Not dead, just feel like it

Yeah, I know long time no post. I bet you thought I'd gone crazy from too many night shifts and killed all my colleagues with a some fishing line, or something. I didn't though. Honest. They are all as alive and well as they ever are.

So, I'm back in Columbus after what seems like nine and half weeks — largely because it was nine and half weeks — and it is good to be back. Who'd think you could miss Central Ohio (miss as in long, not miss as in omit, that is)? Well apparently you can, but I'm sure I'll get over it.

Anyhow is my quick nine and half week recap of myself and Kim's cross-country (and cross-continents in my case) trip in shortened form.

Day 1: leave Columbus... yawn... drive through Indiana... yawn... drive through Illinois... more yawn... spend the night in Iowa... yawn, Zzzz.
Day 2: try to find something interesting in Iowa — see Amana colonies, covered bridges, Des Moines and generally fail — dine in Lincoln, Nebraska (think Nebraska much better than Iowa as drive at night to Grand Island).
Day 3: hate Nebraska, drive fast to make up for lost time, have plane to catch on Saturday in LA, still hate Nebraska, stop in Ogallala — it's very scary — eat lunch in Sterling, Colorado, the restaurant is called T J Bummers, no that really is the name, see (notice the heart as an apostrophe), drive through Colorado, the mountain part is very pretty, drive into Utah, stop at Green River, the restaurant has no alcohol, but the hotel did have wireless.
Day 4, national parks day, drive through Capitol Reef National Park, across Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, visit Bryce Canyon National Park, try to see waterfalls in Zion National Park (see some water falling but not really a waterfall), drive to Las Vegas thinking Utah's very, very pretty.
Day 5, drive to Los Angeles, buy a $200 shirt by accident, drive to airport, discover I've been offered a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, fly to London.
Day 6, arrive in London, go to Grandmothers (no wolves), read mail, go to sleep, finally.
Day 7, go in to UCL, eat a tuna sandwich, send email to friends about beer, get drunk, get more drunk, sleep in Finsbury Park (in a flat near Finsbury Park that is)
Day 8, go in to UCL, walk to Paddington, fly to Los Angeles, drive to Tustin, eat at Outback, sleep in our three bedroom town house in Tustin (it's very nice but somewhat lacking in furniture).
Weeks 2-5: go to work at UCI, eat food, drink alcohol, go to bed.
In between Day 1: drive to LA have Thai food, see Josh Ritter concert go to sleep around 1:30am.
In between Day 2: wake up at 5am, watch England beat Paraguay in Hollywood Billiards, the English fans are almost as annoying as the American commentators they are complaining about, drive up the PCH to San Luis Obispo, drive inland to Sequoia National Park, see the worlds largest tree (peh, it's a tree), see a bear (wahoo, it's a bear!), drive to Fresno, Fresno is shit.
In between Day 3: drive across nowhere California to Monterrey, go to Cannery Row and Aquarium, drive to Stanford Linear Accelerator, sleep, sleep, sleep.
Weeks 6-7: Work all day getting ready for beam
Week 8: Work all night on the bloody grave shift.
Week 9: Work all day on hang test and then packing.
Homeward Day 1: Get up early watch England lose to Portugal, on penalties, again. Drive to touristy trashy part of San Francisco, visit Muir Woods with the rest of the world, drive up PCH some more, 'tis very pretty, spend the night in Utica.
Homeward Day 2: Get up late, don't drive through the drive through tree, drive to Oregon, sleep.
Homeward Day 3: Get up early for phone conference, go to Crater Lake (pretty), go to Bend (hippy town), almost run out of gas in high Oregon desert (had to turn off the air conditioning, drive less than 80, and put 13.2 gallons into a 12 gallon tank), drive to Idaho, bit falls off car, unimportant bit, so we drive to Boise.
Homeward Day 4 (Fourth of July): Get up late, still tired, drive to Jackson Hole, some prettiness in Idaho, watch fireworks, stay in scary touristy town.
Homeward Day 5: Go to Grand Teton National Park, finally see a proper waterfall (Hidden Falls), go to Yellowstone National Park, see Old Faithful and other bubbling hot pits, see enormous herd of Buffalo, drive East out of park, don't realise there is a mountain between Cody and Sheridan, know I do.
Homeward Day 6: Drive past Devils Tower, visit Deadwood (the town that the best show on television is set in), pay $20 unintentional to see Crazy Horse monument, also drive by Mount Rushmore, stop at Wall Drug (well you have to, don't you), visit The Badlands National Park, spend the night in South Dakota.
Homeward Day 7: Drive east, through South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, stop for dinner in Chicago, get stuck in Chicago traffic, who's stupid idea was this, oh that's right it was mine, drive in to Indiana, give up and stop for the night. We'd have made it all the way home if it wasn't for that stupid dinner idea.
Homeward Day 8: Drive to Columbus, watch Germany beat Portugal, go camping (cause I'm stupid), sleep, sleep, sleep.

It was fun a couple all in all, but I'm still pretty tired. I think the only excitement I've had since getting back were the two messages from a TV producer and what the hygienist said at the dentists. They went something like this:
Hello Dr Ryan, I'm so-and-so and I read about you in Golf Digest, I'm starting a golf TV reality show and wanted to know if you'd be interested in taking part, please call me on ***-***-****.
Hello, it's so-and-so again, I had the wrong doctor, please disregard my last message, sorry about that.
(mid way through the cleaning the hygienist picked up a dental tool and said)
I have no idea what this tool is for.

Five o'clock in the morning

So tonight marks the fourth (I think) night for which I've been in charge of the night shift here at SLAC — where the ANITA payload is currently dangling from a crane and recording pulse after pulse of Askaryan radio Cherenkov radiation emanating from a ten ton block of ice in the beam line. For some reason, even though I am getting something close to my normal (recent) quantity of sleep, when I'm working nights I find it much harder to maintain a coherent thought. Probably because must of the time all I can think about is curling up in a ball and going to sleep. Ah, sleep how much I miss you.

Despite the early kickoffs here in California, I have at least managed to watch two of the three England games so far this World Cup, having missed the Trinidad and Tobago game due to East coast West coast confusion. They don't look terribly impressive, do they. But having said that they did win their group, and you have to fancy them against Ecuador on Monday.

Only two and half more hours to go until the shift ends. Two and a half achingly long hours. Did I mention how much I hate the night shift? More than a little.

In which the author misses a wedding in Bismarck, a bachelor party in Vegas and much sleep

Yes, it's that time of year again... it's ANITA integration time! Wherein a large number of physicists, engineers and technicians group together in a large room and try to figure out how we put all our toys together and make them work. What fun!

So, here I am at nine O'Clock on Tuesday evening bravely battling against the evil forces of malignant disks and misanthropic IDE buses (trust me you don't want to know).

This weekend I had two invitations that I ended up being unable to attend due to work commitments. I could have been celebrating the nuptials of Andy and Amy in Bismarck, North Dakota, or commiserating the emasculation of Jason in Las Vegas. I could have been, but I wasn't, instead I was stuck in tooth and nail fight between firmware and software. And neither was fighting particularly clean. Still, at least I got to eat genuine Puerto Rican at Jason's (from Hawaii) leaving party after work on Saturday.

Anyhow between the work and drinking and the driving across America and the flying to London for a tuna sandwich and the work, I have not been getting my usual allotment of beauty sleep recently. Which as you can probably imagine is devastating. Still who knows maybe Rooney's foot will miraculously heal and all will be well with the world. Maybe.

Oh, in other news I found out I had a job at the LA airport (I was at the airport when I found out I had the job, not that the job is at the airport) and I found out we're definitely going to Antarctica this year (assuming that everything starts working sometime soon). So it's not all doom and gloom and insomnia.

Tales from Utah

Yeah, that's right I'm in Utah. I know it's hard to believe but it's the truth. Of all the States I thought I'd be spending a night in, Utah wasn't very high on the list. Can you believe I even suffered the indignity of eating a steak dinner without alcohol at the restaurant this evening.

Actually, to be honest with the exception of the no alcohol thing Utah isn't all that bad. For a start there is the 75 MPH speed limit which is a whole lot nicer than Ohio's measly 65, then there is the gorgeous vistas, again way better than Ohio. Tomorrow should even bring two national parks and hopefully a lot more prettiness. With luck I'll be able to avoid the crazy religious aspects of the state and escape to the relative normality of Las Vegas unscathed and unconverted.

On the way to Utah we've been through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado. Obviously, Colorado is clearly the prettiest of those states, what with the great big mountains and cliffs and rivers and everything. But, I am surprised to say that my second favourite state on the list would probably have to be Iowa. Now don't get me wrong I'm not going to move there, but it wasn't as awful as I thought it was going to be. I even bought a bottle of rhubarb wine (it seemed like a good idea at the time) and walked across one of the bridges of Madison county (ditto). But Iowa had lots of pretty rolling hills whereas all the other states were pretty much flat as the proverbial pancake. On the downside Des Moines is just about the last place on Earth I'd ever want to live, even Lincoln Nebraska was a whole lot better.

Only Las Vegas tomorrow, Los Angeles on Saturday and London on Sunday to go. Should be fun.

Featuring a chest of drawers and a pineapple

On Saturday night I went to a leaving party, to be exact I went to Matthias and Sabine's leaving party. They are leaving lovely Columbus, Ohio, and returning to Germany. All of which means that my office is busier than ever, my arms have hurt all week and I have a pineapple. None of which I were expecting.

The office came as particularly surprising as I was expecting things to become quieter after Matthias, my former office-mate, went back to the mother country. However, I somewhat underestimated the enthusiasm for other members of the group to be in the office. Not that it is a bad thing necessarily, just a little surprising. My best guess is that when there were two of us working in here people assumed that one of us might be working hard and tried not to come by too often. Now that it is just poor, little old me I guess the assume I'm never working and come by at will.

The arms and the pineapple were the result of a raffle, some stupidity (mine, of course) and a hilarious hour and half's struggle in the rain. In the raffle, which was a raffling of the departing couples remaining possessions (all for charity, of course), I won a chest of drawers. Because by the time I left their house a fair bit of alcohol had been consumed, it seemed like a good idea for myself and Brit to attempt to carry the chest of drawers home. Now just to make it more of a challenge we loaded the drawers with a case of beer, a bottle of whiskey, a pair of prescription sunglasses, a bag of tortilla chips, an old IBM laptop and the aforementioned pineapple. A mile is actually a fairly long way to carry a chest of drawers in the rain. It takes a lot longer when every hundred yards you (meaning me) start laughing and almost drop the chest of drawers — on one occasion almost became actually and the IBM laptop met its maker, along with the back left foot of the drawers. Still eventually despite the wind and the rain and the laughter, we made it home. And now I have a chest of drawers, so it all turned out nice again.

Work, work, work and travel and a bit of house hunting and some other stuff

Regular readers (both of you) will probably have noticed the scarcity of posts in the recent couple of weeks. As you may be able to guess, this is largely due to the fact that for ANITA (the experiment I work on) it is getting perilously to the time when the brown smelly stuff gets up close and personal with rotary air mover. But I guess that's why the pay me the small, to medium sized, bucks.

At the moment the focus of our efforts is about to shift from Columbus (home, sweet home) and Hawaii (home to flesh eating diseases) to California. In particular to UC Irvine and the to Stanford (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC, to be precise). Now being as we have to be out in California for an ill determined length of time, of order 6-8 weeks, myself and Kim decided it would be best to drive out there, in her car. That way we have access to a car when we are out in California and I get to see a bit more of the countryside (hopefully avoiding Kansas, this time — which reminds me I never got round to telling that story did I?). To be honest the drive to California is one of things I'm most looking forward to at the moment, as it will be a few days of relative peace and quiet.

One of things that I'm less looking forward to is the fact that the first thing I'm going to do when I arrive the Los Angeles, and in fact the reason we'll be arriving in LA and not Irvine, will be to jump on a plane and fly to London. Yep that's right I'm going to drive two thousand odd miles west on to fly five thousand odd miles east. I'm sure it will be fantastic. What's even better is that a mere 48 hours after I arrive in London, I'm going to be getting on a plane at Heathrow and flying back out to LA. I think I may have taken leave of my senses (or possibly that should be sense in the singular, as the others have probably already departed). Still I'll get a chance to pick up my birthday, and maybe Christmas, presents from Mumsie so I'm sure it's all worth it.

Too much of today was spent trying to figure out exactly where we, Kim and I, are going to stay when we are out in California. The base option is to spend five weeks in the Travelodge. Now it's not that I have anything against the Travelodge, it's just that I think spending five weeks there would destroy what little soul I have left. To try and find something better, maybe even something with a cooker, we've been looking at Craig's List and it's Google powered associate Housing Maps. The site is very nice showing you where all the housing adds are located, it's just a shame that most places want you to stay longer or be female or pay ridiculous amounts of money.

On the subject of ridiculous amounts of money, I've just noticed that Housing Maps, or should that be Craig's List, has a London. Amusingly the number breakdown on the price filter doesn't change, only the currency sign changes. What makes this more amusing is that in London all the rental prices are per week instead of per month. And by amusing I do mean terrifying. It's also somewhat amusing that on the London site instead of actual addresses places are listed as Mayfair or Kennington Station or, best of all, London.

The back in Ohio post

So, I'm back. And the Ohio bar owners association is rejoicing once more. Within a mere few hours of my arrival back in Columbus I was in a licensed premise and doing my bit for the oft beleagured alcohol industry. In fact I was in a bar filled with girls in costumes on roller skates, which I have to confess was not where I thought I would be as I sat looking out of the window of the plane a few hours earlier. The reason for the roller skating girls was, of course, beacuse it was the team debut of the Ohio Roller Girls. I am kind of tempted to attend the opening match on St. Georges day. But I think most of them could probably beat me up, so I'm a little hesitant.

The roller girls were just the starter though, the main course was a healthy helping of Tree of Snakes at St. James Tavern. And ever since Saturday night the chorus of Serious Knife Fight has been bouncing around my head. Well I should probably say every since Monday, as most of Sunday I was lying in bed with my brain bouncing around my head. And they said jetlag and excessive drinking don't mix, the fools.

I know I'm deep in long time no post land, but I'm afraid that's it for this post.