Gordon Watts

Memorial Day

I worked in the morning, and went to a BBQ at night. Below are Kris, Kurt, and Charlotte. Charlotte likes (really likes) pickles. And beer: her hands are strong enough to grab a bottle out of your hand if she gets  close enough!

While at the BBQ chatted with several UA management types (and flight attendents) -- so I got lots of good gossip. One of them pointed out that today is the deadline for the judge to decide to void the contract between UA and their machinists. The union has said they will strike immediately if this happens -- which means I would not fly home tonight! Fingers are crossed!

After that several of us went out to a small club called The Note. Heavy Metal bands were playing. I've not been to something like that in years. They sold ear plugs. I got two pair. It helped.

Update: UA and the Unions settled. I fly back tonight!

80% of the Work

That old saying really is true. The last 20% of a task takes 80% of the time. And boy is that last 80% frustrating!

It is memorial day weekend and I've done almost nothing fun. Let me rephrase that, I've not had a single beer since I got here to Chicago, but I've been having a blast. I wake up (around noon), get lunch, eat it while sitting outside on the porch of the farm house where I'm staying here at Fermilab, work for as long as I can without a network connectiong, walk/drive the 1/4 mile to DZERO, work, perhaps remember to get dinner, and go to bed around 4 or 5am. Feels rather natural.

But this is vacation, so I decided to try somethign new. Actually reading the data, plotting it, and looking at it was a lot fo fun. But then I wanted to send it around to the rest of the people at UW. Making sure what I did worked on Linux and that all the files were up on the web site took as long as it took me to create everything in the first place. But it seemed like it took a lot longer because it was so tedious!

Tomorrow some friends are having a BBQ; I think I'll start drinking beer again.

He is everywhere

I went to dinner this evening with a friend and look who was at the indian restaurant. Rich and I spent most of the time talking about the International Linear Collider -- a project very far in the future.

BTW -- for the first time I got upgraded on a UA 777 -- to first class. The 777's first class has beds! And it has a lot of room -- there is more floor up there than there are seats. It was a very different feeling. Sadly, it was for less than 2 hours so I couldn't really enjoy it. :-)

Finally!

My Dad posted a comment to my blog! And he also did owl shifts!

End of Quarter, not much going on here...

The end of the quarter is almost upon me. I have three more lectures until I'm done for the year. One of those will be used by by the students filling out an evaluation form (how good am I?). But this also means that we have a midterm this Friday and a Final two weeks from tomorrow -- which means I'm doing almost nothing but preparing for class, writing exams, etc.

In other news, our hiring process has almost come to an end (so I can talk about it again!). And I'm on the department staffing committee now -- this is the group that helps guide the department in deciding what targets to go after, what sub-field to hire in -- and it is a lot of work because I need to understand the dynamics in the department much better than I've before, and I need to get a much more global view of physics in general than I have before. Oh, and I've not turned in any travel reports since August of last year (I have to turn these in to get $$ back for my plane tickets).

All this have summed up to depressingly little work done on research. Since Monday is Memorial day in the US, we have a holiday. My vacation plans? I'm off to Chicago to get some research done. This is going to be a great holiday!

Not much has changed in 40 years...

The funny thing about 70th birthdays is the old pictures people bring with them... This is 1959, that is my Dad, and that is the control room/console for the Yale Physics department Heavy Ion Accelerator. The control room hasn't changed much in 40 years!

It must be something in the water!

Has anyone noticed that politics in North America has gone a little crazy recently? In Canada a woman legislator that crosses party lines is called a whore (as opposed to the normal thing -- a traitor) during the recent bitter fight over, basically, the survival of the Martin government.

And in Mexico the mud fest over the hugely popular Mayor of Mexico City -- basically attempting to bring him down on some corruption charge so he can't run for prez next election cycle and challenge the current party in power. Fortunately they seem to have come to their sense and have dropped the case (at least, from the outside it looks lke they came to their sense).

And then there is that big country in the middle. What's its name? What the heck is up with the Senate? One side comparing the other to Hitler? And the other shooting back calling someone Darth Vader??? It is like a bunch of school kids fighting over kickball! I have no idea what the solution is (they don't pay me enough to step into that fight) but what I see now isn't it.

Back to my Dad's 70th birthday...

I can't get how green it is here!

This blog is going domestic for a few posts...

As I mentioned in my last post, it is really green today! The sky is blue with angry clouds roaring across -- which makes for amazing light. I don't think these pictures do it much justice.

And the flower bed kept by Mom:

Last week there was much more color, apparently -- all the bulbs were up!

In New Jersey!

Yesterday I flew back to Seattle, and today to New Jersey. I'm here for my Dad's 70th birthday party -- which is Saturday night. I should get some good pictures there. ;-)

It is always fun to come home for a visit; I visit once or twice a year -- though this year has been a little more frequent -- and the place always changes. I'm really struck this time, for example, how much green there is! I don't remember so many trees!

A funny thing happened on the way to the ACE van...

After landing at O'Hare yesterday I got in the rental car van and discovered John and Robin sitting there already (Robin has left comments at this site). I've know them for I don't know how long (can't even remember how I met them). John used to work at Rutgers, along with my father. Now, he and Robin are at UC Davis -- and their flight path was similar enough to mine that we were able to discuss the thunderstorms that our planes flew around. And we both got Mustang's at the rental car place -- nice upgrade!

After driving out to Fermilab in a Mustang convoy we went to dinner at the Rock Bottom, near the AMC 32 out here. Everyone there was waiting for the midnight opening of Star Wars. :-) The cool thing about these two is they know all the gossip from the CDF experiment -- so we had a great dinner swapping stories.

I'm about to go back to O'Hare. But there is a ground stop on due to the huge T-Storms going through the area. Should be a fun ride. :(