Home

I've been home for two weeks and it's been absolutely wonderful. It was so great seeing my boyfriend and my family again. It was also terrific to be somewhere warmer, though it never got to beach weather and it was windy all the time. Here are some photos of my time there:


This is the gingerbread house which my boyfriend and I made for his family's Christmas. It's pretty cool, if I do say so myself. *grins*


This is our beach tent at Bell's Beach, where we usually go boogie boarding. We went there for a day while I was back, but it was too cold to stay in the water for long and too windy to stay on the sand. Even so however, I ended up getting sunburnt, on the areas I missed with the sunscreen. *sigh*


Here is part of the skyline of my beautiful city around sunset before the children's fireworks on New Year's Eve.


And here is the another part of the skyline and the crowd that gathered to see the midnight fireworks.

Leaving Soon...

Sorry that it's been a while since my last update, I've been busy with preparations for going overseas, flights, visas, insurance, accommodation, packing, et cetera... But now it's finally all done, except for the packing. It's going to be hard to fit six months worth of stuff into 20 kgs, but I have started, there is currently piles of stuff around my suitcase, I just have to decide what goes in. I have also been collecting television on my new hard drive to watch, and thanks to other people, I now have a good selection covering a couple of genres, though according to my supervisor, I'll be too busy with work to watch any of it, which I hope won't be true.

Now that it's so close to my departure date, lot of people have asked me if I'm excited about my year overseas, and I must admit that excitement is not an emotion which I have been feeling recently, except when I've been looking up places to go sight seeing. There is much more anxiety and fear regarding my new research group and living arrangements and I am already looking forward to coming back for Christmas, and I haven't even left! I think my time in Geneva last year taught me that it is much harder living in the country where you don't know the language, and going overseas for work is very different than going for traveling since you are based in the same place and need to fill in the evenings, and it's even quite different than traveling for studying, as it's harder to meet people. Hopefully it'll be better this year...

Plans

I guess I should start by outlining all my planned travel. For all those who don't know, I am an Australian PhD student working on a project in Experimental Particle Physics, specifically, on the ATLAS experiment, which is based in Geneva. I will probably be giving an overview of the experiment and my work in a later post.

Since the experiment is based in Geneva, and I am based in Australia, it is hard to to keep up to date with what's going on, and to collaborate with the other scientists. Personally, I find it easy to to lose motivation being so isolated, and I hate the time difference. I hate waiting ages for replies to emails, and I hate the having meeting times outside work hours, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Anyway, my research group has a grant which allows us to travel to and from the experiments which we are involved in. I used this funding last year to spend three months in Geneva over the European summer. This time, I have the funding to be over there for a year. It should be pretty exicting with the LHC starting up and all, but I'm going to miss my boyfriend, family and friends, and I'm going to miss my home and Melbourne. More often than not, I feel as if I don't want to go.

So why am I going if I don't really want to? Well, I know it's better for my academic carreer. My work and I get much more exposure if I am over there in person, rather than over here in the phone or video conference. It's also a great opporunity. I will get to witness the starting up of possibly the last large circular particle collider, and if I'm really lucky and work hard, I could be in the detector control room watching that first data getting recorded.

My supervisor has organised the timing quite well really. I will fly over on the 4th of July, then attend the week long collaboration conference in Bern, then start working at CERN. At around the same time they should be commissioning the proton beams for possible collision in August, while I'm working my arse off rewriting the ATLAS Level 2 Trigger. Though I have planned to take a couple of days off to meet up with some people in Dublin (from the 24th to the 28th of July) which should be great. Ireland sounds like a pretty cool place to visit.

So I'll be working hard for a month, then I fly to Chicago, USA on the 11th of August for a Hadron Collider Physics summer school at Fermilab. I'm quite excited about this actually, I get to see Fermilab while it still has some funding and the Tevatron while it is still in operation. Not to mention, the program of the school is really aimed at experimental particles physicists working on hadron colliders, which I am. I just hope it's not all going to be above my head. I hope they recommend some prereading for it. It has been a while since I had to study anything.

And since I'm going to be in that part of the world, I'm going to fly over to LA for a couple of days (from the 22nd to the 27th of August) to visit my relatives and friends from exchange, which should be a nice break.

Then I'm back in Geneva until December the 19th, when I will come home to visit my boyfriend and family, though it's going ot be a short trip and I'll be leaving again for Europe on the 5th of January.

So that's all the flying I have planned so far. I'm sure there will be more sightseeing in Europe while I am over there, but that'll all I have definite dates for. Not bad huh? *smiles*

Hello World!

Welcome to my new blog. I've decided to go for a blogspot blog this time, so I can link it to my ravelry account if I ever post about my knitting. Which I probably will at some point. :)

But, as the title implies, I will probably mostly be talking about my work and my travels, to keep everybody up to date. :)