Brittan & Alora survey the Oregon coast before returning "home" to California.
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Brittan & Alora survey the Oregon coast before returning "home" to California.
A mallard and his mate have taken up residence in our pool. The neighbors say they come every year and that there will be chicks later on. The kids have enjoyed seeing them up close, but our attempts to feed them some bread only scared them away. Ironically, these failed attempts aroused the irritation of some of our neighbors because the next day everyone in the complex got a note on their door from the managament about not feeding the wildlife.
| Today Alora, Brittan and I put lights on Dell & Bob's house for Christmas. Since they don't usually do lights, we figured we had to do it over-the-top Griswald style. Dell took some pictures with her digital camera and Bob was impressed with the engineering - I ran all the wires under the driveway and they're all plugged into the same pad, allowing for on-off flipping with a single switch. I had to throw the lights up into the tree, and it took several tries to get it right. Unfortunately for Alora one of my bad throws hit her in the face, breaking a lightbulb on her forehead. |
Brittan and Alora visiting their grandfather's Maryland grave in 2003.
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Fresh snow falls down from the trees as the sun rises over the mountains surrounding Lake Tahoe. Tahoe residents scoff at the inch or so of fresh snow, but we were all happy to play in it. Zara was the first kid to touch the snow - and decide she doesn't like it. Alora, Brittan & Maxwell were of a quite different opinion however. They were happy to start a snowball fight on the driveway here at the Elias's, where we are spending the Thanksgiving holiday. Their dogs Max & Ike also love the snow, romping and playing in at among the bushes in the yard. Ike will also bury his head in an armful of snow as Alora discovered trying to make snowballs near him. Poor Maxwell played to his uttermost limit - making a beeline for the house when his little gloved hands got too cold. Inside, he collapsed to the floor and put his hands and face against the carpet to warm them. Brittan & I also headed down to the nearby skislopes at Diamond Peak to do some sledding. They were running the snowmaking machines, but there was still too little to cover the ground enough to avoid many bumps - our butts were quite sore afterward. Back at the house Alora discovered that Max & Ike were deathly afraid of her saxophone.
Driving up we stopped at Arnie Wogsland's, who is a fellow genealogist living in Rocklin with his wife Barb. Arnie said he met me when we lived out here as a kid, but I don't remember. He and Auntie Dell worked together at the DoD in the eighties and neither had met before when Dell started working there. It's pretty wild to have had two Wogslands who had never met in the same office of only 12 people. Arnie & Barb were really nice and Arnie had some postcards of frontier Wisconsin that my great-great uncle had sent his father. Arnie is retired, and so has quite a bit more time to spend on research. While we talked the kiddoes all enjoyed running laps around the house with their little dog Muffy. Technical Note: Our digital camera went kaputtsky taking pictures on the beach this past weekend, so there shant be any new pictures for a while. |
On the beach by the Atlantic in November '03:
and on the beach by the Pacific in November '06:
 Der überjuristische Rechtsanwalt |
19 Nov 2006
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| Maxwell peed on the potty for the first time Sept 19th of last year. Today I think it's safe to say that he is fully potty trained. It has been several days since he has gone in his pants and I think it's safe to say that all future occurances will be accidents rather than deliberate refusals to use the potty. He is even wearing underwear again! This afternoon while playing in the courtyard with Suhas Maxwell took the opportunity to relieve himself in the woodchips. It was a natural extrapolation of his experience while hiking several weeks ago. Not wanting to stop him midstream Cara waited until afterward to explain that one should always use a potty when there is one nearby. Whether he will depart from the time-honored practice of children everywhere who are too busy playing to come inside remains to be seen. |
Maxwell recieves a present to open on his first birthday.
BaBar's DIRC fell off, and today we removed the nuts. All 1344 of them. Each of the 168 electronic boards that needs to have the dust cleaned off has a metal plate held on by 8 screws. This brings new meaning to the word menial.
Yesterday was parent teacher conferences at school, and I was amazed at how much I learned. The girls are really doing alot of stuph I don't know about: Brittan is student council representative for her class; Alora has formed a 4 person clique of the smart kids; Brittan can write really funny prose; both girls would rather stay in Sunnyvale than go back to Tennessee. I suppose it's a combination of them growing up and my working so much at SLAC. They are both developing into rather strong-willed individuals, playing video games, using deodorant, checking their email, etc. I must admit that some dark part of me had hoped for them to find social failure in California and be revulsed as I was by the place at that age. Instead they have thriven here as they have thriven in every environment in which they have been placed. My only worry is that mathematical and social abilities are negatively correlated among youngsters. But its only a correlation and one that is stronger among males. It is an odd thing to look at one's own children and know that they are better than and will eventually defeat me. I suppose that is way of things; old wood rots away to make space for the flowering of youth to receive the sunshine it needs.
Today was the race down the LINAC at SLAC. Apparently they've been doing this for 35 years. Who da thunk it? Being that I started having my knee troubles after a solo run down the LINAC back in August, I could not pass this one up. For some reason I have a penchant for re-attacking things which have previously defeated me. Last week I finally acquiesed to letting Cara's friend Marcy, who is a physical therapist, look at my knee. With her regimen of exercises my muscles have started to heal and restrengthen properly, perhaps not enough to justify a 4 mile run, but enough that I could walk without being in pain. Ah, impetuous youth ...
the results.
Lately Maxwell has become rather obsessed with Ton-tons, or, as he calls them, Yem a-imels yose guys rie on. When he made his first poop on the potty not long ago, Maxwell got to pick out a new toy at Target for his efforts. He picked out a Luke Skywalker/Han Solo set of action figures where they are dressed up like Storm Troopers. Cara wanted to make sure he knew what he was playing with, so the past few nights we have been watching the old Star Wars movies. The Empire Strikes Back is Maxwell's favorite and most nights he requests a viewing of Gus Kike Bac as he calls it.
Brittan, Ray and Alora visiting the desolation of Mount St. Helens back in July.
This morning at the park Maxwell saw a doggy and wanted to pet it. The owner of the yellow lab was happy to let it share some love, having two young sons of her own there to play with the dog. Tonight Maxwell is making a birthday card for Molly. Even though her birthday is still several months off, Maxwell, like many a three-year-old, is obsessed with the magic of birthdays. It's good to know he still remembers his own dog so well.
The BaBar detector has been running now since 1999 with a very good operational record. Only one subsystem has failed over its lifetime - the Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) for detecting muons and KL. So during the shutdown of the accelerator this fall necesitated by the construction of the SLACs new x-ray laser, the LCLS, we are replacing the RPCs with another muon and KL detection subsystem: Limited Streamer Tubes (LSTs). The LST installation has been going very well for several months now, but the concrete radiation shielding wall was completely removed to facilitate this installation. What no one adequately considered was that the concrete wall, ostensibly to protect us from the radiation of BaBar, also protected BaBar from the vageries of climactic variation. Ergo the BaBar detector has for the first time experienced the full brunt of temperature changes, high humidity, and the like. Electronics do not like such things. The DIRC was turned back on in late September to do some testing to see if we could better our real-time calibration procedure used when the detector is running. We experienced a few electronics failures in the rainy few days of early October, but then all was good for a few dry weeks. At the end of October the humidity went up again and we experienced exponentially increasing losses until we shut the DIRC off the week before last. Engineers in France who designed and built our electronics boards (DFBs) confirmed late last week that dust plus corrosion from humidity were the cause of the failures. So today we begin the ultimate grad student grunt work project, disassembling the DIRC electronics (180 boards in 12 crates connected to ~10000 PMTs) to have them cleaned and then reassembling them before startup in January. It is a great irony that that which I have deplored the absense of in California for so long, that is, humidity, would be the focus of so much of my service work here.
Brittan, Cara & Alora up at Lake Anna for Spring Break 2003.
| You may have noticed as of late that my website has become rather polluted by ads like the one below. In my continuing attempts to find a funding model to make this website pay for itself I am trying out Google's AdSense. They generate ads based on keywords found in the text of a webpage and payout revenue on a per-impression or per-click basis. Believe it or not, people from all over the world have discovered Wogsland.org - or at least stumbled upon it. Of the fifty or so seperate visitors which look at the site daily, about half of them come to this page. The other half look at a page or two of genealogy and then move on. Hopefully this means that fellow genealogists are finding the site useful. I am also trying this ad revenue model out on TheWineRater.com, my other online outlet for my obsessive organizational habits which is currently still only in a beta version. |
Here's a cute retro video of Maxwell crawling back in my parent's basement when he was just a wee lad.
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9 Nov 2006 What's better than being a Super Zara or a pirate? Being a Zuperpirate! We are celebrating today because after weeks of cleaning out poopy underwear Maxwell has finally pooed on the potty. I think the key has been not allowing him to wear underwear the past few days. While this was a great risk, underwear is still diaperlike, so he felt comfortable pooping in it. Now that he is cogniscent of when the poop is coming, hopefully he will be happy to do it on the potty. Alas, putting underwear back on him put him back in his old routine...
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Yesterday I finally acquiesed and went out to get new glasses. Getting hit in the face with a soccer ball the day before and breaking the other side convinced me. So yesterday I shelled out the extra money to an optometrist so I could learn that yes, in fact, my prescription has not changed. I'm so glad the state of California required me to have someone tell me that I could see before allowing me to purchase two pieces of polished glass and a frame. Anyway, on a happier note the optometrist did have a coooool new machine to take digital pictures of my retinas. Here are the composites made from those pictures:
Left Retina (I kept blinking when looking down, so that is my eyelid at the bottom).
Brittan, Bev & Alora at Crater Lake, OR back in July.
It is awfully nice to be able to go to the pool in November ... This afternoon Alora, Brittan & I went for a short swim which was rather bracing, but still alot of fun.
Yeah, I'm having way to much fun with the Windows Movie Maker software Cara discovered was on my computer the other day when I was opining about how cool it would be to have such software. Apparently its part of the standard XP installation. Yes, I have had the thing for over two years. C'est la vive.
Christie, Keeters and Maxwell back in February of 2004.
One of the great disadvantages of blogging is that it has cut down severely on my journaling - replaced it almost. However, one must put a filter on one's blogging because it will read immediately and thus cannot be truly introspective. Mental health requires introspective periods at regular intervals, and whether one calls it prayer, meditation or whatever, it is the application of our mental machinery upon itself. Journaling initially helped me focus and record my introspection, but it too was filtered because in High School I was worried my mom would read it and thereafter I was worried what posterity might think. Perhaps the darkest depths of a man's mind are better left unrecorded, but I had always hoped later generations could profit by following my honest mental development in my journals. More recently as blogging has replaced journaling, honest introspection was also replaced with the recording of history.
For the last few months I have been plagued by a growing annoyance with something. Something about California really bugged me, but I could not entirely put my finger on it. That lack of introspection again. The busyness of it all. Then it dawned on me: that, it seems, is the answer. It is the general busyness that annoys me so. This is in no small part caused by my chosen vocation and obsessive visitation of as much as possible while we are here. I used to spend evenings back in Tennessee sitting on the patio just watching the children play and thinking about the day. Nor do I have an office here at home to hide in. Here every moment is required to have a purpose; an external focus perturbing the mind away from paths it wants to follow. So hurried a life does not befit me.
When does the basecamp set up at 12,000 ft become home? A week? A month? A year? Or right after your tent is pitched and dinner is acooking? We are only here for a year - several thousand miles from "home". From this basecamp we have ventured to parts nearby. But Tennessee was only our home for 2 years. Perhaps that is really the basecamp from where I now venture as physicist and "home" is really Alpharetta, much as we once had basecamps in South Carolina and Atlanta. But Alpharetta, like California and Pennsylvania before it were only base camps removed from the true home that was Maryland. Baltimore, Maryland was were I was born, and the answer I give when people ask where I am from. Yet none of my close family live there anymore. So is home where you are from, or where you are going? I have always imagined what my future home while be like - an estate with woods, a creek, a large library and to which I have recently added vineyards. But this fictional home has never and may never exist. Instead of giving a garbled life story when people ask where my home is, I should just be honest and say "I don't know".
| Merging onto I-280 this morning I encountered a beautiful rainbow which formed a complete arc across the interstate. Rainbows are such amazing things - white light scattering through the prisms of a million raindrops. Sometimes I wish I could see the rest of the rainbow out into the ultraviolet and infrared. Imagine seeing a rainbow with a hundred colors of light filling the entire sky. Now that would be something to behold! I suppose water is opaque to EM radiation not far outside the visible spectrum, so most of the radiation would be absorbed instead of scattered, and the ozone in the upper atmosphere filters out most of the UV light, so it wouldn't even make it down to our altitude to be scattered. Come to think of it there really isn't much rainbow to see outdside of the visible spectrum - so low an intensity in fact that that it is completely washed out by the ambient sunlight. So I guess we actually see pretty much all the rainbow there is to see. . . |
Here's a nice retro picture from Christmas 2002:
Would that they were still this cute and little!
Back in July Grammy & Papa Ray took Alora & Brittan up to Oregon and Washington where they did some sightseeing. When they sent us a DVD of pictures, however, they also sent some good old pictures which predate our digital camera days. So this month we'll take a look back at some of these...
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