I know. I'm late.

Today (well, now it's yesterday) was somewhat crazy. I could have attended a "field trip" for one of my classes...it was optional. When it came time to get up, I just couldn't do it. Mike and the little guy were here for just today, and I have so much to do. In the long-term, I hope I can stop feeling guilty about wanting to spend time with my family rather than doing school-related things.

I guess it's worse than normal because they have to leave right away tomorrow morning. So today was the only time I get to spend with them. Mike is also going to be doing a lot of travel in November, so we probably won't get to visit every weekend.

I spent a lot of the day working on my NSF grad fellowship proposal. I don't know why I'm so hyper about this thing, but I am. My friend who won it last year was loosing sleep over it, and I didn't understand why at the time. Now I think I know. Part of it is that this is my one and only shot at applying for it. Second, of course, is that I could finish up a lot faster if I didn't have to TA my way through grad school. And, frankly, I think I have a kick-ass project. Maybe even paradigm-shifting...maybe.

I'm so paranoid that I decided to go for 4 references rather than 3. Not that any of the people would be flakey (in fact, all of them have written me very favorable letters in the past), but I am nervous after the fiasco with my grad school applications and the one prof who just never bothered to send anything (despite him telling me several times that he was extremely happy to write a letter and was working on it just before I visited/emailed). It's very unfortunate that I don't feel I could ask this particular person to write me a recommendation as I worked for him on an RA for a year. If he did manage to get around to it, I'm sure he'd write a good referral. Based on past history, I can pretty much guess he'd never get around to it.

We made a quick run to Michaels. I got a really huge book of newsprint because I think it will help me to organize my thoughts for my oral exams. I want to make a bunch of charts and have a place to write down derivations. (Can I just mention that it makes me squee with happiness that I get to put derivations into a paper?) I think I have most of the math there, but I really want to focus on how the boundary conditions work.

In the evening, we celebrated Halloween. The older boy designated himself as the candy-dispenser. We only had 4 groups of trick-or-treaters, so he spent most of the night writing his "fanfic" of 9. We had friends come over, and the dads took the younger boys out while I graded student labs and chatted with ursulagoddess. She brought over 2 bags of candy, 100 pieces each. My students this next week will be happy. They will be getting all the left-overs.

And now I look forward to sleeping in a bit.