What a Long Strange Week It's Been

P: Events of the week, by day:

Monday - by the end of the day I didn't want to think of it as my birthday at all, but "just another Manic Monday" when stuff goes wrong. I suffered from a sense of being overwhelmed by the move, by the expectations of others, by the inconvenience of our current living situation. In the evening, Seth and I waited 25 minutes in the cold and wind to get picked up to go home. Kathy's plans for celebrating my birthday also were thwarted by stuff that kept coming up. We ended up being at odds with one another.

Tuesday - Kathy had to find a ride to bring Ben to his appointment. Good thing too: when Kathy's ride arrived - a lady we know, the wife of a postdoc who's also moved his family out here - she recognized the water utility truck of a guy who pulled up to our place, pulled off the manhole cover in front of our garage, and started mucking around inside it. I ran to get the French dictionary and came to discover he was there to turn off the water, because the bills weren't paid. He managed to get a hold of a lady on the phone who spoke some English; she gave us one more day to pay the bill. Also fortuitously, the professor who's name is on the rental agreement (the "MPG" or "main professor guy" from the UofM) was in town and had already asked to see all the bills and mail that had piled up in his absence. He got the water thing taken care of. That bill will now be paid automatically like the other utilities.

Then on Tuesday night I got into a fender bender at CERN. Never mind the details. To make a long story short, the MPG came and looked at the damage and decided not to file insurance on it, so I got off the hook there too.

Ben's appointment went better; from Kathy's email:

K: Ben had his first appointment with the occupational therapist. She's an English speaking lady. Here is her website: http://www.ergo-leman.ch They did an hour-long interview of me, asking all manner of questions about Ben's development, and they watched Ben play with some toys and eat his lunch. Already, she (Kristine) has some good ideas for helping us with Ben. She feels we need to work on de-sensitizing his hands to touch (he'll pull back his arms and hyper-extend his legs when he's excited, she noticed). She had me guide his hand to a piece of bread after it was already in his mouth, and Ben didn't resist this! He resists me trying to guide him in feeding himself. They were quite enamored by Ben...one of the other moms in the waiting room came up to us and said to Ben, "Isn't life much more wonderful with teeth?!" Then she said to me, "Oh, he's a wee dote! A real cuddle yum!" I thought that was so cute. Yes, Ben is a little "cuddle yum"!

P: Wednesday - I got up early (4:30 a.m.!) in order to join the biweekly meeting of my men's group back in the Twin Cities via Skype (ain't technology great! with it we can stay connected).

Kathy and Ben went to the nearby town of Chevry to see an apartment. The living room was absolutely huge, and square. The kitchen was thrown in as an afterthought, and there was only one closet in the whole place. Seems like they don't know how to make use of space - or else they expect tenets to provide all of the storage space freestanding...We decided to pass.

Thursday and Friday - Physics meetings going on throughout the day. In the afternoons on both days I went up to "Point 5" in Cessy, France, where the CMS experiment is physically located, underground. I had gotten all my clearances in order, so this was my first opportunity to see the caverns full of hardware, computers and people feverishly working to put the huge thing together. Reminded me one reason why I came out here in the first place: This is one awesome project to work on! The project website has links to lots of cool pictures and web cameras and explanations, if you like. My first day there I ended up being the last guy in the counting room, so had to wander 'round and turn a few things off.

Here we see a picture of Phil after his first successful day working at Point 5, modeling all the latest in Point 5 fashion. Starting at the bottom you have the hard-toed safety boots, which look conveniently like hiking boots. Moving up from there you see the CERN badge hanging on a blue CERN tether. This is convenient in that you always know where your badge is. Phil learned this lesson the hard way, by going up to Point 5, pulling up to the gate and only then realizing that he didn't have his badge. (Imagine him frantically looking through the car while other cars start socking him in from behind, honking their horns - you get the picture.) Then to top it all off (literally) is the safety helmet and flashlight - for those annoying times when someone pulls the "arret d'urgence" alarm and kills the power to the whole underground cavern. Around Phil you see the detritus of a failed bday celebration from Monday, the bird clock that we can't hang on the wall, and a picture of a chicken. If you know Kathy, you don't have to ask.


On Friday I had a medical exam scheduled - necessary to receive my personal dosimeter (logs radiation exposure). A lady told me to drop my stuff in the office, a hearing test would be first. For some reason she was pointing to the bathroom and trying to hand me a cup - for a hearing test?? Then I realized she didn't say "hearing", she said "urine"! Well, okay...

Today (Saturday) we plan to see another apartment very close by, right next door really. And go look at used automobiles. Tomorrow we've been invited to dinner by the aforementioned postdoc's family.

Some meta-communication:

1) As our friend Naomi discovered, the little envelope at the bottom of each blog entry does NOT post a comment to the blog , it sends us an email. Click on the "X Comments" text right next to the envelope (X being a number like 0,1,2...) and that will take you to a comment form.

2) Tonight we "fall behind" an hour here in Europe. However, NOT so in the states! Last year Congress changed the dates for DST. States that observe DST will not change their clocks until next week. Practically speaking then, this means that for this coming week only the time difference between Geneva and Minnesota will be 6 hours, not 7. Between Geneva and PA/East Coast, it will be 5 hours, not 6. (8 hours, not 9, for West Coast)

Check back, I'll be adding pictures at some point...
-PKBD