What December's been like so far

Alex oniugnip has already written about what December has been like for us so far. Here's the story from my perspective.

At the beginning of the month, I returned to Hacker School for a second residency with them. My first residency there had been over the summer, and I'd visited twice during that "batch" (as they call them) -- once close to the beginning of the batch in mid-June and once close to the end, in early August.¹ I'd loved doing it that way, but unfortunately, this fall I couldn't really justify being away at Hacker School twice, so I signed up to go only once, during the first week of December. Excitingly, Alex was also part of the HS residency program this time, and so we got to go to New York together.²

The first week of December was supposed to have been a perfect time for me to be out of town at Hacker School, since my thesis proposal presentation was supposed to have been over with by then. As it turned out, though, my original proposal date of November 21 had to be pushed back because my advisor asked me to work on a mid-November paper submission instead. Then, due to a combination of factors including Thanksgiving, Hacker School, and my committee members' various other commitments, the only day and time at which we could all be present for my proposal was December 6 at the decidedly uncivilized time of 8:30 in the morning. So, the plan became that Alex and I would fly to New York, spend four intense days in residence at Hacker School, and then fly home late on the night of the 5th, at which point I'd grab a few hours of sleep before getting up early, going to campus, and giving my presentation. What could possibly go wrong?

Shortly after we left for New York, our house back in Bloomington was burglarized. Our good friend Rebecca had been coming by the house every day to look after our cats, and she was the one to discover that someone had broken in by smashing a glass panel in our back door. They took a laptop, our TV, our PS3, various video games and movies, a couple of guitars, and a bass guitar, and left some other things broken or in disarray in their hurry to leave.

When we found out about the burglary, we were at a diner in Manhattan, catching up with our local friend Brett (whose art you might like) and relaxing after a long first day at Hacker School, which had culminated in Alex giving a talk to a room full of enthusiastic and inquisitive students about NLP, statistical machine translation, and his work on Guampa. Rebecca was incredibly apologetic about interrupting our trip with bad news. She'd already called the police, and they had swabbed the door for DNA samples; over the phone, we tried to help them make a list of what was missing. Thankfully, Rebecca and the cats were fine, despite there being broken glass all over the kitchen floor and a broken lamp in the living room.

We don't think that anything the thieves took was irreplaceable, and most of it wasn't even particularly valuable. We hadn't even used the guitars in a long time, and certainly none of them were nice guitars. In fact, the thieves may have done us a favor by relieving us of the burden of moving them when we graduate and skip town. The laptop they took was a cast-off old one of Alex's that I had been using as a replacement for an ailing desktop machine; I didn't lose any data, because the only important stuff I had on there was in remote repositories. I'm sure some of the stuff they didn't take was more valuable than what they took -- they didn't take any desktop computers, or our bikes, or either of my keyboards. So I'm not mourning the loss of the stuff itself, just the loss of the illusion that our stuff is safe in our locked house.

I didn't tell anyone at HS about the burglary, since, after all, there wasn't anything they could do about it and I didn't want them to worry. I didn't want to think about the burglary myself, either, since aside from talking with Hacker School students and working on various projects with them, I still had to worry about my thesis proposal presentation. I had to bail out of some social engagements to work on it