20 days.

The count to home is now 20 days. Important dates in the next three weeks (starting Friday, the day before last):

• 11.30 - Final Graph Theory assignment turned in
  
• 12.1 - Putnam
• 12.3 - Algebra homework due (possibly last assignment?)
• 12.5 - Number Theory extra credit and homework due
• 12.6 - Voula's birthday, and cousin Kate comes in from Edinburgh! to stay until Sunday
• 12.7 - Halcy's birthday
  
• 12.8 - BSM talent show (hopefully)
• 12.10 - Hungarian final exam (I think)
  
• 12.13 - Algebra final exam
• 12.14 - Graph Theory final exam and last day of classes
• 12.17 - Exam week begins (although the only exam I'll have during this week is Number Theory, I think
• 12.20 - Farewell party
• 12.22 - Fly home

The Putnam was, you know, fun... in that really nerdy kind of way. If I get even 1 point on it my name will be immortalized on a plaque on the LC math department wall. And I think I may have even managed that this year? I got a big old donut last year, but who knows, I think I made significant progress to a solution on one of the problems this year.

If this program has made me discover one thing, it is that I am not a math person. I was talking to Voula on Friday about it and realized that this situation is very similar to my relationship to piano. I am passable at piano because I took lessons for 8 years, but I never had the natural talent and I never had the drive to practice enough to make me really good. And this is how I am with math. I am don't have the natural talent to make me a genius, and I don't have the drive or interest to study hard enough to make me good at it. But just like I'll be able to pull a sonatina out of my butt when I sit at a piano years and years after my last lesson and wow people because my fingers still remember the motions, I will sit down with my kids with their AP Calculus homework and freak them out because my brain will still remember the motions.

But in the immediate future there isn't much more math. One more semester at LC and I'll be done with my major (projected classes are Computer Science 1, Complex Analysis, Voting Theory and German Lit in Translation - I was going to take Algebra 2, but since Algebra 1 is kicking my booty so hard I don't think that's going to happen) and that'll be the end of math. I'll need summer term to finish up on credits, so I think I'll just take a studio art class. And then after that?

Maybe I'll work in a craft store and on the side I will do craft projects I can sell and probably write a lot and try to get somewhere with that. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before that writing is something that could actually get me somewhere. Maybe it's because I hate hate HATE writing classes. I was in Creative Nonfiction last semester and hated every minute of it. But then I realize I keep up 4 blogs and a paper journal. And I've never gone more than a couple of months without writing in some form of journal, whether online or on paper.

But who knows where I'll be in a year... honestly, your guess is as good as mine!