Update and Office Chairs

Monday of this week was the first day that I tried to come back to work a full day. I did manage to make it through to 5:00, but around 3:00 I hit a wall. I was starting to ache and feel very, very drained. I basically went home at that point and collapsed for the evening.

Tuesday I lasted until about 11:30 and then I had to bail out for home. I stopped off at the surgeon’s office on the way, though, and got him to write me up a new set of working orders to go back on half days until the 24th. I took all day Wednesday off to recuperate, since I was in a fair bit of discomfort and came back in for a half day yesterday and today. I’m on Aleve today to help with the continual backache, and it seems to be helping.

I also came in to the office this morning to find that a loaner desk chair had been delivered to my cubicle until my new chair finishes getting built. The ergonomics folks ordered me a new chair last week that will hopefully provide me with more support and comfort for working here at the office. The thing actually looks kind of futuristic. The loaner I’m using right now is very similar to the one they ordered for me and is a thousand times more comfortable than the standard-issue office chair. Of course, the one they ordered for me fell in line with my general tastes – it was one of the most expensive chairs they sell to the tune of over $500. I’m just glad I’m not the one who has to pay for it.

Getting Back to Math

One of the things about my undergraduate college experience that I have always wished I could do over is to go back and retake all four of my Calculus classes as well as Differential Equations. I really enjoyed the math, but an unfortunate hazard of being a poor kid paying his way through college was that I ended up devoting a full 20-30 hours a week to working in the cafeteria in hopes of knocking my college debt down a smidge. As a result I never really got to learn Calculus as well as I wanted to. So, I went through the boxes of books my wife and I have yet to unpack (we moved into this house almost two years ago) and found my old Calculus text, from which I intend to teach myself Calculus again. And if I run into trouble, well, my father-in-law is the professor from whom I took Calculus I-III from, so I’m sure he’d be happy to clear up any confusion I have.

The beauty of WordPress.com is that it has , the math markup software, built right in – and since I can’t get installed on my primary blog, I will probably be using this one for awhile to do things like this:

I’m rather looking forward to this, as I’ve always been something of a numbers geek. Any other numbers geeks out there who want to share their math learning?