Laurie successfully defended her thesis, “Closure Operations on the Submonoids of the Natural Numbers”, this afternoon. She practiced it for the cats last night, but Guildenstern got bored and walked around on her computer before walking off to find something more exciting like lying on the floor. Puck came in late and slept the the rest of the presentation. However, Rosencrantz stayed alert and payed close attention during the entire presentation. I think Stretch would have enjoyed Laurie’s talk, but he was too busy hiding in case I was going to waterboard him.

Laurie’s defense went very well today, so now she will have a Master of Science in Mathematics and will continue working toward a PhD in Pure Math.

A BNSF locomotive crossed my path at 6th St. on my way home tonight. I cross those tracks daily during the week, and that is the first train I’ve seen crossing there. I figured since the sawmill had all closed down in that area many years ago, the tracks weren’t used anymore, but obviously I was wrong.

Romeo, one of Laurie’s parents’ cats, was posing for me tonight, and not long after we got home, there were little knocks at the door to the sunroom, followed by little growls that sounded vaguely like trick or treat. I went to investigate and found the raccoons at the door looking for handouts. I told them Halloween was almost two weeks ago, but they argued that I was wrong because tonight is the full moon and that raccoon Halloween was on the penultimate full moon of the year. Right! Clever, but those masked bandits didn’t get any handouts from me.

The last photo is the view to the west from the third floor of the Science & Math Learning Center at UNM.