Like Sands Through the Hourglass, So Are the Days of My Weekend

I don't think I could have asked for a better weekend. Sure, I got next to no work done, but given the chance, I wouldn't change any of my time management decisions from the last two days.  This post probably won't have much science until the very end (and even then it won't be a lot), so if you want to read about my life, continue, but if you just want to get to the stuff about space, feel free to skip a few paragraphs.

It all started, as most weekends do, on Friday night. I had just closed my eyes for a nap when I got a call from my school-year roommate telling me that her best friend from high school was in town.  He lives in Georgia and I hadn't seen him since he came up to visit two years ago, so I promptly jumped right out of bed and ran over to see them. We spent the night talking and listening to music.  And then we got cheesy bread from Domino's.  It was a pretty great night.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to my alarm at 8:00 and realized that this was the first time since I moved into my summer housing that I had the option of sleeping as long as I wanted. Obviously I took it, and didn't wake up until after noon.  I probably would have slept longer but I got a text from my cousin saying that he was in town.  I woke up and got ready to meet him.  We had lunch and then went to meet his friends from college who live around Boston.  I only meant to spend a few hours with him/them, but ended up spending about nine. Oooops. But it was pretty fantastic. And I got some nice feedback on my ideas for my thesis from unbiased parties who don't have any reason to tell me things just to make me feel good!

Today was going to be the day I got stuff done. Did that happen? Not really.  Instead of working on my research in the morning, I slept. Instead of working on my research in the afternoon, I went all the way out to the suburbs of Boston to lose horribly to my cousin and his friends in Super Smash Bros. And instead of working on my research in the evening, I played --and won -- Spades with the rest of the Banneker group at my advisor's house.

Now it's Sunday night, and I haven't really done anything super productive, but I'm really okay with it. But just so I don't feel completely useless, I'm going to make and share a To Do list for this week.

1. Finish testing the script that will take raw Kepler data and "detrend" it. I have no idea why it's called detrending. I just know that it takes raw Kepler data like this and subtracts the telescope's response to return a more-or-less flat line. 
2. Learn how to run light curve fitting algorithms (the rigorous kind, not like what I did in Astro 16 with Excel)
3. Start LaTeXing my report for the Exoplanet project
4. Make a list of Observation IDs to process using HIPE and actually start processing them 
5. Analyze the data that's already been processed. 

It's going to be a busy week, but I'm ready.