Time flies like an arrow...

Greetings once again...

So where did October go, anyway? Seems like it just flew by. And here we still sit, without a car of our own, a house of our own, or opposable thumbs...oh wait, guess we got those after all. Thank God for evolution!

A little backgrounder: Workwise, my adviser has told me to split my time 50-50 between my own physics analysis, and "service work", meaning work done not necessarily to advance my own degree program as much as to advance the project itself, which of course redounds to my benefit in the long run anyway.

Currently the chief activity on CMS is called commissioning. That means "standing up" the detector subsystems; i.e., powering them up, making them talk to one another, testing that they do what they're supposed to do. CMS is one huge detector made up of numerous subdetectors, each intended to detect different aspects of the passage of subatomic particles. There's a tracker with millions of channels, that detects the passage of charged particles. There are also electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters, which absorb and detect the deposition of energy as the particles pass through layers of dense material. I am part of a "detector performance group" assigned to the hadronic calorimeter, or "HCAL" for short. The service work assigned to me by my adviser for the time being is to commission pieces of the online software used to control the data acquisition system that is attached to the HCAL.

Well, the service work aspect suffered this last week because of maintenance work being performed on the hardware. The activity basically rendered our system unusable to people such as me trying to get their work done. Still, I will be giving a short 10 minute presentation tomorrow describing my progress to the group...

My work also suffers in part also because there are still so many errands to be run just in settling into our new abode. We have started searching in earnest for cars and also for places to live. Apart from taking care of Benjamin, this takes up a major portion of Kathy's day, running down ads and setting up appointments to view these things.

From this website we've heard that, well, if you want your car to start in the morning, buy Japanese; otherwise go ahead and buy French! Well, used Japanese cars for sale are actually not quite so easy to find...this week we managed to view a 5-door Honda Civic 1.6Si, and a 5-door Mazda 323 2.0l V6 GT, both being sold by private individuals. (We found them both on the classified ad page of the web site for the only English-speaking FM radio station in the area: WRG-FM.) The latter was not quite our vehicle, as you can imagine. Fuel economy is a huge thing over here, the price of gas is roughly $5.50/gal right now - in Switzerland. In France it's even more expensive. So even though the Mazda was selling for 1500CHF less than the Honda, we figured out that given the relative reduced mileage rating of the Mazda, that extra money would be burned up in fuel expenses in less than half-a-year!! Right now we are in negotiations for the Honda.

We also managed to view a couple of places to live Saturday: one apartment in "downtown" Ferney, and the lower-half of a house in Segny, a small village closer to Point 5, where the CMS experiment is. And basically, if we could have relocated the apartment in Ferney to the location in Segny, we'd have the perfect deal. The apartment was pretty nice as far as apartments go, but the view out the window left far too much to be desired. Still we enjoyed receiving a tour of the place by the current outgoing tenant, Moustapha, a black graduate student from Senegal who is finishing up his physics research at CERN. He had a lot of interesting things to say also about his experience of racism in Europe, and how the U.S. is generally more open-minded, a land of greater opportunity for minorities such as himself and his son. He hopes to find a postdoc position in the U.S. after receiving his PhD from Stony Brook U in NY (he went to Hamline U in St. Paul for his undergraduate degree!).

The tour of the house in Segny was also guided by fascinating and wonderful people; and a more different property you couldn't find. In the U.S. it would be categorized as an upper/lower duplex. The lower is being vacated by the owners, a retired French elderly couple. They're moving to the lower of another duplex on the same property. Since they didn't speak English, they recruited another tenant of theirs, who lives in the upper of the property they're moving into, to do the translating. He is a Belgian native who speaks French and English fluently, and he also works for CERN on the Safety Commission. He recently upped his contract with CERN and will be moving his family into a house he bought in nearby Prevessin France in February.

The elderly couple were sweet as could be. The grandmother immediately took a shining to Benjamin, she wanted to hold him and kissed him on the cheek and talked French baby talk :)

The house was, as you can imagine, completely furnished with the best furniture, antiques, wooden armoires, chandeliers, decorative wallpaper. It had wood trim, tons of cabinetry and closet space. At 960 sq.ft. living space, it was very large. And that doesn't even include the downstairs, where we would have our own wine cellar (!!!) and laundry room and spacious garage (not wide enough for two cars, but long enough for ample storage). Also factor in the huge lawn which we would have both to play in and to mow, and the school right next door that we would send him too, starting at age 3 (assuming we're still here).

We came away a little despondent for a couple reasons: 1) As wonderful as the space is, when the elderly couple moves they would take their furniture and laundry machines with, and we would have this huge space to fill with our few pieces of chintzy (by comparison) IKEA and second-hand furniture. 2) I thought that the place did not have enough light. The only south-exposed area was the living room, and the four season glass-enclosed sunlight room off the kitchen. 3) The real killer was the expense. The price is actually very reasonable for the size of it, but still just a bit beyond our budget - 1150 euro/month > $1600/month. Why, you ask, would we even consider such a huge monthly rent bill? Everybody who comes here to work from the U.S. gets a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). Ours will shave off ~$1000 from our monthly expenses. So the rent itself we could probably manage. But also add in 100 euro/month for utilities, plus 100 euro per year for garbage collection, plus 115 euro for yearly gas heat inspection, plus 400-500 euro per year for French "habitation tax" (!!!). In an apartment, most of these things would be included either in the rent itself, or in the "charges". Finally, we've just assessed the grocery expenses from October. Looks like our monthly grocery bill is about 50% greater than it was in the states! Dealing with the added expense of things here has been very much on our minds of late.

Things we did manage to accomplish this week:

• We got our Swiss "bank" account open - through the Swiss post office. This is the account through which we will receive the COLA.
• We purchased a used crib for Ben. That's right, he has officially graduated out of his Pack'N'Play, which now awaits the arrival of future progenitors (hoped for, but not expected as of yet!!). We have a brief home movie of the inaugural "putting-down" at our dropshots website. The crib can be converted to a toddler bed.

Other things of note:

• We were invited to a social event last Sunday by a couple we know who are stationed at CERN for the University of Maryland. They live in a duplex upper in Ornex, France, not far from here. All the people shown in the picture work on the CMS project as scientists, postdocs, graduate students or significant others.

• One of our roommates, Seth, went back to the states for 13 days this last Wednesday, to attend a wedding. Coincidentally, the person who's getting married purchased our mauve recliner before we moved out.
• Our other roommate Vlad reappeared on Thursday from a lengthy trip to his home country of Serbia.
• Kathy started attending a women's fellowship on Tuesday mornings at the church we attend, while I take Ben to one of his therapy appointments in Coppet, Switzerland.





• I killed a spider. Normally this is not newsworthy, except this spider was a large hairy beast that petrified Kathy! One certainly doesn't like the thought of having such monsters invade your living space...

• Took a bike ride today for recreation. Here are some pictures, long overdue, of the house we live in now, in Hameau Voltaire. You see the garage door open, the bike I ride, and the white Peugeot Partner van we drive for the time being.

Views up and down the street...

A view of some grape fields in Switzerland...

On this bike ride I also found a video store that we can rent English DVDs for our date nights - score a big one, dude! :)

That's all for now. Thanks once again for your thoughts, prayers and well-wishes. Be assured you have ours!

-PKBD