Studentene mine...

Over the years I've had some pretty cool students. I'm delighted that some have maintained contact with me. Here's a good example. Look! How cute! My former student wearing his OS-mössa, rather randomly in Switzerland:

Can't believe he went along with my request for an embarrassing picture of him wearing it. He's off to graduate school in the fall (sucker!). Is the two-headed turtle somehow symbolic of that? I'm now expecting to see pictures of him in the hat rolling in from random places on a regular basis, kind of like those photographs of garden gnomes from around the world in the movie Amelie. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're a gnome, Marcus.)

Yesterday I had another day of cranking through small but complicated and important tasks. I wrote two letters of recommendation for my PhD student. Now that his dissertation has been approved it's much easier to write compelling rec. letters.

Then I finished a book review, which was a really tricky task. In some ways I really agree with the book, but I found it very poorly conceptualized and thus difficult to evaluate. Seeing a book like that scares the crap out of me in relation to my own book--I have good ideas too, but what if I don't pull it off? What if I majorly misrepresent the secondary literature like the author of this book has?

Today we have to participate in that most Norwegian of activities, a dugnad at E's preschool. I really like dugnader, at least in principle, and am happy to perform tasks for the common good. I'm less excited about the party afterward, since that means I may have to socialize with people. Oh no!