Week in Limbo

August 19, 2005

This week is the famous "limbo week"--summer camp ended last Friday, but most schools don't start until next Tuesday.  Who thinks up these schedules that assumes there's always a parent who can be home for random weeks during the year?  I coped with this (as usual) by sharing entertainment responsibilities between Rob (Isaac's father), my mom (who teaches high school but luckily not full time until next week) and another family at Fermilab in the same boat.  Isaac's schedule for this week was:

Monday:  do errands with me, sleep over at Grandma and Papa's house

Tuesday:  take train into Chicago and see the Shedd Aquarium with Grandma

Wednesday:  go to Brookfield Zoo and Tara with me

Thursday:  go to Museum of Science and Industry with Dad and Tara

Friday:  go to Burpee Museum and Arboretum with Tara and her parents

and next Monday Isaac gets to go canoeing with Tara and her dad. 

Sounds like a tough life, doesn't it?  I'm thinking that we're making it hard for Isaac to want to go back to school with this schedule. 

The ironic thing is that this week I'm also in limbo as far as money is concerned.  I can't believe how much of my job these days is thinking about money, and thinking about how much of it we'll need versus time to build the MINERvA experiment.  So this week was more or less the last chance we ("we" being MINERvA) have to ask for extra money to buy things this fiscal year (which ends at the end of September), but it's also the week we're supposed to put together the budget for next year to request from the Particle Physics Division.  Of course money we ask for fiscal year 2006 doesn't actually show up to be spendable right away anyway, so it's sort of tricky to figure out what you need when versus when you can ask for it. 

Sometimes I feel like I can go days without thoughts about something I could really classify as "physics" but in fact I did get a chance to hear about something more physics-related than budgets.  This week we had two internal reviews of different subsystems of the MINERvA detector:  So I got to be a reviewer and figure out what kinds of things you would need to have in place to test and build different pieces of the detector (and ask if they had thought of those things...), and as a bonus had plenty of donuts as is quickly becoming a MINERvA review tradition (stolen from MINOS, admittedly).  Then I finished off by the week by going to the first MINOS wine and cheese talk (stay tuned...). 

It is sad to feel like the summer is coming to an end, but with Isaac starting school and Sonia starting pre-school next week I'm going to have to get back to a school year schedule--no more driving to and from Fermilab with two children in the car...no more late afternoons at the Fermilab pool...

Luckily I can still make margaritas to drink on the patio before dinner so although the limbo week is over, the summer still lives on...