It’s been a while since I jotted some thoughts here in the old blog. It’s been a rather on/off series of weeks. I went on a four-day vacation while my sister was here, then returned for a full week of research. Labor Day weekend was spent in Connecticut with my family, which was a great trip. Although four days of vacation in every 180 is not great, it was at least a brief respite from the non-stop summer work craze preceding it. Labor Day weekend was a good chance to tack a few more days onto the vacation, albeit separated by a week of research.
Things are starting to heat up again in physics. Now that the post-conference lull is over, it’s time to regroup and redouble efforts. The job transition from MIT to OSU is still on, with lots of new work getting attached to my existing portfolio of BaBar work. I still have a lot of learning to do in this transition, but at the same time no fewer demands from the things I already know how to do. This is certainly not uncommon, although it’s clear that work is linearly additive when you transition between two institutions on the same experiment.
In the world around me, things are also heating up. This is now the peak of the fire season here in California; in the south comes the fear of the Santa Ana winds, hot and dry and ready to whip a small fire into a 10,000 acre blaze. In the north, we’re contending with a few fires in the region: one in the Sierra Mountains and another south of San Jose, just 40 miles from here. This morning, the wind spread the particulates from the fire high into the sky and across the Bay Area. The rising sun, its rays passing through the smokey chemical haze, were transformed from a blazing yellow to an eerie pink. Here’s to hoping the heat drops everywhere sometime soon.
