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All kinds

I had a slow start to my day today, as it’s Sunday, and that’s what Sundays are for. I woke up naturally around 9am, read for a bit, didn’t even bother to make tea (Sundays can be brutally atrophying), then clambered back under the blankets around 10am. I’m quite proud of this lifestyle.

So eventually I do make it into the kitchen, and behold a table full of engineers bent over their diagrams, reams of graph paper piled around them, pens retracing uncertain lines of graphite.

I don’t feel combobulated enough to handle an omelette, so I pour all my ingredients into the pan and then just scramble it. Win.

I sit down with my tea as a spot is politely cleared for me, and listen to the scratching pens and hissing of old-fashioned pencils. To the clacking calculators. To the silent textbooks, which no one opens.

Poring over a diagram of something I’m pretty sure was mechanical, one of the engineers cries out, “How can there only be one degree of freedom?!”

I replied, “Whoa now, that’s a pretty deep question. Let’s just focus on the math, OK?”

Yeah, I’m a jerk like that.