Tapas

My stomach is happy.

I don't usually blog about restaurants. Because dinner hasn't been available in Somerville's dining hall during spring break, I've been using this as an opportunity to try some more of the local restaurants. The tapas restaurant I tried tonight had been on my list for quite a while, and I just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Clearly, I should have.

I had an early dinner on my own (it's a bit weird for me to be blogging about dinner that I just ate when it's only 6:40 pm, isn't it?) and wanted to have something nice because I had leftovers last night, skipped lunch entirely today (though today's errands did include an impulse buy of a very cool stuffed Sonic the Hedgehog, so it wasn't a total loss), and had been getting a lot of fast food lately. It was clearly time for a good meal. I ordered three tapas (which I pronounced pretty much correctly): meatballs, garlic fried chicken, and a skewer consisting of steak and bacon-wrapped dates (with potatoes on the side). Yum! This place also has a meat sampler meal, but it's for a minimum of 2 people and I figured I'd wait until I went to this place with somebody instead of nuking half of it. (If it takes too long before I find someone to go there, then I probably will go ahead with the nuking plan.) After seeing the menu (and especially after trying the food), it occurs to me that this is one of the restaurants at which Lemming and I should eat when he visits me. [It also occurs to me that the term "bacon-wrapped dates" could be interpreted in an entirely different manner---though it, too, would probably be delicious. :P ]

The other thing of note from today was that I started a new calculation. I may eventually bring collaborators with me on this project, but the key thing this conveys is that I actually have some time now to not just to read papers, supervise students, revise drafts, and do various other research things [which I have to be creative to find time to accomplish for any reasonable length of time when classes are in session], but that I even have time to get my hands dirty and do actual calculations myself! Hooray! I actually have a decent idea of a neat thing I can do with this particular calculation, though it will obviously take a while to go through everything. Additionally, I do have numerous other projects that are far more immediate, so even during spring break, I do expect to experience long temporal gaps between my chances to work on this. That said, it is really nice to start a new project on which I intend to be the first author. It is natural to write fewer first-author papers as one ascends the academic hierarchy, but it's both important and very nice to continue to do those kinds of projects too.