Mitt liv som Tobin

[ dawn over san luis obispo vineyards, as seen from the train ]

I was delighted to find the Obispo Hostel in San Luis Obispo, a reasonably cheap ($26) and very clean place to sleep just a block away from the train station. I've been in SLO a few times before, visiting shamster and bobolly back when they went to school there. It's a pleasant college town, full of enterprising students, and with a walkable downtown full of independent businesses (not to mention curiosities such as the Bubblegum Alley). But I think this was the first time the town really clicked for me, though, enjoying slices of pizza and, then, hunkered down at Linnea's cafe, enjoying coffee and waffles while peals of laughter from one joyous group intertwined with piano music being played by another guest.

The town is a stop for Amtrak's Coast Starlight train that runs from Seattle to Los Angeles daily, and for the more frequent Pacific Surfliner trains that originate in SLO and run to San Diego. I woke up early and made the easy stroll from the hostel over to the train station, catching the 6:45am Surfliner bound for Orange County. I was happy to find such a functional little train station at the outskirts of such a functional little town.

The train made for a pleasant ride. The train itself doesn't go very fast, never really exceeding 40 MPH while gliding between small coastal communities, often traveling right at the edge of the ocean and other times moving through agricultural areas. There's an AC electrical outlet in each row, so I didn't have to worry about battery power while I typed up that livejournal entry about my hitchhiking trip (though of course I'd have to wait till later to post it).

I have to say that the cafe car, though, was a disappointment, selling only nonperishable trail mix and shrink-wrapped danishes and that sort of thing, the fare of cheap motel breakfast buffets and less appealing even than airplane food. Scowling at the other options, I settled on a simple coffee for my breakfast. Notably, though, they do sell Arrogant Bastard beer, a delicious San Diego microbrew—but not what I had in mind for breakfast. With nearly a whole train car at their disposal, and traveling through the most productive agricultural land in the country, don't you think they could muster something a little more ... Californian?

At Oxnard the train begins to head inland and the terrain turns into an interesting rocky landscape near Chatsworth, traveling through a sequence of tunnels and passing the northbound Coast Starlight on its way to Seattle. At Los Angeles Union Station the train pauses for 15 minutes before resuming the second half of its journey.

The train ran precisely on time, which surprised me. At Union Station an Irish man took the seat next to me and we chatted about our various travels; I felt quite legitimate with a casual mention of being in Belgium last week. He marveled about Amtrak's promptness and affordability--a judgment error due to small statistics, I assured him.

The ride to Irvine took 6 ¾ hours and cost $38. It's about 230 miles, giving the train an average speed of 34 miles per hour and a cost of 16 cents per mile. The cost seemed reasonable, the pace a little slow, but, altogether, being on vacation after all, it was a satisfying experience.

At Irvine I caught a local Orange County bus #86 right to my parent's house. I don't think I've ever before taken an OCTA bus, but it turned out to be super convenient.

I'd love for Amtrak to resume the Sunset Limited Service from New Orleans east to Jacksonville, Florida and on to Miami (which ceased with hurricane Katrina). I'd take that trip.

`Breakfast' of waffles with strawberries and bananas at four in the afternoon yesteday. We left for work at 4:30pm and didn't get there until 6, the hour turning our usual contra-commute into a regular rush-hour one. Upon arrival we were openly mocked for having taken fifteen hours off of work.

Late nights at the lab. Communal dinners with the commissioners in the control room. Someone goes out and gets some local Livingston fare. Popeyes chicken. (Gerard asked me, "You do know Popeyes, right? ... I had a friend who thought it was "Pope-YES" chicken!") Wayne's barbecue, domino's pizza. One night we went out to a place in Walker for catfish dinners. Stefan's rental car is an SUV sort of thing. There were six of us, though, so Rana climbed into the cargo area in the back.

At 2am we're aligning an optical spectrum analyzer at the IFO-REFL port. Hooking up scopes to collect data. Importing it to Matlab. 3am, we're in the pre-stabilized laser enclosure, all dressed up in white jackets and hats, the optics-worker equivalent of a surgeon's scrubs. Tuning the phase of the FSS local oscillator. Measuring the transfer function of the frequency stabilization servo. It seems almost like a star trek cliche of science when Rana shouts out of the PSL, "It's Oscillating!" and Valera scrambles to the console to turn down the gain. (Hell, we have photon calibrators!)

We have plenty of commissioners these days. Rana, Stefan, Hartmut, Valera, Kate, and me. So mostly Rana and Stefan sit at the operators consoles. Sometimes one of us runs out into the Large Vacuum Equipment Area to adjust something. I plug in a camera at the Dark Port. Push on a table to test for scattering. Otherwise I putter away at my laptop. Reading Siegman, writing out scattering matrices. Contemplate my thesis.

Engage the Thermal Compensation System!

The output of the machine is directed to speakers in the control room, turning our audio band signals into real audio, the whistles and pops and whines and rumbles conveying to all the health and the state of the Machine. A sort of stethoscope. When the machine is happy, it is just white noise. But now when it is just being coaxed back into life after a two-month laser- and magnet-replacing operation, it is full of noises decidedly ungaussian.

4:30 there's an earthquake somewhere in the world, sends out optics swinging. We declare it's time to go home.

tf, 5am: mañana

rana: Vaya con dios

I'd told Chris that I had this big plan to make a huge batch of waffles, and today we did it! Making them was pretty fun. Chris whipped up the five eggs, and by the time we added the liter of milk products to the concoction, it really looked like a huge amount of stuff! So I found a waffle iron, and then ran around and found some people to help us eat them. Javiez, Daniel Wallace, Martin/201, Chris, and I sat down to this huge pile of waffles and had a great breakfast. The powdered-sugar-and-lemon-juice style proved quite popular. I think it turned out to be a really nice little get-together.

Here's the recipe as my mom sent it to me:

Ingredients

• 5 eggs
• ¾ cup (1.8 dl) granulated sugar
• ½ cup (1.2 dl) melted butter
• 1 tsp (5 ml) ground cardamom
• 1 tsp (5 ml) baking soda
• 1 quart (10 dl) buttermilk
• 3 cups (7 dl) sifted flour

In place of buttermilk we used a mixture of ½ milk and ½ fil, which is a sour yogurt-like product available here. For flour we used rågmjöl, which is... flour. And baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO₃.

Procedure

1. Beat eggs and sugar until thick and creamy.
2. Mix in the rest of the ingredients.
3. Preheat waffle iron. Spray with spray oil, lightly, or brush with oil. Alternatively, put a dribble of oil in waffle iron and close so that oil spreads around.
4. Make waffles!

The ``Norwegian Style'' is to eat them cold with whipped cream and jam. We ate them the ``Fricke style'' with powdered sugar and lemon juice, which I highly recommend! And also orange marmalade.