Pause for the cause

 "You went quiet for awhile there."
"Yeah. Math."
"Math?"  

Data points, equations, and sleep. 

It's funny. 
On average, I burn more calories sifting through data and taking notes than I do out throwing dirt or something similar. 
Brains are funny that way.
500 calories. 
Just for the basic functions of thought. 
Now. 
Chew through mountains of data. 
Looking up and working through various proofs and open equations.  
Until I can't keep my eyes open. 
Then I lay back, listening to conversations about the data I was just sorting though and nap. 
Sleep is way more important for working through problems and learning new information than people think.  
It's how the brain encodes what you've learned into long term memory. 
It's the time when you brain chemistry equalizes and clears the brain fog.
creates muscle memory and solidifies linguistic understanding. 

Seriously. 

When I don't have to be somewhere.  
I'll work on a problem for like 3 or 4 hours solid.  Snooze for 10 or 15 minutes until some dangling thread of a thought hooks to another thread and the pattern starts to emerge then it's back up and working  on the problem again. 
I'll do that for days, sometimes weeks.  
Never sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time. 
Then I'll sleep for like 10 to 12 hours strait and vegetate for almost a full 24 before getting up to move again. 
And when I'm really crunching I'll go full non verbal for days, or weeks at a time.  I think my record was like 4 months when I was on overnights. I worked by myself, all my communication with other people was through paperwork.  
I kid you not, there was a moment on Thursday or Wednesday where I startled myself because I had been silent for almost 3 full days. 

"Must be some good booger sugar."
"Huh?"
"To keep you running like that for days on end."
"Ah, na.  Just good old fashioned insomnia and listening to my body when it tells me it's tired."
"Not even caffine?"
"Oh, sometimes.  On a heavy day around 200 milligrams of caffeine give or take. Typically 2 to 6 cans of soda..  So it averages out at  about caffeine equivalent to  3 cups of coffee through out the course of the day.   Less than your average energy drink."  
"So uh, what problem are you working on." 
Same one, the gravity one. The black hole one. and man.  sooooo much maaatth.  I feel like my grey matters been leaking out of my ears. 

I also updated some of the plans from a civil engineering paper I wrote a few years ago. Mostly just refining/reiterating some points about managing social programs.  Funding and tax structures for educational programs, and have most a syllabus done for an elementary to high school aged agricultural development program. Essentially building the basics; reading, writing, and arithmetic; into a school structure that focuses more on understanding and demonstrating knowledge over wrote memorization of, contextually, irrelevant facts to the students educational goals.

"Contextually irrelevant?"
"Ya know like 'Here's math, with word problems that poorly demonstrate real world uses for the material V.s. do something wild like I dunno, having the class manage their own field trip budgets or ordering supplies for their next lab project.  It's all fine and dandy knowing what 2+2 is. But two of what and why? "


 Ran some budgeting, sketches, and supply load configurations for a new system to shuttle between the ISS and what ever projects end up on the moon. 

"Have you ever done anything like that before."
"Yes."
"For what."
"I don't want to jinx it." 
"Jinx what." 


I have my scene outlines and a shooting schedule penciled together. I just need to finish the scene call sheets so I can flesh out the dialogue and address any plot holes or loose ends.
 After that I can see where the big money needs to be focused, what needs fabricated, and what doesn't.  
Basically I laid out a roadmap from start to release so that there are milestones and time frames for each scene and gag to keep the production on schedule and budget.


"What's the script?"
"The capstone to my freshman outing." 
"Pretty vague there bud."
"Yeah, and you'll have to live with that answer." 


Oh!! 
On a plus side.
  Aside from some minor repairs and upgrades that are entirely outside of my current budget, I did finally finish this workstation I've been trying to put together for almost a decade now. 

"Workstation?"
"Yeah, a general use computer for networking and content creation."
"You mean a laptop?"
"If I tried doing what I'm doing with a laptop I would have easily spent twice as much and still wouldn't have the full functionality I need for my work flow."
"Yeah, you know, work til you pass out, then wake up and go right back to work.  Have a few dozen reference tabs open while editing video and running renders in the background, then leave all that open and jump into VR for scale reference or design considerations."
"Whoa, that must have cost you a few bucks."
"Cable by cable, license by license on the software, testing and replacing peripherals. 
All told, over the last 15 years, about 10k or more. And I still need to subscribe to some asset libraries so I have some music to work with when I'm editing.
And man, if I had bought all of the hardware, peripherals everything all at once now, with all the b.s. going on and AI snapping up everything but Keyboards it could have easily cost twice that.  But that's where thrifting, working sales, and horse trading come in."
"Horse trading?"
"I'll help you move your fridge if you help me trouble shoot processing bottlenecks.  Or I'll cook you dinner in exchange for a few minutes of steady hands doing a bit of soldering for me. Ya know, work for work kinda things."

 So.
The thing that's got my anxiety pumping at the moment?
Updating my licenses and financials.  
It's at that once a decade point where it seems every piece of paperwork needs updated or resubmitted at the same time.
Volunteering at the places I would like to work that aren't going to be nearly as hard on my body as my previous endeavors. 
I started that last year, but ended up spending the bulk of my down time letting my hand heal and after/now rebuilding the strength in the arm and hand. 
Almost there in that regard. 
Hell, took such good care of it I don't even think there's going to be lasting nerve damage.   
I'm sure having a numb spot on the back of my hand wouldn't have been a the worst thing in the world to happen, but I'm not going to complain if it's going to heal. 
Small victories. 

I'll get through this week and see what the next steps are. 
In the mean time. 

More.
Math.