A Good Day

Yesterday was a busy one, and I was actually quite productive, particularly considering it was a Friday. I even missed lunch (which is atypical) because I really wanted to get a few proofs written, proofread, and emailed to a prof before a group meeting I had to attend in the late afternoon. I finished some other work after the meeting, and then, in the evening I went out for drinks with some friends.

As our crowd dissipated, I headed over to another friend's home for some poker. We ended up playing dealer's choice (in which the dealer decides at the beginning of each hand what variant of poker, from any in existence, we will be played for that round) well into the night. After finally losing my $5 buy-in hours after we had started, I decided to head home.

So it is 3am, and a friend of mine and I decide to walk instead of call a cab. Well, I should mention that I wouldn't have minded taking a cab (it was 3am), except my friend kept insisting that the walk could be done in 25 minutes. Stubborn old me was more than willing to humour his delusions just to prove him wrong (which I did quite successfully).

In any case, it is February in Edmonton and after an absurdly warm winter thus far, the weather has finally started to become more typical for the season. That means our walk is accompanied by -20 to -25 degree Celsius temperatures. Both of us were well-equipped for this particular situation and so we just shrugged off the conditions and entered into a lengthy (much longer than 25 minute) discussion about how the cop-win number of an arbitrary graph is bounded by a function of the graph's genus.

Now, I don't expect you to have any idea of what that last line means. As it is, I barely do. But I bring it up to make the following point: in grad school, no matter where you are, what time it is, what shenanigans you have just engaged in, or what weather is being thrown at you, science is never that far away.