I will fly to Austin on Sunday so that I can give a talk on MEMS resonator simulation on Monday morning at the computational mechanics conference. I'll be back in Berkeley come Friday, and that will be it for my summer travels. I'd originally planned to go home at the start of August, but I'm tired of travel, and want to spend the rest of my summer enjoying my own bed and my own cooking. And, of course, writing.
To my family and Maryland friends: I hope I'll get to see you -- at least some of you -- for Christmas or the New Year.
On an unrelated note, I am now the proud owner of one new fountain pen and one rehabilitated fountain pen. And I'm cackling over these things, I am. I've had the older pen for quite a while, but for the past couple years I've not used it. It has a fine nib, and it gets quirky when it's not very clean; unfortunately, it's hard to clean the nib when you only use cartridge ink. I got a converter for it and spend a quarter of an hour using the converter to flush water through the nib; at the end of that time, the water was running clear and I was able to write again. Hooray!
The new pen also has a cartridge converter. I filled both pens with blue ink. One day, I hope to be able to perform this task without turning my hands blue.