Classic.

Thank you, xkcd.

I'm sitting right now in a very comfy chair in Mainz, trying to get my brain to focus on my second-to-last Spectral Theory assignment. Last Thursday, I finished everything (including the lectures) for Algebraic Topology. The research project is coming along, as is our paper summing up what we've done this semester (I still can't get over how exciting it is to write a math paper, and how giddy I get when I generate the nice PDF of our work - it looks like fancy math! Really, it's just typed math, which is not all that fancy, but still!)

And I've been absent here for a while. Yesterday, C and I went to a tiny Christmas market in a tiny town a very short train ride away from Mainz. We went with her neighbor and another friend to this village so small and cozy, it reminded me of Meadville, my home town, just a little bit. We got to see this amazing country house/farm that C's neighbor's parents own, to warm our cold toes next to a wood stove, have amazing soup with barley and pumpkin, and curl up next to the sweetest, oldest, most non-strangle looking Dachshund I've ever seen (I don't really like small dogs that much, but this one was positively lovely. At least thirteen years old, partly blind, and all sweetness- and with long, gray hair! That's right, not the strange, worm-like smooth-haired Dachshunds we're used to seeing yammering on corners.), pictured below:

Maxi couldn't really be bothered to get up from next to her favorite spot by the wall for a picture.

So, I went to her instead.

C's neighbor Miri has been known to take great pictures, and I hopefully will be getting some of the market from her. In the meantime, Erin, who came to stay with me last weekend in Budapest and enjoy some ex-pat Thanksgiving, wrote a lovely blog entry about her time here and her time in Edinburgh, where she is studying. Please do give it a read! Here it is.