Tuesday, May 19

I woke up at 5:30 and probably stayed awake until the alarm went. I say probably because I might have dreamed that I stayed awake.

As I woke I remembered waking on Saturday. Today I woke with a more or less empty mind. On Saturday I woke while proclaiming triumphantly that “123 equals 7b!”.

I had a reason for this. Friday counted as 123 days since the date of Auo’s death, and I had worked this out and written it in my calendar shortly after she dies, because I knew that she would appreciate that. When I woke I realised that 2020 counted as a leap year and therefore the number of days since the date of her death had changed.

Initally I thought that this meant that I had woken up with this thought on the right day. Later I realised that I should have thought this one day earlier, and not one day later, in order to catch the correct date.

Later still I realised that 123 in decimal did indeed equal 7b in hexadecimal, and vowed to stop thinking about that for a bit.

This morning the rector confirmed Tomas as the new head of department for Film & Media, now that Nathalie has left for a new post in Oslo. I learned this before breakfast when I checked my iPad and saw all the messages of congratulations.

I left for a forty minute walk, listening to Laurie Taylor’s podcast Thinking Allowed, which I continue to enjoy.

As I walk home I pass the line of waste bins at the end of Riskutie and stop to look at them. Their length constitutes their only real point of interest; assuming of course that you find waste bins interesting if they stand in long lines.

I walk home wondering if this train of thought has any advantages over thinking about hexidecimal numbers and decide that it probably doesn’t.