

I fell asleep on the train. A lot. It’s the pollen. I still managed to read a bit more of Music In The Castle of Heaven, all of Michael Harris’ Mathematics Without Apologies, Why Men Love Bitches by a (delusional) Sherry Argov, and not much more. If you don’t count a lot of stuff on Tkinter objects, of course. Also volume 3 of Fables and volume 1 of Sex Criminals.

I finished the month with a cold, so I spent the entire weekend coding, re-stocking the sites on my Feedly, looking over new music sites, and browsing lots of math stuff. Because I decided to start polishing the Riemann-Roch essay for completion.