The sum, 27+1+11, are the number of days that I was away from home while Jodi was here in CA, the number of days we were both home, and the number of days she’s away from home, all for a period of 39 days starting on Sep. 18. Physics can be a tough life, when you enjoy spending time with your spouse; neither of our families seem to understand our life, though I wonder if they say the same things about family military deployments (which are far worse). I know physicists who’ve undergone much worse separations than this (while still very much married), so by comparison it’s not the worst case I can think of. On the other hand, it’s our case and it sucks.
Passing the time is also tricky. I have a lot of work to do, plus a seminar this coming Tuesday at UC Davis, and plenty of work around the house. On the other hand, it gets awful quiet, and with many of my close friends themselves disappearing for shifts in the coming week, it’s going to get even quieter.
A BaBar Collaboration meeting is coming up this next weekend, as well as the BaBar Symposium to celebrate the scientific life of the experiment. I feel a bit weird celebrating the life of the experiment for which, technically, a LOT of physics analysis is left to be done. But I respect the fact that many people long involved in the running of the experiment are now onto other projects, and it’s important to mark their achievements before too much time passes.
Oh, and SLAC has a new name. It’s now the SLAC National Accelerator Lab (much like FNAL is the Fermi National Accelerator Lab). I, and many others, find it super-weird that SNAL contains the word “accelerator” twice and sounds too much like “snail”. That said, I am assuming this also saves the domain name – slac.stanford.edu – from having to change, thus saving a lot of money and preventing thousands of web-based systems from breaking.
It’s been a busy week, I guess, despite being part of the 11 days that I’m at home and Jodi is not.
