weird day!

Mostly for my own posterity, I wanted to record some of the things I encountered this weekend:

• A very satisfactory score on the Putnam
• The GRE Math Subject test (I think I did all right)
• A bike ride, including:
  
  • Approx. 20 miles including round-trip
  • Sunburn
  • A small yellow-bellied bird with a striking melodic chirp and a remarkable ability to hide in grass
  • Said birds hiding in a stunning plain of the greenest grass (approx. ankle length) I've ever seen
  • Inspiration for a song from a passing train (clichéd, I know, but no less compelling)
  • From a long distance, a grass fire
  • Nearly a dozen of some bird of prey all soaring together over (what passes around here for) a mountain
  • The most intense exhaustion I've had in about five years
• A very interesting bit of sci-fi: Arthur Clarke's The Lost Worlds of 2001. In a word: Did you think the novel 2001: a space odyssey was a lot more prosaic than the movie? Wait till you see the early drafts! (The computer is not evil.) It's great stuff, and I think some of it was reused in Rendezvouz With Rama years later.