It was my advisor's birthday Saturday, so there was a conference in his honor thursday through tuesday. I don't work in the field any more, and didn't think I'd be up for most of the talks, but I went to the Saturday night dinner, and the 10am talks Thursday through Saturday, which were nice surveys of subjects related to his career, together with the occasional personal trivia.
It was all a little like walking back into a room I'd just left and finding everyone 8 years older. Well, the people all seemed the same. (But suddenly there were babies everywhere!) Though I haven't kept up with them, they're all people I like a lot, so it meant a lot to see them again.
Florian even had a math question for me. I spent a few minutes looking back at my dissertation Sunday to look for an answer. Unfortunately I had to agree with him that there was a bug in one of the proofs in my dissertation, and though it looks like it was squashed in the version that later got published elsewhere, the proof in that version is missing an intermediate result that Florian wanted.... So on Sunday I managed to figure out a little, but not to answer his real question. I'll have to give it a little more thought next weekend.
If there were twice as many hours in the week, I'd take up commutative algebra again, though I think I'd rather be doing computational stuff, which isn't something people here seem to be as interested in.