02/03 - There are two reasons to keep this brief - firstly not much happened, and secondly I have forgotten most of it anyway. I am unsure what happened during the day on Tuesday, all I wrote down was "work, lunch, false alarm on work", whatever that might mean. In the afternoon I moderated another International Physics Masterclass with a chap called Marco. They were a lot less responsive than the groups we had last week, and I found myself leaving him to do a lot of the talking. There were some excruciating silences, which he didn't seem to mind, and afterwards I met james and Dan for dinner - James had never been to L'Entrecôte, the first place I ever went for dinner in Geneva. We treated ourselves to wine and dessert, and each of us came out CHF 65 poorer but it was delicious, as always. The wine was great even though it was the cheapest, and the cheese platter was amazing. Afterwards we came back to my flat, as I had beer, and watched a couple of episodes of Black Books on youtube before I kicked them out.
03/03 - Oops, today I slept through/turned off and ignored all of my alarms (multiple alarms on each of two phones and my iPod, placed all over the flat) and slept for two hours longer than I had intended. This was not a massive disaster, as I had no meetings and nothing in particular to go in for, so I worked from home. Also I built the other set of IKEA shelves I got the other week, which are standing proud next to me as I type this, in all their low quality plain wood glory. In the evening I received a few emails from Dan and James - some fellow named Lee has returned to CVERN after an absence god-knows-where, and consequently most of the normal takers for Dan's pizza and film combo are out welcoming him back, so instead we cooked dinner (well, they shared, I didn't know what was going on so I made Nasi Goreng) and watched Terminator 2 just the three of us. It was awesome. After watching Terminator last week I was already looking forward to it, and it was even better than I remembered. I mean, the effects have come on such a long way from T1, Robert Patrick is a pretty menacing bad guy, and the soundtrack? There are only three songs in the entire film - bad to the bone, you could be mine (G 'n' R) and guitars, cadillacs. Awesome.
04/03 - I made it in fairly early today, having solved yesterday's problem - if I put one of my phones in the bath, I am far more likely to have a shower and actually get up. Hopefully this will be a key weapon in my battle against my morning self. I had a pretty productive day, mainly because I went for a coffee with Teresa, my designated stand-in supervisor. I mean, it's been a month and I am not too sure what I am meant to be doing, just heading in various directions without a clear goal. I told her this and she was rather surprised, assuming I had been studious and organised all this time, but she was also very sympathetic and said she'd help me to direct my efforts towards something that might one day become a thesis. Phew.
I had another masterclass this evening, with Marco again. It was much better, mainly because the schools connected were much chattier and asked much better questions than last time, especially the American one - for example will we destroy anything (no), are there any ill effects to the surroundings from the LHC (no), what is our average work day (officially 40 hours a week but really just however much time it takes to get the work done - I let Marco answer that one), and what is the proportion of females to males at CERN (15%, and that's being generous).
I ended up staying until half 7 this evening (that's a 9.5 hour day, hopefully that makes up for yesterday a bit) before coming home and cooking a leftover special, which was mainly tomato, garlic, onions, some kind of spicy French sausage (not in the slightest bit spicy) with the rest of yesterday's rice. Also I just listened to the entirety of NOW 13, the finest songs 1988 had to offer. Wonderful. I am going back to England tomorrow, in just 15 hours I will be packing up and sneaking off, and I am looking forward to it immensely.
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