On Wednesday things started to ease up; five people had stopped by my office by lunch time (that's quite a few more than usual) and the meeting of the day was smooth and relaxed. Part of the afternoon went by almost lazily, with my office mate and I chatting over the dismantled body of his dying computer.

Today? Even though the corridors were mostly empty, I have to admit to a small upheaval of activity when one of the servers went down. Later on, I realized some code had changed since we published my first paper, and that it was probably why I could not reproduce one of the values. I rushed to Kit's office. "Do you remember when this part of the code base was changed about a year ago by a guy who is no longer here?" I asked. "Do you remember what the change was? I think I have non-reproducible published results!". There might have been a slight shrill in my voice. There is little we fear more, professionally speaking, than non-reproducible published results. Except, maybe, reproducibly unpublishable results. "I don't know exactly," he said. "I'll look into my archives, and ask Randy about it," he added. "Well, thanks," I said. "Don't worry too much about it, though," I added after a pause. "If the problem has been around for a year, it can wait ten more days," I decided. I went back to my office, stopping halfway to chat with the lady who is going to visit Paris soon, and decided to leave early to go read outside while the afternoon was still drenched in sunlight.

Tomorrow there is a department lunch, and I will take most of the afternoon off. I'll go and see my psychologist, stop by the post-office to send a birthday gift to a good friend of mine, and spend some time fixing my somewhat neglected appearance. Then I'll meet the Fabulous Feline in the evening and we'll have dinner out; the rest of the night should drift away, calm, sweet, and tender.

Can you tell it is the end of the quarter?

And then... on Saturday, before noon, my plane will have landed, and hopefully my parents and I will have managed to find each other without the help of cellphones (can you really believe we did not have them ten years ago and managed just fine?). I'll spend the week with them in San Francisco, walking around the city, eating cheesecake, taking pictures and laughing my heart out.

I hope you won't mind, then, dear Internet, if I am not taking the time to sit at a computer and wander around the intricate webs of your inner networks.