There’s an old Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where Calvin is trying to get enough cereal boxtops to mail-order a prize, namely a propeller beanie.  Being the impatient sort, he pretty much decides to eat enough cereal in one sitting to order the beanie.  The end of the strip has him commenting, “2 1/2 boxes to go.  Man, I’m earning this.”

That’s how I’ve been feeling about my book lately.  Pretty much every day I’ve been churning out a complete section on a specialized topic, which usually involves first burning a lot of brainpower to remind myself of the details of said topic.  One day, I was writing on vector spherical harmonics, the next on Zernike polynomials.  Currently I’m pushing my way through the method of steepest descents.  There’s relatively little left to be written, but everything that remains are more advanced topics.  I’m still hoping to get through the first draft by the end of the month, though — if I can keep up my motivation, I should be able to do it.

In other news, my h-index reached 15 today.  Considering it reached 14 only a few months back, my publications have been getting cited pretty well.  I am well-aware that the h-index is a  very crude and somewhat artificial measure of scientific relevance, but it is still nice to see it go up.  The number of citations/year for me has been quite satisfying as well; from the Web of Science,

In other good news, I received unofficial word that my tenure has been approved.  Of course,  I should emphasize the “unofficial” part, but it looks like things are on track, barring some unexpected disaster in the next month.

Even with everything moving along, though, I feel rather melancholy today, and could use some cheering up.  Anybody out there have any good news they’d like to share?