Yesterday, I hit the road from Bloomington and headed north to West Lafayette, and Purdue University. Purdue is a place I knew little about before I arrived, but the many posters on the walls of the physics department told the tale. From detector fabrication (CDF hadron calorimeter, CLEO silicon detector, CMS pixels) to flavor physics, B_{s} mixing, new physics searches, active galactic nuclei, string theory – they have a very diverse research effort. I was a little later than I’d intended, so I was whisked off to meet with graduate students as soon as I arrived. We would up chatting until almost lunch, and then I had a chance to meet faculty and discuss their research afterward.
My last seminar of the fall went great, and today I will leave for California and return home. It’s only been a few days, but with all the travel that Jodi and I have been doing lately home is very much where I want to be right now (especially in the lead up to Thanksgiving). One thing I’ll miss about the Midwest is the weather. I mentioned this last night as my host, his family, and I were leaving dinner. A gentleman at a nearby table quipped that he’d be happy to swap weather with me and send all the cold to California. I quipped back that he should think carefully about whether he likes fire more than cold right now, but he seemed pretty certain he’d take the risk.
All joking aside, I’ll miss the reminder that I’m mortal, the reminder that comes everytime a blast of cold air punches through some crack in my scarf or my jacket.
