Cleaning house. No, really.

I wrote Lucy Vanderwende back, explaining my concerns about not being a Real Computational Linguist anymore, and she wrote back basically saying "that's fine, here's the project I want an intern for this summer, does it look like something you can sink your teeth into?" So I will get my CV ready, and we'll see what shakes out of it. Thank you, people who thumped me on the head and said "just do it, you moron"; you were right. :)

I was still a horrible ball of stress yesterday, though, and almost cancelled out on unspecified evening plans with ti94 because I wanted to try and make some headway on getting the shop cleaned up, which probably would have translated into coming home, saying "hmm, I want a nap," then waking up at 3 AM and being frustrated because I hadn't gotten anywhere on it. Instead, he volunteered to help me out. Thus, while semanticsmc and the Minion of Continuous Math worked on LISP-hacking in the living room, Tris and I knocked out the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom, half of my room (most of the scattered papers, all the books, and a lot of the laundry), and the shop. OMFG, the shop looks awesome now. I want to take pictures of it and post them someplace just to remind myself that the shop is capable of looking this good. The floor is clean and vacuumed, the tools are organised, the fifty bajillion enclosures I picked up at Surplus this summer are stacked neatly against the wall in an out-of-the-way place, the bookshelves are straight and dusted. The benches are still a bit chaotic, but one of them is semanticsmc's, and mine is at least full of Stuff In Progress and not trash. And it's clean under the benches. And we vacuumed the basement stairs. Yay!

This had the unforeseen side effect of making the living room look several orders of magnitude worse than it had before, but sometime in the next week we're going to tackle that, including the morass of Stuff I Don't Know Whether To Get Rid Of Or Not that is the wall o' desks in the dining room. Which would really be spectacular; I find it a lot easier to keep a tidy place tidy, and conversely, to let a messy place devolve into a worse mess. The hard part will still be keeping it that way, but I'm in a much better mood now.