16/02 - My journey to CERN was made far more pleasant than usual by the presence of some Gypsy buskers on my Tram, playing violin and accordion and generally making a dull grey day seem more exciting. My actual day passed largely without incident, consisting of two long meetings and a lunchbreak, whereas my evening was really good. I met Zack Taylor and his wife Masa for a drink - Zack is the son of a friend of my grandparents, and works out here for the UN development program. He's a very interesting guy, having done fieldwork in many countries, focussing on the Balkans especially Croatia (where he met Masa). We had some good in depth chats about a wide array of topics, generally ending in one or other of us vainly trying to link our two fields - international disarmament policy and particle physics have few areas in common. I am going for dinner with them on Saturday, and I'm looking forward to it immensely - I must admit to not really being myself at first, attempting to make a good impression and probably coming across a little twitchy and overeager. The wine was very good though, so I think I relaxed pretty quickly.
17/02 - I made it in rather earlier than usual today, intending to do a full day of work. However, about 11 o'clock Zack texted me asking what I wanted from IKEA, as he and Masa had very kindly offered to pick up some stuff for me while they were there. Consequently I spent rather a long time browsing the online catalogue for stuff rather than doing anything useful. Lunch was a delicious but bony Peking duck (as it is Chinese new year there is a different Chinese dish in R1 this week), and in the evening I had intended to go for a curry with Jody and a few others, but due to some confusion about leaving times I ended up going to Love Me Do's for pizza a gogo again, followed by The Terminator at Dan's flat.
18/02 - I had the first session of my shift training this morning, from 9-1030. I was 15 minutes late as I couldn't find the venue, and once I got there it was pretty dull. It was mostly an overview of what does what inside the ATLAS computing structure, and which bit we'd be dealing with. The rest of the day was pretty standard (satay beef for lunch, delicious), and in the evening I went over to The Globe with James to watch a few short films - we had missed the documentary session which was what I really wanted to see, so we made do with one of the fiction sessions. The films were interesting enough, I'm not going to bother going into detail about them now but my favourites were one about some Bedouins running out of sugar for their tea, and a Serbian film called L'age de la virginity which was about a future in which virginity was recognised as a (potentially fatal) disease, following one chap with a serious case during his visit to a Serbian virginity clinic, staffed by hot nurses of course.
When I got home I persuaded Hannah to get online with the google account I made her, purely so we could chat with Clare and Kelly at the same time. Not much important was said, but a lot of fun was had.
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