Boy do I need to sleep

I was up all night working on my fluids midterm, and I made some progress. I didn't do great, but I'm pretty sure nobody did. I didn't talk to anyone who sounded close to confident that they had even a single problem right.

Went to class today, despite feeling exhausted and very queasy. In scientific computing the prof handed back homeworks from 2 weeks ago, and there wasn't one with my name on it! Unbelievable. Apparently it's been lost, after I spent days on it. Even more incredibly, there was one homework left over with no name on it...but it wasn't mine! Somebody not enrolled in or attending the class is doing homework anonymously, looks like. If I'd been fast on my feet, instead of half asleep, I would have claimed it, because it was a perfect grade. Instead I said "nah..I never do math in pen."

This is in a class where homework sets are 48% of the final grade. The class is going to kill me.

Earlier this morning I started looking at the answer key for a midterm I'm supposed to be grading in the class I'm TA'ing. One of the questions was "The times of high tide and low tide shift _______ each day." Two of the possible answers were "forward" and "back." Because the moon revolves around the earth, tides one day happen almost an hour later than tides the preceding day. That much I knew. But for the life of me I couldn't decide whether later was "forward" or "backward." I mean if you move a meeting forward, it happens earlier. But if you move the clock forward, you're moving it to a later time. This completely blew my mind and after 20 minutes of thinking about it, I decided I was in no condition to grade a midterm. I still don't know if it's forward or back.

Such was the condition of my brain when I was finishing up fluid mechanics this morning. Scary.

I still have to get the damned things graded somehow. Class is at 2:00 tomorrow, and for some reason we want to hand them back before fall break, which starts Thursday, thank god. I plan to stay with my family in Asheville and study scientific computing.

Tomorrow afternoon is my semiannual graduate committee meeting, a meeting with my advisor and two other faculty members to talk about my plans and my progress. It should be interesting because I was starting to lose it on Sunday and sent my advisor this long rambling email about how I was probably going to flunk out, if I didn't drop out first.