Today had been a pretty good day.

Woke up nice and late: having the luxury to do so makes it already a good start.

I came into office, and stared at the calculations I am doing for the time being. (This is also known as research.) There was a lunch seminar with the grad students, which I didn't particularly pay attention to, but the pizza was good. After the pizza, I stared at it some more, and had an Eureka moment.

I had made quite a bit of progress yesterday in the calculations, and had basically gotten it down to the very end of the stage. But there were just a few pesky little terms that I couldn't get rid of. In the morning I figured out that I *must have* made a mistake since if I take a trivial contraction on one side of the equality sign, I get zero, and the other side, I have something manifestly nonzero. So in the afternoon my first eureka moment was when I found where I dropped a factor of two in front of one of the terms. The second eureka moment came when the "trivial contraction trick" that I used to check whether the calculation is sensible showed that one of the extraneous terms from before vanished, while another did not.

This I got stuck for a long long time. But then I used a different rubrik to check the calculations: a permutation trick. By the way the quantities are defined, the contraction trick and the permutation trick should be formally identical. But if I calculate using the permutation trick I found that on both sides of the equations I get zero, whereas by the contraction trick the right hand side is not.

So most of the afternoon went by with me trying to figure out which of the two tricks was applied incorrectly. And right before my 3pm class I figured out that I made a small computational mistake when using the contraction trick and with that corrected, the answer agrees.

So now I went back to simplifying this monstrous expression that I have some faith in being the correct one and, lo and behold, all the "wrong" terms cancel out! With this, I am officially 2/3 the way to finishing my dissertation! (And the last 1/3 does not involve symbolic computations [thank FSM for that!], this is why I call it a good day.)

This computation has been weighing on me for several months. I keep doing it, keep not getting what I wanted. It was good that in the past two weeks or so I have developed a few computational tricks that apparently works. Now I feel a lot more sure about being able to finish by dissertation and graduate in time.

In addition I had verbal confirmation that all of the people from whom I requested a recommendation letter (for job search) have agreed to provide me with such. So now it is up to me to write my applications...