Odd transition to joy

I've written before how much I love my job.  And the end of this particular week is part of the reason why; I got off the airplane to join a thousand of my colleagues who, like me, love doing math.

No, really.  Last night at the opening banquet of our summer convention I saw all sorts of friends huddled in conversations about generalized eigenvalues; people who compared notes on their latest teaching assignments; smiles and hugs all around.  After dinner for 400 people, there was a musical where we sang -- I kid you not -- lyrics like these (to the tune of "All that Jazz"):

Number theory and topology!
         And all that math!
Graphs and hyperbolic symmetry!
        and all that math!
Come on, guys, let’s congregate today
here at the summer meetings of the MAA!
We’re having lots of fun
Right here in Madison
With All!  That!  Math!

I'd planned to stay at a nearby dorm, but a good friend grabbed me and put me up in the second bed in her hotel room.  Whatever stereotype you might have of the soulless, humorless mathematician -- you wouldn't have seen it last night.  

This sounds neither "miser" nor "mom".   But maybe, after the first part of this pretty awful week, a break  is a good idea.  Today I'm going to hunt down some people who might want to grab lunch and talk about projective geometry.  Yes.  Harmonic homologies, here I come!