On Sunday, Matt & Jason hosted a no-particular-occasion brunch. I grilled a big pile of baby broccoli and made a double batch of Hollandaise sauce, since last weekend reminded me how easy it is to make with a stick blender. Had a great time socializing with bears at brunch. I got to tell stories about me and my mom & my grandfather all playing with fire as kids. (Plus Schmooze's high school physics class rocket boat project, which is a good enough story to tell second-hand.)
The last couple days at work have been all filled up with communicating across a dozen different channels (meetings, phone calls, email, writing things up), being supportive of the people dealing with the NSF site visit this week, and with reviewing this absolute dumpster fire of a paper. Every time I looked at it, I found another thing wrong. Not just methodological problems, but bad structure, terrible figures, missing essential information, citation inflation, and I think it's distinctly possible that the authors don't actually understand the math behind the methods they're using. I submitted it today as "major revisions" rather than "reject" because it is potentially salvageable and because one of the associate editors (who's a co-worker) steered me that way, but I will be kinda surprised if they manage to do everything it needs...
