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I've returned to Rochester! I've been gone for a month, an expedition covering five missions in four states. Yesterday I was at Fermilab, currently and for some months more the world's most powerful particle accelerator. With some other students we disassembled an optics experiment, carefully packing lenses and beamsplitters and power supplies for shipment back to Rochester. A gigahertz photodiode and a library book were retrieved. In addition, we retrieved a laser that is, evidentally, mine, as my advisor kept referring to it as "your little laser," with an endearing tone as if it should reside in a terrarium in my hotel room and be checked up on every hour. After all this effort avoiding fermilab as a place to which graduate students are sent and from which they never return, it turns out that it is a nice place, more a pleasant park with verdant prairie grasses, ponds, and bike trails than the industrial park / grad student tarpit you'd expect.
A couple days before I went to Caltech to scope out their 1/100th scale LIGO prototype, a 40-meter interferometer where they design and test future LIGO technologies. One professor I spoke with there with silver hair and darting eyes exclaimed excitedly "These are Class 4 Lasers. They will set things on fire!" He wore a tiedye T-shirt emblazoned with a happy face. In his hand he held a coffee mug bearing in giant cartoon letters the phrase "ROCKET SCIENTIST." I inquired about a job.
Rochester in mid-june is exploding with life, trees huge and green and the whole place a jungle of unrestrained vegetation. This is only partially hyperbole: the hops vine grows up the house an inch an hour. In the evening, fireflies and mosquitoes. It seems (fleetingly) so much a paradise that four months of depression vacate the memory. But for now it is that paradise and we'll take it. Tonight is Midsommar. The summer solstice. Our landlords initiated a bonfire in the backyard and we drank home-made wine, swatted mosquitoes and admired fireflies. I had feared the co-op in disarray, but it seems to be just fine, with a new porch, and we moved the hot tub onto its new foundation (railroad ties!) this evening, and the "wildflower mix" Bree planted last year has shot up now, months later, as brilliant red poppies.
Pierre, a french student who moved in here while I was away, is quizzing me on starting a co-op in Turin when he moves there in a few months. He's taking an Esperanto course too, and was esctatic when I pointed to my Esperanto-English dictionary on the shelf just a few feet from where he was working.
Bree left this morning for her summer job in the Adirondaks, where she was to be a sous chef at Putnam Camp near Keene, NY, but something didn't work out with the hired master chef from Australia, and so Bree has ended up with a promotion to that position. The camp itself is a bit of an enigma. It's a "private family camp" and you have to be invited to stay there. Sigmund Freud once stayed there. The place bears prominantly in the family history of our landlord. It was begun in 1876. In any case I look forward to visiting.
A couple days before I went to Caltech to scope out their 1/100th scale LIGO prototype, a 40-meter interferometer where they design and test future LIGO technologies. One professor I spoke with there with silver hair and darting eyes exclaimed excitedly "These are Class 4 Lasers. They will set things on fire!" He wore a tiedye T-shirt emblazoned with a happy face. In his hand he held a coffee mug bearing in giant cartoon letters the phrase "ROCKET SCIENTIST." I inquired about a job.
Rochester in mid-june is exploding with life, trees huge and green and the whole place a jungle of unrestrained vegetation. This is only partially hyperbole: the hops vine grows up the house an inch an hour. In the evening, fireflies and mosquitoes. It seems (fleetingly) so much a paradise that four months of depression vacate the memory. But for now it is that paradise and we'll take it. Tonight is Midsommar. The summer solstice. Our landlords initiated a bonfire in the backyard and we drank home-made wine, swatted mosquitoes and admired fireflies. I had feared the co-op in disarray, but it seems to be just fine, with a new porch, and we moved the hot tub onto its new foundation (railroad ties!) this evening, and the "wildflower mix" Bree planted last year has shot up now, months later, as brilliant red poppies.
Pierre, a french student who moved in here while I was away, is quizzing me on starting a co-op in Turin when he moves there in a few months. He's taking an Esperanto course too, and was esctatic when I pointed to my Esperanto-English dictionary on the shelf just a few feet from where he was working.
Bree left this morning for her summer job in the Adirondaks, where she was to be a sous chef at Putnam Camp near Keene, NY, but something didn't work out with the hired master chef from Australia, and so Bree has ended up with a promotion to that position. The camp itself is a bit of an enigma. It's a "private family camp" and you have to be invited to stay there. Sigmund Freud once stayed there. The place bears prominantly in the family history of our landlord. It was begun in 1876. In any case I look forward to visiting.
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