Small Spaces hate me

I shouldn't be cramped up in tight spaces. I'm far too clumsy. Now while I can sit still for long periods - say, on airplanes - working in such an environment is a different story. I slam my arms and hands into walls and doors. I find every corner of every shelf (or mounting structure or table or..) by hitting my legs on them. And I am the perfect height: too short to have hazards at eye level, but too tall to miss them completely.

Working in the cleanrooms this week has occasionally felt like a gladiatorial gauntlet. At one point I was maneuvering around the xenon system by our detector. I caught my right side on the unistrut, struggling to duck under a refrigerant line I hit my left side on our pumpout cart, and then as I was angrily leaving I hit my head on a large portable lamp hanging down.

The 'joys' of shared housing

I'm in New Mexico for my final shift on my old experiment. While it is a little awkward, I now get to say "goodbye" to the apparatus itself, and do some of the local things that I always meant to do. I'm sure this will be a more positive experience in the past since I know this is my last trip here.

But there is one thing that a positive attitude can't change: sharing a house with my collaborators. This is much more a problem of the house than the people. People come and go on a weekly basis, so everyone loses track of how old the bread on the counter is. And we collect a large number of cans of shaving cream on the counter.

I find the maintenance and cleanliness standards the worst. While most people are very good about taking care of their dishes, no one bothers to sweep the floor. When there are now small piles of dead cockroaches in the corner, this is a problem. No one has the tools or motivation to fix things around the house, so they just go unfixed. Theoretically the land-owner should deal with these things, but there is no one to continually call them and get them to take care of it.

The room I am sleeping in has no door latch. You know, that thing that keeps the door from randomly opening without a doorknob being turned. This is a new development and actually has a good reason: the latch has been very sticky for a long time. Someone got stuck in the room and had to climb out the window. I don't blame him for taking the latch off. It's much more proactive than the solution some others would have come up with - always going in/out the window.

The microwave is broken. This actually occurred the last time I was here (in June). The power went off and when it came back on the microwave was dead - I searched the internet and couldn't come up with a good way to fix it. I e-mailed the faculty member who pays our rent (I don't have the land-owners' contact info) and some of the post-docs who are here most. I guess the land-owner never did anything. Now, I like microwaved eggs in the morning, so this is a major tragedy for me.

If you are a somewhat reasonable person, you are probably wondering why I don't take care of these things instead of just complain about them. Yeah... you're right. That's what I'll do.

Kid's day talk

Tomorrow is Kid's Day at SLAC.  I have been given the honor - perhaps responsibility is a better term - of giving the opening talk to the 12-16 group.  I wasn't given a lot of guidelines, but I have about 5 minutes to talk about how I became interested in my field of research.  I suppose I'm supposed to excite and inspire these young people and then they get to ask me questions.

What is an AMU?

I've been reading "Radiobiology for the Radiologist" by Eric Hall for the past week or two.  I'm learning a lot from it, but a lot of the cancer terminology is unfamiliar to me.  I'd stop to look everything up, except this book is from the Lane Medical library and I'll need to return it before I leave for WIPP on August 24th.  Since I'm on page 106 of 518, I figure I don't have too much time for backreading.

I decided to simply read the glossary - only a few pages, but should give me almost all of the terminology I need.  Not only are there lots of medical terms, but there is also a lot of physics terms.  I was very confused to see the atomic mass unit (amu) defined as "one sixteenth the mass of a neutral  atom of the most abundant isotope of oxygen, 16O." Oxygen?  The amu I know and love is defined by Carbon!

It's Official!

Today was officially the day the torch was passed.  I talked to Marty and said I found a new lab, Marty talked to Ted, then I talked to Ted.  As of September 7th, I will no longer be part of EXO and will be 100% of the Graves group.