No time for Europe: CERN, she calls

Bat40 is bilaterally symmetric;
Donc,
nous tracons la limite,
nous coupon elle,
nous avons deux moities.



The LHC Building (Bâtiment 40, or "40" to its friends)

It was CMS Week, a local holiday observed by staying inside despite the beautiful weather and holding long meetings.

I have little patience for long meetings.

Once you are exhausted by content-free talks, stubborn semantic squabbles, and sheer overwhelming unbrokenness of the meetings, it's time to buy rounds of beer, wine, and snacks on the flagstone terrace of R1 (Restaurant Un).



HCal, my peeps, are particularly good at this. Above, Steve Lynn of Miami refuses to sit still for the long exposures of natural light around sunset. (Middle) Wine bottles obscuring two collaborators visting for the meetings and Arno, our Coding Wizard and a post doc in my group. Right, with their wine: Ianos who makes the radioactive calibration sources move through the detector, Arjan, who develops the next generation of high-gain, low-noise photodetectors (and is CERN's closest approach to a Big Lebowski, though Dutch), and our Pomeron-hunter. Don't know what they are? No one does, mon chou.

The HCAL Last Supper.

(actually, this was still a few hours before supper.)

_Dr. S

So this guy moves to the Rhone Valley...

The morning I moved to another continent

~

My trusty, much appreciated moving crew.
The cat had chosen the night before all this to go explore the neighborhood.
Lost Cat,
the poster would read,
Is he chillaxin' on top of your cat right now?

Then came the longest day of my recent life. Scant pictures, but lots of memories. By 8 or 9pm (the first time that day), I was walking through the airport parking lot with just this suitcase and this bicycle, all I brought with me to live. Everything I wouldn't be needing at CERN was stored away in the physics department.

Somewhere in here, I took a long flight sandwiched between two German business men: AutKoldPforDerNicht, and TossenzTurnzPfitpfullie. Otherwise they were nice, and I got a few minutes of sleep, even. It was 14h when we arrived, my advisor and I went to CERN to glad hand various characters, we dumped my stuff in my current temporary lodging (Ferney-Voltaire, France side of the border), and we stayed out with more than a dozen fellow collaborators drinking and eating. Just before 2am, I gratefully hit the sack.

New Place: voila.
Je suis crapped out.
~

Exploring the next day, the place is perfectly decent.

...not exactly my taste, but clean enough and spacious enough...

The French make scary stairs that eat you, then fence you out so you don't get eaten. Nice.

and the wildlife... I didn't know the Rhone Valley had marmosets who, according to this warning sign, will arrest you and make demands.

Watch out for marmosets.
_Dr. S