Post exam plans

So with the exam out of the way, a few months with less immediate focus opens up. Today was to be spent, in part, on drawing up a plan for this period. All manner of things have been bubbling away in the background over the last few months - at the very least, I should start preparing a list of them.

But most of today was spent sorting out the study which has, in time-honoured academic style, become bogged down in books, magazines, offprint articles and so on, A trip to Oxford results in 30 boxes being purchased. It takes some time to begin to get some sort of order to things. Firstly, everthing related to PH400 can be boxed up and put in the garage ready for movng to mum's when the garage is knocked down in a few week's time. But left over are a whole series of articles that resist easy classification.

I decide that some part of the organisation of materials should be based on my tentative plans to do some serious work on Kepler. So one box gets every article that could be remotely linked to this project. Another box gets all the many weird and wonderful sociology of science and science studies articles that I printed off before Christmas and have rarely looked at since.

Then there is the pile of article that I could see myself reading over the next month or so. Several articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Theodor Adorno, Platonism in Mathematics and some other maths ones; a famous article by Charles Schmitt on Renaissance Aristotelianism; Paul Rosen's The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes (!), a couple of economics papers and one by John Milton on induction before Hume.

Finally, there are all the papers that vaguely relate to my proposed dissertation.

Gradually a list of projects is produced. Twenty things I'd like to do in the next week or so. Start sorting out the garage, clear my post tray, list some more cds for sale on Amazon, and so on. Then a dozen projects for the next two months. Various accounting and tax things, plans for next year's study, things like going to see the Richard Long show, taking some photos, going fishing, and so on.

Also today I made the first speculative financial trade that I have made for some while - the sale of an FTSE100 delta 20 strangle in the July options for premium £800. Just to get my eye in again and get used to the online trading system that I am now attached too. Bought a book on option trading too - Trading Option Greeks or some such thing. At 400 pages I am hoping its a serious read.

Finally, I also bought a picture frame in Oxford for my A3 forest picture. It looks very good and I will be trying it out in the main lounge in the next few days.