2006 Barn Nyheter Siden 1814 er Norge fri! jan | feb | mars | apr | mai | juni | juli | aug | sep | okt | nov | des 2005 | 2004 If you care to comment, email me at bradley@wogsland.org with "Children Blog" in the Subject line.

Hey Dad, whatcha doin' over there?

Grammy came up this weekend to help Cara paint.
Zara wanted to help too!

My hubbers made me a new room while I painted today!
I get to paint this room a pretty color, too.

Today was the EXPO 10k/5K through downtown Knoxville. It was my first really big race, and there were even Kenyans there. (Okay, so I didn't ask, but they looked, sounded and ran like Kenyans). Knoxville is really quite like a miniature San Francisco in terms of hills ... so I still haven't reached the under 30 minute goal I made before my first race. I am getting closer though, pacing myself and actually running more of the race than last time. I finished the first mile in 8:22, but there was no two mile time caller so I got rather disheartened in the middle of the race; for a long time I believed that I hadn't passed the second mile yet! Then, as I neared the what I knew must be the last turn I realized that I hadn't been lapped by a Kenyan yet. Since the 10K course was two laps of the 5K this meant that I was still under 30 minutes! Sure enough, turning down the home stretch I was lapped by the first of the Kenyans and then I saw the finish clock several hundred yards ahead read 29:44. I sprinted as fast as I could those last few hundred yards, but I didn't make it - 30:06 was the time as I crossed the finishline.

Herefollows the tale of Flippen D. Burge; yes that's his real name but he went by Flip. Flip Burge graduated Georgia Tech in 1916 with a degree in Architecture, a founded the firm of Burge and Stevens with a fellow Tech grad in 1919. They did many projects in Atlanta, most notably the first federally funded housing project Techwood, which was built by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930's and mostly torn down before the Olympics in 1996. Burge and Stevens worked on many other projects, however, just before Burge died he designed and began construction of an apartment complex for his Alma Mater. Since Burge died in 1946 during its construction the newly renamed Stevens and Wilkinson christened it in his honor upon completion in 1947.

Unlike Techwood, Burge Apartments' concrete walls were still standing in 1998 when I started attending Georgia Tech. We lived there for four good years in that I-shaped building, and it rather grew on us. Sure, it was cold in the winter, the pipes backed up on the lower floors causing grossness to ooze out of the sink drain, air conditioning had be added poorly later, an immense amount of the square footage was wasted in a twenty foot hallway, and you couldn't really get out of the bathroom unless you stood in the shower, but it was home. We did our first plumbing there to add in an old dishwasher, and ran wires across the ceiling to run the drier by the window for venting. Most of Burge's work has been razed, but this lone building was still there to greet us when I ran the Pi Mile Run back in April. Fortunately Tech has no plans to raze this sturdy old building; it still feels like home coming back to it.

Well finding a reasonable apartment in Silicon Valley has not been an easy task, and in the end price was sacrificed to provide for the girls not having to learn Spanish to attend elementary school. The apartment is at a place called Cherryhill in Sunnyvale, which is in the school district of Cherry Chase Elementary School. Of course, everything won't be finalized until we actually get out there, but hopefully ya'll appreciate the update. The girls are not thrilled about living in an apartment again, but the fact that the complex has a pool more than offsets this. Maxwell and Zara have no idea what is going on, but we've tried to prepare Maxwell for the transition. Hopefully once he learns what a swimming pool is he will also be as excited as when we fill the baby pool in the backyard.

It has really been a hectic few days! Saturday in the wee hours of the morn during a fierce and windy thunderstorm we lost a large branch from one side of the Bradford pear tree in our front yard. For those not from the southeast, these are beautiful trees with awful smelling flowers that adorn many a front lawn but rarely last more than twenty years. Upon closer examination of the trunk I noticed a split down the one side were the branch had fallen. This meant that another branch would not be far behind the one that fell.

As the reader has no doubt surmised I approached this task with great relish, choosing the older, purer axe rather than the modern machine of the chainsaw. Some would call this foolish inefficiency, but I prefer to think of it as indulgent - imagining myself as some American pioneer clearing these woods for the first time two hundred years ago to build a farm. He too worked only with axe in hand. Ah, the yeoman farmer, archtype of Jefferson's great American Republic ... but I digress. Alora & Brittan joined me in the fun playing pioneer girls: chopping with axe, breaking up branches, and hauling them away. But that was on Sunday; Saturday was also

The Messy Party was everything one could hope it to be - a big mess: Children flinging paint at eachother with wanton disregard; Mud being slathered on bodies like sunblock; Flour caking up on the trampoline as wet rapscallions jumped amongst it. Oh, it was at the same time a beautiful and terrible thing to behold. Smiles of those freed from the shackles of all youth's inhibitions, and the disgusting mess that they wrought upon the backyard. If not for the rain and thunder that ended it all, society itself might have fallen apart right then and there.

Sometimes our dinner conversation can be a little dull ... but how did she get that way?

This is our last month in Tennessee, and I'm already feeling homesick. I really love it here and am sorry as ever to leave. Working at SLAC for a year will be worth living in California, because it's truly an opportunity that will never come again. In a few years SLAC, where the charm and bottom quarks were discovered, will cease to be a high energy facility, becoming entirely dedicated to condensed matter physics. The same is true at most other big labs in the country except Fermilab in Illinois, which has tied its future existance to High Energy physics; but no new accelerator will be built there. Outside of the US, there is one more new big accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), being built at CERN. More than likely, the LHC will be the biggest particle accelerator ever built. (That's why I say I'll probably be in Geneva as a post-doc). You see, the Standard Model of subatomic particles is basically complete and the last generation of accelerators failed to find anything unexpected. And there is only one Standard Model particle left to find: the Higgs boson, whose coupling to matter gives it mass and breaks the symmetry of the electroweak force apart at low energies. Sure, theorists have predicted many different additions to the standard model, but most are designed so that they can be pushed safely beyond the reach of the largest particle accelerator of the day - perfect for getting more funding! There are plans on the table to build an even larger linear collider after the LHC, but it is doubtful that any governments will shell out the billions necessary to build it if the LHC finds nothing unexpected. So I go to SLAC to be part of an great era that is passing; to enjoy an opportunity that my children will in all likelyhood not have. Only in this section of spacetime, there and now, can I smash particles together at fantastic energies. Much as the days of sailing ships or swordfighting have passed, so to will such huge particle accelerators become nothing more than history. When future generations read the stories of their forebearers, they will take pride in Hallvard Graatop, who fought with his sword so nobly against the Danes in the 15th century, Ole Vaagsland, who sailed across the Atlantic with his family to make a new and prosperous life on the Indian land of Wisconsin, and Brad Wogsland, the particle physicist who helped establish the Standard Model.

Alora & Brittan ran their first race this morning on the UT campus...

Postrace snacking and celebration.

The racefans.

Alora succeeding in her goal to run the mile in less than 10 minutes - she crossed the finish line as the clock struck 9:59. Brittan unfortunately got a cramp and finished in 11:36, which is still a pretty good time. I managed to snap this shot of Alora as she finished, but there was unfortunately someone in front of Brittan in the shot I took of her. Afterwards there was ice cream. For the afternoon we visited the Dixie Stampede for girl scout day. Maxwell was quite amazed by the ginormous horses and the people doing tricks on them, as was Zara, who is starting to appreciate passive entertainments.

Tanasi Council Girl Scout Troop 750: Alora, Lacey and Brittan.

Here's a fun site: Popular Baby Names from Social Security statistics. 2005 was an interesting year: Sally and Jaime both dropped out of the top 1000 girl names and Zara appeared for the first time. Also, the high point of the popularity of the name Bradley was in 1979. Alora and Brittan are still not on the list (success there at least), while Maxwell remains rather popular (doh). And Cara is being quickly replaced by the more popular Kara. One can really waste alot of time perusing these numbers...

My boodlicious dish is really developing at a breakneck speed these days. Today Zara took her first step, but, as Woody said of Buzz Lightyear, it was more like falling with style. She was standing holding on to the chair Cara was sitting in at her desk, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed nearby. Then Zara let go and with both hands in front of her took a single falling step to my leg. Not bad for a 10-month-and-four-day-old!

Zara kisses ... it's her new trick!

My Fan Club

Yesterday it rained ... alot. But we went hiking anyway. Maxwell is super hiker and set the pace running up the hill to Chestnut Top. Unfortunately, the rain eventually chilled his spirits as well as his body, so he rode on my back going down. We all wore our swimsuits, planning to swim afterward, but no one went with me because they were all too cold. The kids all sat in the car while Cara nursed Zara and I took a dip in a cold mountain creek. Today saw my second attempt at running a 5K, this time a local one: the Run for the Deaf at the Tennessee School for the Deaf. This time I paced myself better; 8:52 after 1 mile; 22:10 after 2; finishing in 34:44 - a full two and a half minutes better than my best (and only) time. I don't think that's something one gets to say more than a few times. Everyone came to cheer me on, even the shark from Ripley's Aquarium in Gatlinburg. Maxwell befriended the giant shark only after receiving a free baby shark stuffed animal. Alora and Brittan have decided the want to run races too, and are going to sign up for a 1 mile kid race later this month. With the ending of the semester this week I have also completed my Physics Masters, an incidental degree on my way a Ph.D. but nevertheless an important hedge.

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