I spent the day at home while a four foot tall hole in the side of my bathroom was repaired, and while trying to ignore the shriek of copper pipes being cut I pressed forward with my research. I’m beginning to understand why research is such a difficult thing to make headway in. In the merely academic problem I’ve been studying of late, I’ve literally discarded an entire binder of research notes and started over, realizing that methods I thought would work at the time were actually bunk. I had high hopes at the beginning of the summer: to get a publication at least in the rough draft stage by September or so, but that’s just a distant dream now. Now, I’m wrestling with an almost purely academic problem that has literally taken me a month to sort through.

It’s frustrating, watching so far two months of work be able to be summarized in about forty lines of code and maybe five written pages of notes. But I guess, at the end of the day, all your research and all your work will appear as a ten page journal article, so really it’s not a major thing to worry about.

At the same time, I gave my first presentation to a research group. Fraught with typographical errors, it was an effort to explain my research to an experimental group we are collaborating with, only to find that we weren’t talking about the same thing when we were talking.