The place where lost socks go...

At the Event Horizon now, waiting for the first guest to arrive for today's party. They should be here any minute... but let's see if I can't sneak in a quick post before then!

When last we left our intrepid hero, it was Wednesday night... and he had just finished spending a delightful day at Hurricane Harbor with the enchanting tawneypup. Our hero fell asleep early that night, exhausted from the cumulative lack of sleep as well as spending the whole of the day out in the bright sun.

Our story continues...

Thursday, I woke up early (8am), showered, and went to work at Fermilab. At this point, gentle readers, I can hear a collective "Huh?" emanating from your lips. "But aren't you on vacation? Didn't you stop working for the lab well over two years ago?" All true. Interestingly enough, I went to the place of my last job (Fermilab) to meet with people who I will be working with at my next job (Imperial College London)... which will, coincidentally, involve an experiment (Super-Kamiokande) that I worked on two jobs ago (Stony Brook)[*]. Basically, Thursday morning involved every professional job I have had except for my current one (Oxford). Go figure!

Anyway, I met some remaining members of the Imperial group, who have been stationed at at Fermilab. I participated in a video conference. And then I got a tour of the SciBooNE experiment, which my new group at Imperial is heavily involved with. I stayed at Fermilab until shortly after 2pm -- effectively working a half day on my vacation for a job that I have not started yet -- and then came home.

Thursday afternoon was spent running various and sundry errands. While productive, they are not particularly interesting... so I will say no more about them. Thursday evening was much more fun. I went to Sidekicks for a special Poly Karaoke night that I had called. The usual monthly get-togethers are on the first Thursday of each month; given that I will be gone by then, I pulled together my own outing. Several nifty people -- including unclevlad and the lovely wyldekyttin -- showed up, and I got to see a couple of old acquaintances that I rare spend time with now. The overall crowd at the bar was small -- and the number of people singing even smaller -- so I got to go on stage more often than ever before. I think I sang nine times during the evening. Good fun!

And on that note, the first guests are here... so I will have to wait until later to write about Friday and my lovely date with iamthesphinx...

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[*] Now that I think of it, I have not written very much about what project the new job will entail. I should rectify this at some point.

Two days in, it's been a pretty good vacation so far.

Last night, I went to Sidekick's for the unofficial Poly Karaoke gathering that I had called. There was a decent turnout -- a dozen people showed up, including xirpha, salexa, sciffy_circo, electronicrope, the ever-awesome sweetsourcat, randyjackson221, raven_ap_morgan, and the lovely iamthesphinx. Lots of fun, good people, and good conversation. I sang four songs; it seemed appropriate to begin with something by British Anarchists, so I sang Tubthumping first, then the Safety Dance, next Major Tom (coming home), and then ended the evening with more typecasting -- She Blinded Me With Science. Good thing miss_tessa wasn't around, or else she would have smacked me with a telephone or somesuch.

Around midnight, things finally started to break up. I drove iamthesphinx back to her apartment and got the "grand tour" of her new place. It was really, really good to see her again. I finally returned to the Event Horizon around 2am. At that point, it would have been quite a sane and reasonable suggestion to go to bed. Especially since I had slept only four hours, while sitting up on a plane, the night before. However, I just had to check LiveJournal first. As chance would have it, kat1031 logged into AIM right after I hopped online. We started chatting, but quickly moved our conversation to the phone lines. It was nice to hear her voice again... for the first time in over fifteen years. To our mutual surprise, we each think that the other's voice has not changed. Go figure! This impromptu conversation was interesting enough to keep us on the phone for over three hours, until we were both about to pass out from exhaustion. We also starting setting up plans to get together next month, during the two weeks when I will be out in California. It was 5:30am for me (and 3:30am for her) when we finally got off the phone. I fell asleep immediately... and was so tired that I slept for seven hours solid without any disruption -- probably the best night's sleep that I have had in weeks!

Today, I woke up around 1pm. Very soon after, I called the lab in Oxford to learn the state of the cooldown and measurement. Then I did what nobody would ever expect of me: I spent the afternoon being mellow and relaxing. I don't do it very often -- I think I have now filled my quota for the year. In the evening, I got together with gyades and madandrew and nyssa73 to go bowling. I bowled four games, scoring well on three of them: 154, 151, 122, and 150. After bowling, gyades and I came home and hung out for a bit. Then I made dinner for us and polymorphism. They both collapsed into their respective beds shortly thereafter and, with the Event Horizon party starting in eleven hours, I will go collapse into mine shortly after posting this entry.

As I said, a good start to my summer vacation. Looking forward to seeing many, many people at the Event Horizon party tomorrow. From the RSVPs, I am expecting quite a nice turnout...

Wowza -- after over six months away, I am finally coming to visit the States. By next week at this time, I should be comfortably enshrined at the Event Horizon! With my three lovely black furry girls to lavish attention on, too![*]

For folks local[**] to Chicago, here are my social plans for the trip. Check it out and come join me for some of this!

Thu July 12: An unofficial Poly Karaoke at Sidekicks from 7pm until who knows when! I'm hoping that lots of the PolyChi crowd will show up for this one, especially the people I did not get to see when I was last in Chicago in December.[***]

Fri July 13: Bowling with gyades and madandrew.

Sat July 14: SUMMER PARTY at the EVENT HORIZON! With sprinklers and fire and frisbee -- oh, my!

Wed July 18: Dinner and evening with wyldekyttin, crim_ferret, unclevlad and the rest of their clan.

Thu July 19: resourceress arrives in town!!!

Mon July 23: Leave Chicago (boo!) for Starwood (yay!).

Careful readers may note that this does not even account for half of the days that I will be in Chicagoland. And that, gentle readers, is where you come in. I have several other activities planned, like SCUBA diving wrecks in Lake Michigan, hitting two water parks[****], my traditional walk around a part of the Morton Arboretum, and possibly making an urban exploration trip with stormdog and posicat. The dates for these things are not yet set[*****], so if you are interested in joining me for one (or more) of them, let me know! Together we can sort the scheduling out!

Looking forward to seeing many of you again -- quite soon!

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[*] Well, two lovely black furry girls to lavish attention on. Unless a major miracle has occurred, like one did with Foxy two years ago, I expect that Nona will simply hide under a chair for my entire visit.

[**] For whatever definition of "local" suits you.

[***] Not-so-subtle hint to iamthesphinx, sweetsourcat, et cetera.

[****]The water parks in question are Hurricane Harbor and Cypress Cove.

[*****] But will obviously be between July 12 and July 22 (inclusive) while not being on any of the dates already mentioned above.

Like the previous post, this entry is for my Chicago area friends. Once upon a time, I thought I would be at the Event Horizon after Starwood, in the first week of August... making it easy to attend the Poly Karaoke on August 2^nd. But, as Robbie Burns likes to say, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agely. Know what I mean?

Since I'll be in Stanford in early August, my time at the Event Horizon has been shifted to before Starwood. So no first Thursday of the month for me. Not being one to let a little thing like timing stop me, I am planning to announce an unofficial Poly Karaoke on either the second or third Thursday of July. That's either July 12^th or 19^th. Both dates are equally good for me, so I was wondering if anyone who would be interested in coming along has a preference. If so, drop a comment and let me know which of the two Thursdays is better for you. Using the replies, I'll settle on the best date and announce it on the Poly Chicago list in a few days.

Looking forward to hitting ye olde Sidekicks again... and hope to see some of you there!

Got back from Boulder yesterday afternoon. Proceeded to be really busy for the rest of the afternoon with a doctor appointment, a trip to the computer supply store, and my muscle toning class. This was the last class of the first five week session; I liked it enough that I signed up for another five weeks. Yes, it hurts, but I think I am actually beginning to see some change from the semi-weekly workouts.

The evening was not much less busy, really. cheshcat and I tackled the enormous accumulation of stuff in the storage space that we rent. Managed to remove a couple of boxes worth of stuff. Plenty more to do, but it was a start. Then we came home, had dinner with polymorphism, and an Event Horizon house meeting to discuss the upcoming changes in the household. After which, cheshcat and gyades and I wound down the evening with Smallville and a discussion of Illinois state politics.

Once everyone had drifted off, I also polished off issues #227 - #229 of The Flash, leaving only the final issue in the series for me to read. Slowly, the pile of unread comic books in the bedroom is getting whittled down. About seventy left to go.

Now I am getting ready to head off to CapriCon for the weekend. Amazingly enough, I actually get to be in town for a Chicago con for once; usually they coincide with when I am travelling. For those of you who are local con-goers, I look forward to seeing you soon... probably at the poly party tonight!

Thursday in a nutshell:

Started off by going back to the dentist for a scaling in the right side of my mouth. The whole experience was overwhelmingly positive... mainly because it didn't hurt. It seems like a dentist will never tell you when something is going to be painful, so I've stopped believing claims of painlessness. This time, however, was pretty darn close. Sure, the right side of my mouth was numb for four hours afterwards, making speech awkward, but that's okay. Really! And now I'm much less apprehensive about going in next week to do scaling on the left side.

Following the dental visit was a session of productivity, getting both work and busywork accomplished. Due to my inability to speak clearly, I worked from home and, thus, had the pleasure of seeing little furballs every time I left the office. Often, I would go into the bedroom and see various pairs (or triads) of kittens cuddled up together; each time it made me so glad that we decided to keep an entire litter. There is really such a strong bond between these cats, as they have been together every single day of their lives. And they act like such siblings, too: Quickly going from a mutual licking session to a fight back to cuddling. In case I haven't mentioned it before, Nona has a crush on Totoro (the one cat currently here who is not from the litter). She follows him around, sits where he sits, and generally begs for attention. Totoro is not an ideal boyfriend; he would rather be left alone and frequently hits her when she gets in his face.

In the evening, I went out to the monthly Poly Karaoke gathering at Sidekick's. As usual, much fun was to be had. There was a pretty good turnout, eleven people, so there was good conversations to be had. The music was a little late in starting -- it didn't get going until nearly 9pm -- but once it did, there were many good singers in the crowd, making life a little easier on the ears (not that I'm one to complain!). Angie had brought a caseload of karaoke CDs, so the selection was a little wider than the usual Sidekick's fare. I sang five times, splitting my selections between some old songs and some that I had never done before.

So the day started off good and got better... for a while. Unfortunately, it did not end all that well. It seems that the ghost of psychodramas past may be rearing its ugly head. I'm not going to go into details here, but I did spend about three hours, once I returned home last night, attempting damage control on multiple fronts. Feh. I hate psychodrama -- outgrew the stuff by the time I was seventeen. Hopefully it will die down on its own, rather than flare up into something worse. I'll keep fingers crossed.

In about two hours, polyfrog and I are heading up to Wisconsin for Congenial. Honestly, I have no idea what to expect from this so-called "relax-a-con", but it should be interesting. Looking forward to it...

After a hard day's battle, I finally got my linux distribution settings right for running the internal wireless LAN card yesterday. Whew! Took a lot of tweaking, but it always feels good to be victorious in the end.

As a reward (well, not really), I sent myself out around 7pm yesterday for Poly Karaoke. As usual, it was fun stuff. One odd thing, however, is that we usually get about fifteen people at these things -- and only two of us (Liz and me) ever actually sing. Doesn't matter, though, since I enjoy the company.

Somebody at karaoke mentioned that there hasn't been a Games Night at the Event Horizon for some time, so we're going to have the next one in two weeks, on Saturday November 20th. If you're reading this and want to attend, drop me a line and let me know.

Tonight, I went out with the Moof and a Poly Chicago person to see a production of the play Copenhagen. It was written by Michael Frayn, the same person who wrote Noises Off... though the tone is drastically different. This show was about Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, with a central focus on the development of the atomic bomb. I had meant to see the show several years ago, when it was in New York, but never got around to it then. Watching it as physicists was particularly interesting. There was a time when people in my field were taking bold steps toward re-defining the way we understand the physical world, as well as making difficult decisions that would literally change the political world. And, as the play drives home, holding this position did not come without personal cost. Wow... kinda makes you think.

Tomorrow afternoon, I am off to Argentina for a two weeks. As the weather gets colder here, I won't turn down two weeks of Springtime!

We're finally all packed and, after Poly Karaoke tomorrow night, we will soon be setting off on our drive to New York. This weekend is my favourite Pagan gathering and I'm all psyched up for it. Especially after last year, which was probably the best time I've had at P****** yet.

In other news, I realized today that one unexpected benefit of using the bicycle to get around the lab is that I get a much better look at the Autumn foliage. This occurred to me as I was heading over to the auditorium for today's colloquium.

Speaking of the colloquium, today's topic was "The Physics of Brass Musical Instruments." It was a funny and interesting talk, in which the speaker built a trumpet in stages, demonstrating principles at each stage. The speaker, one Professor Holmes, is not only a physicist but also an accomplished musician and composer. During the talk, he played a trumpet, an 1835 bugle, a classical horn, and a modern French (Freedom?) horn. He also played a coiled up garden hose with a funnel at the end -- which sounded astoundingly like a brass instrument!

This has been a long week, but a good one. Picking up where I left off yesterday:

My fellow post-doc and I talked for awhile after getting news of our raises. He has been on this job about a year longer than I have. According to him, the lab puts an amount equal to 10% of our salary into our pension plan. I knew I had a pension plan, but I didn't know how much money got contributed to it. I'll admit that I'm impressed. Between the raises and the pension money, I'm making nearly $52K now -- much more than I have ever earned in my life! And, more importantly, that is considerably more money than I need... enabling me to help contribute more to important projects. Honestly, sometimes I still can't quite believe how much I am being paid to do work that I absolutely enjoy!

After work, The Moof and I went to visit some PolyChi people for dinner in Lombard. Dinner was good, the conversation was interesting, and the company was enjoyable. Eventually, our numbers dwindled when a couple of people went home... so I suggested playing a game. We played The Settlers of Catan, which I won by a very slight margin. Close game -- got my adrenalin going.

Went home afterwards and chatted with classrevolution and LabRat about their encounter with the sheriff's deputy. I still can't get over how messed up that was! There were some funny parts to the story, though. For instance, the deputy saw the Four Square game sketched on our driveway from the party last week and assumed that children lived in this house. Apparently, classrevolution rebuked the deputy, telling him that people can still have fun playing games when they get older. I got a kick out of that...

Today, I did not go into the lab. In a way, this is too bad, because I missed out on getting to sing Happy Birthday to CERN. CERN is 50 years old now, and I've never sang Happy Birthday to a physics lab before, so I would have enjoyed the opportunity. For those of you who have never heard of CERN, you should know that it was where the World Wide Web was born.

Instead of working at the lab today, I drove into Chicago to meet with a colleague at the university. On the way in, I dropped classrevolution and LabRat off at the Haymarket Square memorial. Then I had a very productive day at the university, learning something of the software that I will need to use to analyze the inclined laser shots that we took in Argentina last month. A productive day always puts me in a great mood, so I was feeling good when I left work to pick up my comrades.

Once reunited with my travelling friends, we headed to a Food Not Bombs party in the city. Essentially, it was a potluck party -- vegan food only -- with a short meeting about setting up a new FNB chapter. The party was fun, and I got to introduce LabRat and classrevolution to a goodly number of Chicago Anarchists.

Finally, we got tired -- very tired -- and came home. As I said, it has been a good week, but it has also been a very long week.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub.

Saturday: Our neighbor has been trying to officially welcome us to the neighborhood since we moved in last November. She finally succeeded. Afterwards, the Moof and I played GO -- our first game in quite some time, and the first game using the full 19x19 board in many months. It was a close game, but he won with 33 points to my 20 points. In the evening, we visited with M&C, who made pizza for dinner.

Sunday: The kittens turned two years old! Wow, time flies. I gave them freshly picked catnip as a birthday present and I took birthday pictures of all four kittens, to compare with the baby pictures from 2002. Then I picked up langs_place and we went to Wisconsin to see Utah Phillips perform. His performance was slightly different than the Friday show, so I got to hear some other pieces, like The Preacher and the Slave. Good stuff! After the show, we got ice cream and sat on the Capitol lawn talking for several hours before heading home at about 2am.

Monday: Slept in, thanks to staying up until 6am Sunday night.

Tuesday: Went to a dedication ceremony for the new Haymarket memorial. The ceremony was pathetic; I can't believe they had a cop on the speaker list, but no Anarchists. One trade union guy spoke, reading the names and trades of each of the Haymarket Martyrs. After the list of what each one was, we yelled out "...AND AN ANARCHIST!" One guy tried to tell me that the Martyrs had been Socialists, not Anarchists. I told him to go read their writings. George Engel's last words before he went to the gallows were, "Hurrah for Anarchy!" What an idiot. Anyway, the memorial is ugly, but not nearly as offensive as the ceremony (or the previous memorials to the cops). After the ceremony, most people left, and us Anarchists hung out for a couple of hours. I climbed the memorial, wondering if the cops would arrest me for it. Wouldn't that be ironic -- arresting Anarchists at the Haymarket? Some pictures from the day can be found here, here, here, and here.

Wednesday: Had a good meeting at work with some of our collaborators from U-Chicago. Made plans for how to progress with my analysis. After work, I went to the monthly Poly Chicago dinner, which was held in the Burbs for once. It was my first Poly Chicago event since July, and it was well attended -- apparently the best attended dinner in months. In short, it was a good and fun evening.

Thursday: Long bike ride. Ouch. See yesterday's entry here.

Today: Had a reasonably productive day at work. Went for another bike ride (more ouch).