Tricia Sullivan's Blog, page 10

my eigenvectors are aching

Yesterday was a shitty day for math. In December I was well ahead of schedule, but over the holidays I got behind in less time than it takes to say 'couch potato'. Last week I banged at it as hard as I know how to catch up...until yesterday.  The math books stayed open on the table all day and I got nowhere with them.  I kept bouncing off the text. I'd read a couple of lines and be all why should I care about you, invariant lines? And why can't I just get this stuff squirted effortlessly into my brain?

Bring me your brain-squirters, scientists!



Could it be that the word 'eigenvector' was psyching me out? Maybe. It sounds scary, like the kind of thing that will chase you around with a battle-axe.


 image from http://musketswordpaint.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/vikings/

But see how small the guy is compared to the axe! Even if he is carrying somebody's head like a packed lunch. Luckily I remembered You Tube!  Thankfully I found this brief and clear introduction to eigenvectors by Zheng Hao Chen from Stanford. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Good People Who Put Things on the Internet as a general service to humanity. I don't know why it's so much easier to understand math when someone puts it on a board and explains as they are writing, but it is.

It's 5:30 am and I've already been up a couple hours thanks to a small person who is much cuter than our Viking. I am a little zzzzhhhaaauuuughhhhh and since today is Thursday and Thursday is martial arts day I will be expected to do other difficult things later. Please to have the forgiveness for my punchdrunkenliness.

a horse in the house

This pleases me.

the mouse police never sleeps

I have been up since 3:15 AM stalking a mouse in our kitchen. Thanks to a cunning plan by Steve, we finally managed to isolate and then trap it in a rubbish bin with the aid of an empty kitchen towel roll and duct tape and an all-important chocolate coin. Mouse has now been released into the wild at some safe distance from our house. But I just spent four hours hovering, trying to read, listening to it rumble around shredding our stored loo roll and waiting for it to make its move.

No wonder cats are so lazy most of the time.

inside the box

Long term readers of this blog may remember that I posted a You Tube clip of myself on the heavy bag some years ago, not long after I had Sean. Back then I'd hoped to be back in some form of training by now, but all I've managed to do is a bit of general fitness maintenance. My fitness isn't too bad but my skill level has stagnated year after year.

Last month when I filmed the training session for Steve's latest DVD I got all excited about training again.  Also, I ate many cookies over Christmas. So I decided that this year, Thursday afternoon will be martial arts day and I will take advantage of having Steve around to learn some stuff. I'll film a small portion of each session for accountability, and to shame myself into improving.

Today was my first boxing session. I got my ass handed to me for about half an hour culminating in a pukatory (almost) Tabata set.  It was all great fun, but I only filmed the first few minutes of me hitting the Thai pads. The camera isn't well-positioned and I didn't realise it was only capturing waist-up, so it's kinda meh in various ways. I'm trying to put this under a cut to spare your browser and my ego, but I have a lotta trouble with LJ cuts so apologies in advance if it doesn't work.


It was freezing but within moments I was too hot for the hat.

hard to tell the poison from the cure

What with all the skulking and avoiding I've been doing for the last couple of weeks, I want to just pop on here and wish you all a happy and healthy 2012.  Recently I have had a bad patch mentally--December's seldom good for me, and this year was no exception.  I seem to have vanished from even my own sight, and I owe a number of friends and family e-mails and thank-you notes.

The kids had a really happy Christmas and we got through the day with NO MELTDOWNS (not even by me), in spite of the fact that Sean's big gift from Grandma and Grandpa, a Thomas the Tank Engine Hornby set, came with an EU wall plug as well as various other faulty bits.  He took the disappointment very well, and later in the day we received an adapter from our kind neighbour (who is Dutch and has these sorts of bits to hand), and we muddled through. It's progress from the years where Christmas was characterised by the tantrums and tears that seem to go hand in hand with small children and big excitement.

Rhiannon got an indoor trampoline from her US grandparents. That's been...interesting. And Tyrone got the original AD&D manuals and some dice. The DM's guide is a second edition and looks weird, but I've said we can get out the graph paper and see what we shall see. I expect him to be underwhelmed given that he's accustomed to computer games with amazing graphics and save options, but maybe I am underestimating the old school. He discovered Zork and has been playing it online.  Why, I don't know. Back in high school when my friend Carolyn had it on her computer she'd try to get me into it, but I didn't have the patience to endure the endless 'you can't go that way' and 'I don't know that word' and 'that sentence doesn't have a verb.'  (When Tyrone asked me what a verb is, I squawked, 'What are they teaching you at that bloody school?' like the parental drone that I have become.)

So yeah. In my misery I ended up dropping MST209, which may have been a bad decision in terms of getting a teaching job sooner rather than later, but all my panic bells start ringing when I go there so I'm gonna stick my fingers in my ears and sing lalala.  I have to be realistic about what I can handle.  The online materials are dense and copious, and I think I need to solidify my algebra and vectors and calculus and stuff before I take this on. I don't quite have the mathematical confidence for it yet.  It's been a very tough decision and I'm still not sure I've made the right one. Part of what triggered the depression, I think, was the realisation that I just can't manage the workload that I want to be able to manage, and all the wishful thinking in the world doesn't row the boat any faster. Lacking an armed team of enforcers to follow me around all day and flog me, I need to be realistic about what I can do.

I got a 97 on my first assignment for MS221, though.  The exam's in June and I need to start revising for that as well.  I don't expect to pull high marks under exam conditions, but opening the post and seeing that 97 really made me excited.

The list of goals I've made for this year I'll keep private, but I do have one.  I've enjoyed reading the goals and reflections posts coming up on my f-list and I'd like to wish you all the very best in the New Year.  Big thanks to my friends for your support. Much love to you all.

quick housekeeping post

I haven't been able to get on LJ all day and I've just quickly cruised my friends list while printing out the last bit of the e-ARC of 'Range of Ghosts' by matociquala which I am lucky enough to be reading (and hope to review for Foundation).  It is very good indeed -- more on this later, after I've done the review and can come up with some personal bloggy-type things to say here.

Anyhoo, I feel out of touch.  Hello, friends!  I owe lots of comments

I disabled my Twitter yesterday.  Need to get serious about a BIG stack of work this weekend.  I hope LJ will be up and running next week so I can catch up a bit.  Happy weekend!

fear factor

I don't know what it is about December that brings on the mood swings, but I've been all over the place lately.  I feel awake and alive in all sorts of uncomfortable and itchy ways.  Maybe there's some skin-shedding going on.

I'm at a tricky juncture in the new book. Some little while ago I decided to take a foolish narrative and philosophical risk but the funny thing about leaping off cliffs in novel writing is that it isn't a one-time event. You leap, and then the next day you have to leap again, and again and again, in order to stay out there in that zone of madness.  It's like freaking plyometrics.  Hard to work up the energy for that every single day.  No wonder I need so much chocolate.

But most of my time this week has been devoted to trying to get ahead of the game in math.  I had to change my course program and I'm not getting to do the Astronomy course yet, after all.  I need to do MST209 first, which is the precursor maths for proper physics.  Guess how scared I am?

(I went to look for stock photos of scared people. More men in suits looking scared. And women being stalked on their way to their cars.  Oh, internet. Fuck you.)

So, lacking a graphic image of my state of mind I will just say that my plans for a spring marathon have been deferred because something had to give.  I'll be carrying 90 credits from February, and it's not going to include the 60 credits of fairly-straightforward general science of last year.  I was really quite lax with that course and mostly got away with it.  It's going to be 90 credits of mathcad and calculus problems about particles and springs OH GOD WHAT HAVE I GOT MYSELF INTO??????

Ahem.  Sorry.  See what I mean?  I'm like a Peanuts cartoon without Snoopy.

In lighter news, we have a professional boxer coming to the barn for a private lesson with Steve today, which should liven things up.  And hey, now that I think about it my problems are all phantoms faced down from the comfort of a chair.  Beanbag, even.  I don't actually have to get in the ring and take a physical battering.  So there's that. 

Oi, I think I just cheered myself up!

I passed!

Just got my first term of OU results.  I now have 100 points!  Reading the results was relatively painless because neither course had a proper grade and neither of them will count towards the quality of my degree (that starts this year). I'd been hoping for a Pass with Honours in the introductory science course but didn't make the cut on the 'examinable component' (which was not actually an exam). Boo.  But I did well enough, and if I am honest I found the course a little blah and didn't work particularly hard, so I guess I got what was coming to me.

I've been hemming and hawing about what to do next.  I'm only on 30 points at the moment, which is not enough. I'm never quite sure how much work I'll be able to handle.  I'll be sitting a maths exam for the first time...well, EVER...in the spring, and I need to do well on that, so I'm reluctant to pile on too much.  Let's face it, my maths are weak and I'm playing catch-up. The next math course I need (in order to handle 300 level physics, which is a long way away right now) starts in February. It's supposed to come after the course I'm doing now, but you can self-study some bridging materials if you want.  I started on them and they're not bad.  But student feedback indicates the course requires 20-25 hours a week and people use descriptors like 'beast' and 'monster'.  Bit intimidating, that.  And the whole thing's on Mathcad (shudder).

So this is what I'm doing instead.  I'm taking Practical Science: Physics and Astronomy.  It's a degree requirement and also a requirement of the minimum Physics Certificate that you need to get on a PGCE program.  They have a study path option that includes going to Mallorca to use the telescope!  (I turned this down. Deep, deep sigh.)

I felt really ill on Sunday, with the result that I'm also cooking another scheme to do with running.  I know, that makes sense, right?  She feels ill, can't get her requisite exercise, gets crazy up in her own head.  That's me.  I'm waiting on some news before I tell you what foolish thing I've done this time.

I know most people on my friends list are aware of, if not participating in, the Terri Windling benefit auction.  Just in case anyone has managed to miss this, there are some absolutely beautiful items and amazing services on offer over there.  It's been moving and heartening to read the testaments about Terri's role in the fantasy writing and reading community that have been posted practically everywhere this week.  I hope the fundraiser will be a great success.

No Forbidden Planet for me

I'm really sorry to say I can't make the group signing at Forbidden Planet today. We are dealing with the triple threat of no central heating, no hot water, and some sort of gastric illness beginning to make inroads in the family.  I can't leave.

The joys of winter.

At least it is not snowing.  And no apparent asteroid strikes overnight.

I hope everyone at FP has a wonderful time!  Totally bummed that I won't be there...

Anne McCaffrey

I read 'Dragonsinger' when I was ten and reread it countless times, together with all the Harper Hall books and the first Dragonriders series, throughout my early adolescence.  We didn't buy many books in my house, but we went to the library every week.  I kept 'losing' Dragonsinger so that my mother ended up having to pay for it, and then after I 'found' it I ended up with a lovely library-bound mini-hardcover to keep. (Don't anybody freak, I did buy more than one copy of my own over the years).  

I remember reading The White Dragon and watching it week after week hit the NY Times bestseller list; I was ten and I think it was around the same time The Silmarillion charted more or less forever.  In those days it was a big deal for SF and fantasy to be recognized like that.  (And I remember my ten-year-old self being annoyed by what I thought was a pompous quote on 'The White Dragon' where some well-meaning grown-up said Anne McCaffrey's dragon books were all about human nature.  I was like: you idiot, it's about the dragons.)

The Dragonriders books got me through middle school.  They made me want to be a writer more than ever.  I remember the day in my early teens that I found Crystal Singer at the local Waldenbooks and went nuts.  I also read her early SF and a number of her 'straight' novels, such as 'A Stitch in Snow', 'The Year of the Lucy' (which was for me an insightful book about the artist in suburbia) and her Irish riding novel 'The Lady'.  I read her books over and over.  Their warmth and essential optimism were soul food, and for years and years they were what I would crawl into bed with when sick, crampy, or miserable for whatever reason.  I think the most recent time I read Dragonsinger was in the exhausted weeks just after my first child was born.  There's a photo of me somewhere, asleep in a chair with baby at my breast and a tattered copy of Dragonsinger splayed on the nursing pillow. 

It's hard to really articulate how this feels.  I never met her, but she was a person who opened vivid worlds for me on the inside.  I hope those who knew and loved her for real can take some comfort in the appreciation that so many people feel, readers who never knew her but who felt she knew us.