(no subject)

With my car in Illinois without me, I drove my grandmother's car, a Mercury Grand Marquis, to school for a meeting tonight. I haven't driven a car that drives that smoothly since the Olds Delta 88 Royale I used to have. It's the steering that's most remarkable to me. It's so...floaty.

My fellow panelists, including my advisor, seem to think my presentation is looking pretty good. That said, I do need to do some rewriting on the paper the presentation is *based* on. See, I wrote the paper first, which is twice the length of the presentation. Then I condensed it to a 15 minute presentation. But the act of writing that led me to more thought and analysis about the paper. And both of them should go to our panel's discussant by the 16th. And the paper itself may or may not be the basis for something publishable in the future. So even though no one's really going to see it outside of our group, and my presentation is just about done, I still have some work to do on this.

Still, I'm feeling pretty good about where I'm at with this right now. I'm going to celebrate by using my groupon for chinese-buffet-plus-sushi in Waukegan tomorrow with my brothers and people. And with the rest of the weekend, I can work on other school stuff I've been putting off while I deal with the presentation.

Tonight, though, I'm going to do some cleaning. It's so nice when I get near the end of a project and I can really clean my living space!

(no subject)

I installed and adjusted new brake pads on my bike. It took much longer than that job should, but such is the way of doing things for the first time. I'm becoming increasingly competent in bicycle mechanical skills. Yay!

I also note that my back wheel is mildly out of true again. Just the slightest bit. This seems to just be inescapable on Kenoshan roads.

I bought a spare inner tube on the way home along with the pads. I wanted a presta valve, but he was out so I figured I'd go with the Schraeder. Later, it occurred to me that if the presta tube I have goes flat, the Schraeder tube won't fit on that rim since I put a spacer in the valve hole. So I'm going to take the tube back and swap it for a presta once he's got them in stock.