Long weekends and term endings

This year, the April holidays are all weird. This is due to Easter being late, but it makes for some very interesting times ahead, in the next couple of weeks. This last weekend was a long one with Human Rights day on Friday. I could probably write a post about the meaning of Human Rights day in South Africa, but Friday was actually more a celebration of my mother's birthday for me. The whole long weekend also meant that my family took the time to get away from the business that clogs up our lives. My youngest brother spent the weekend on a Scout camp, building rafts and catapults. The rest of the family escaped to Simonstown, and the lovely sea views of the Simonsberg.

That was most certainly time well spent, no matter how unproductive sea views might sound. Whilst the amount of work I got done was minimal, the weekend away from the rat race was helpful in resetting my mind to a place where my university work is fun again. I no longer feel like I'm drowning, and I can appreciate the beauty and simplicity of Category Theory (whilst still feeling a little lost). I can also focus now on studying for exams. This might be another reason for my feelings of relief.

I have been working on one project per CS course for the last few weeks, and it felt like the work would just never end. Now, I have handed them all in, and I have some time to spend studying for exams rather than focussing on the implementation of the skills we were learning alongside the project. I can go back and do all the readings that I may have skipped while working on the projects. I can look through past papers and come to understand what I am supposed to know for each course. In this, I quite like the structure of my courses, taking only half a semester, and then writing an exam, and writing them off. It is a little scary to be writing exams on absolutely no feedback in terms of marks, but I suppose it just means I must make sure I know everything as well as I can before I go into the exam, not that I would do different in different circumstances.

What becomes fairly odd though, is that I write some exams next week, the week after that I have short vac, and then a week later it is Easter, and so there are holidays all scattered there. There is also Freedom day, and then Worker's day, and then voting day, all of which are holidays. So for the first three weeks of the new term, there is not a one which is a full week. It is a rather spectacular spray of holidays. Lots of time to either do intensive work on a single topic, or else time to relax, visit the beach, climb a mountain, read a book, something of that nature.

So having ramble on, mostly about one topic, I sign off, thinking about what remains of my evening, and realising that eight o'clock hockey practises are actually really late.

Life, the universe, and everything

So, I hand in my big project, hoping that now I will be able to relax a little. But instead I find that tonight I am restless, and unable to convince my brain to stop wizzing for long enough for me to work out what is making it wizz. So I am looking at what is happening in my life that might be worth wizzing about.

Only, things actually look pretty good from an objective point of view. I can go shopping for some sports equipment which I would like to buy, and I don't need to worry about either the money or the time. I have a hockey match which will be a lot of fun to play. And I am able to spend some time this week catching up on interesting physics things that have been neglected recently, due to project pressures. There is onehing which is a bit of a bummer, and that is the fact that my cell phone battery seems to have been overcharged, which shouldn't even be possible, but has made the battery physically swolen, and it loses its charge in about ten minutes when being used. But that shouldn't be causing my brains to wizz.

So it is time to think, what else is happening in my life. I have covered academics, that looks good. I have covered sport, that looks good too. Technology is being a pain, but hopefully I will be able to fix that soon, by buying a new battery. So perhaps it is my social life.

The question there could be actually, "do I even have a social life?" The answer to that would be yes. So is it worrying me? Perhaps a little. I have to tell a good friend that I will not be able to attend her 21st birthday do, because I will be away with family that weekend, but she will understand that, so tjat shouldn't be stressing me. I have some things I need to get done for my youth group, but objectively they are all fairly simple.

So I come to the conclusion, that there is no one thing that causes my brains to wizz like mad, but rather perhaps a collection of things. It would be awesome if things were all simple, and peoples reactions were as predictable as a physics edperiment, or a piece of complex code. But unfortunately there is no debugger in the IDE of life, so we just have to put up with the occasional bug, and possibly create a work around. That's why life hacks are so popular. So if that is the case, then I will steal shamelessly from Douglas Adams, and say the answer to why my thoughts and brain are wizzing endlessly must be very simply, 42.