Being welcomed to new places is a strange but very, very nice feeling. It's also incredibly motivating. I keep looking up at people in gratitude and going "thank you sir, how can I totally help you kick ass, SIR!"
Today was one of those days where I could do just about anything except the stuff on my todo list. I'm grabbing a notebook and pen and writing those things out offline after dinner so I'll be forced to concentrate on content; that's usually good for breaking up writer's block. (I have not successfully found a way to willfully break mathematics block on command, since I usually do not do math while typing.)
I pledged to learn how to document things this summer, so here's a tour of my room. (Hey, bad documentation is better than no documentation.) I need to put video editing software on this computer (kino, possibly).
I'm living in a 38-person (plus-occasional-visitors) house* this summer and using a dresser as a clothes/electronics storage space as well as a standing desk; it holds all my belongings except for my bed and piano. A faded marker drawing of a four-petaled flower on the ceiling is the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning. Then it's climbing down the homebrew loft ladder (occasionally using the sprinkler pipe for balance), brushing my teeth in the corner sink, showering across the hall, and then it's off to face the day.
*yes, it's crowded.
Sometimes facing the day entails cleaning the murph (the living room, my house chore), which means stacking top hats and juggling equipment in their proper places and going to town with a shop-vac (the only vacuum left with sucking power in the domicile). Sometimes I cook dinner, which as you can imagine involves Massive Quantities of Food (usually citrus-free, gluten-free, tree-nut-free vegan dining due to differing dietary requirements among residents).
Sometimes I clean up after dinner, which involves hosing down a wok large enough to bathe in, mopping around the industrial strength stove which can burn soup (...seriously, I've never had to watch my soups for developing a burnt crusty bottom before, but that's before I met pika's stove). Sometimes I play piano in the murph. Sometimes we bewilder Matt Ritter. Matt's an old friend from Olin and my roommate for the summer; he's working on a VC firm specializing in companies that specialize in green technologies, getting them from "cool technology!" phase to "viable ongoing business." (My suggestion for their tagline: "We make sustainability sustainable.")
Today, because I could not seem to write coherent English about POSSE into slide form, I went on a scrubbing frenzy in the kitchen and felt useful again. Now I am going to stuff myself with dinner, shove a notebook into my backpack, hop on a bus, and write. Once you have a productivity momentum started, it's easy to keep going.
