Floating

Reading in my garden out back, I feel rich with the sun toasting my cheeks and not one but two trees in bloom, showering down delicate petals to float in my tea.

Snow!

Real snow, with big fluffy flakes and even some accumulation.

We had some snow last week, too, but it kept alternating with rain, hail and clear blue sunny skies, shifting between any two of these states easily in 15 minutes. I would wait for the skies to be clear and blue, dotted with only a few tiny puffs of cloud before I would leave for the office. Halfway there (on my half hour bike ride) it would start hailing. Of course, you can't even rely on this. When I tried to leave while it was raining, figuring it would clear up in a few minutes, it just rained harder. Until I got to my office, that is, when of course it cleared up and didn't rain again until the evening.

This was typical April weather. It had been miraculously sunny during the ceremony at the foot of the steps of Smallbridge House, but it had rained torrentially once already during the twenty-mile drive to London. Then the sun had reappeared, had warmed and dried them; but now as they crossed Wimbledon Common the sky was black again, and the first drops began to drive into their faces.
                                        -C.S. Forester, The Commodore

Back to Banff!

I've been accepted for the WIN - Women In Numbers workshop at Banff in November. A whole workshop for women in number theory -- I thought I was the only one!

My calendar is filling up with workshops. I'm thinking about registering for the Modular Forms and Arithmetic workshop at MSRI this summer. I've been waitlisted (I was late in submitting my application) for the summer school on p-adic representations of p-adic groups in Paris in July. And I was invited to (and will probably give a talk at) a workshop in Bristol on Computations with Modular Forms in August.

Null and void

Vows to not play until one's thesis is finished are null and void when there's a 6 dan in town, right?