For once I'm not writing this from an airport-waiting lounge, instead I'm in a surprisingly hip coffee shop in Miles City. I say "surprisingly", because Miles City is better known for it's annual "Bucking Horse Sale". This is a more familiar scene of the cowboy west involving drinking, rodeos and fights.
Yesterday was spent running around the university attempting to get my affairs in order. While I will be back on Saturday, this is out of the working week, and so I would have been unable to get important documents, and book tickets and so forth.
Kadie wanted me to see Miles City before I flew out to Australia on Sunday. Tonight we'll go car camping and watch the stars and then the gibbous moonrise over the plains. Kadie is a bit paranoid because she knows people here and doesn't wish for them to know that she has a girlfriend. I don't want to make things difficult for her, so I am trying to keep a low profile, hence the coffee shop.
I neglected to bring my wireless adaptor, and so for the first time in quite some time I am cut off from the Internet. Not that this is a bad thing, as I'm not expecting to need to rapidly respond to anyone or anything. My grant proposals have been submitted on time, and my only demand I have on myself is to try and understand some inorganic chemistry concepts.
I'm up to my armpits in the interrelationships between chemistry and symmetry. It's deeper than one might think, and it's important because the same motifs keep appearing again and again in nature and science. The haemoglobin which transport oxygen through my blood, the chlorophyll centre which harvests light for the pot plant next to me, and all the other occurrences where a square of nitrogen atoms holds a metal of choice. From the basis of maths and symmetry, we can predict all the other properties that this molecule can exhibit.