Richland, WA IV

We went out to find the Kennewick club scene tonight. The place "Evolutions" seems not to exist anymore, in favor of a place that Evan told me about. He told me it was a place called "Beds" which is sort of like a club but there are beds everywhere. Afterwards I sort of figured this was a crazy thing I dreamed since it seemed so odd (especially in Kennewick!), but lo and behold Evolutions had been replaced with a place called "Bed" (with the unlikely expansion of "Beverage, Entertainment, and Dining")... it was closed, however, so the beds thing might just be a fabrication. We did go into "The Beach" which was better than you might expect (or just the same, depending on your expectations :-). The population there (like the general population, I think) was almost entirely hispanic.

I met this guy Nick at the conference today or yesterday who's a 2nd year masters student at MIT. (Interestingly he's taking the SICM course there this coming semester.) This evening he and Stefanos and I went out to some mexican restaurant on Lee street, then walked across the street to the Atomic Ale Brewpub & Eatery where I enjoyed an Oppenheimer Oatmeal Stout. The table next to us was populated by LIGO SURF students (SURF = Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, pretty much the Department of Energy's equivalent to the NSF's REU program) who seemed thrilled to run into LIGO grad students but then just as quickly lost interest after a thrilling discussion of the first free spectral range. Across from the Mexican restaurant we stumbled upon a neat looking Italian restaurant that's housed in a traincar... looks like a good place for a date.

Back to Rochester in the morning. I actually could deal with staying here longer. Looking forward, too, to buckling down and learning some physics.

Too much conference, though. I feel like my blood is pooling in my feet from all this sitting around. The best part here was sitting alone outside the conference area on the outdoor picnic areas in the quiet, warm desert air and working things out with paper and pencil.

Richland, WA V

I explained my scheme for airline seating assignments to the Skywest couter agent in Pasco, how we should fill out little questionnaires about conversational preferences rather than this whole "aisle" or "window" thing (it seems like they ought to at least include "middle" as an option, for the sake of completeness even if no one would choose it). She cut me off in my explanation, asking, "Why don't you just tell me what kind of cute girl you want to sit next to?" "Any kind," I answered boisterously. "Done and done! Seat next to a cute girl," she answered, and printed out my boarding passes.

And I did get to sit next to a cute girl! With a crying baby! Oh the irony, given the previous discussion of a special "crying baby class." Oddly enough the baby didn't actually cry (very much). Or maybe I was in Crying Baby Class--this row of six seats held the statistically improbable number of three infants. And one cat. I didn't even know cats flew.

In Pasco the flight out was delayed, causing a cascading failure of our itinerary, which was to connect with a United flight in Salt Lake City, to Chicago, to Rochester. Delta picked up the ball and, at the last minute, squeezed us onto an already overbooked itinerary through Northern Kentucky (meaning they were then handing out free ticket vouchers at SLC for volunteers). That was right after we had formulated the ingenious plan to drive to Seattle, spend the night there, and then fly from there the next day—Adrian actually suggested that! So Stefanos and I were mildly heartbroken when they really did find a flight for us, through Salt Lake City and Cinncinatti (however it's spelt).

The woman sitting to my left asked me the age of the baby (on my right). "Oh, she's not yours?" she asked. OKAY THEN.

It was a good trip, though, and I enjoyed working through SICM problems on the plane.

Alas, my car developed a flat tire in my absense—a huge screw lodged in it. That's an annoyance.

The co-op greeted me with a huge batch of pasta being crafted by JP out of our seventeen gazillion metric tons of ripe tomatoes, the overripe ones being processed into food products as quickly as can be mustered. Yum.

Back at the house I had a new toy or two waiting for me. A few days ago I ordered an "ultra quiet" 80GB samsung hard disk for my laptop computer ($100) and it had arrived. Some of you know how insanely keep-you-up-at-night, disturb-neighbors loud this computer is (certainly all of my past roommates). The new harddisk makes nary a sound but a pleasantly faint whir. With a new systemboard, new display (replaced under warantee due to falty flex cable--could have been fixed for $4 part), new hard disk, new power supply (first one was lost in the mail, between Oscar Wilde House and a hotel in Boston), and new keyboard (spilled milk on the first one a few years ago), not much of this computer is the same computer I bought in 2001 prior to my trip to Sweden. (So, kids, what's the Linux distro du jour?)

It was a good trip in the end. Even if the meeting was primarily pretty boring and not all that useful, the tidbits might have made up for that, and somehow I feel better about the whole thing. Their mind control is getting to me—somehow I'm starting to feel like it might be okay to be a LIGO student for real. Maybe part of it is finding out that, however marooned we are out in Rochester, we are not operating in a total vacuum. I hope I can take up Nick on his offer to host us out at MIT for a LIGO-topics mind meld; and it was good to actually be held accountable to some more rigorous scientific standards. I feel better about being a grad student now, and am ready to take a second shot at it.