I've been in one of my working moods lately. Wake up. Work. Eat. Work. Sleep. Next weekend, though, we're plotting an adventure. The idea is to go to visit Liechtenstein (it's a monarchy! and tiny!) and then hit up the fest in Zurich.

Today my detector, the pixel detector, descended the 100 m into the ATLAS cavern, safely. It was quite an exciting event because they had to get it across the parking lot in the the 30 minute break in the rainstorm. The rest of the week will be spent inserting it into the centre of the SCT.



(Picture thanks to Jens Dopke)

Food-wise I've had a pretty good week. On Wednesday I headed in to Geneva with some friends from my days at LBL. They are Spanish so we went to a purported tapas bar. It decidedly wasn't tapas, or at least not the Spanish interpretation of tapas, but the food was excellent. I had my first foie gras - deepfried - with caramelised onions. The highlight of the meal were these little steaks (from somewhere on the back of the pig that I didn't quite understand) wrapped in jamon. Dessert was chocolate and apricot tart. Delicious!

I've also been experimenting my with latest cookbook: The Soul of a New Cuisine. rachel_paula and I cooked up a batch of harissa (one CUP of red chile peppers) and turned it into red penne with roasted almonds. It was fiendishly spicy but provided me with fabulous lunches for the week. My favourite recipe thus far is a simple one for egg sandwiches made with baguette, spicy mayonnaise (with almonds & garlic) and scrambled eggs. The combination of flavours is truly magical.

Today the Caltech house had a barbecue so I made ginger beer (rather spicy) and cumin braai bread. toyoko_o made tasty Indian food (she's vegan, so meat isn't quite her style) and guacamole for a truly international evening.

Hopefully next week has even more exciting food in store. Tomorrow I'm taking in my first French movie, en francais, without any sub-titles. I hope that I understand more than 10% of it!

My former office at LBL makes it into PhdComics: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=872

I've always heard the windows machines were trivial to hack, but, I didn't expect it to be quite to easy. Silly old me forgot her administrator password. A trivial google search lead me to an ISO, which I burnt and booted and all my passwords were gone in under 20 minutes. Wow!

Exam. Passed. I shall henceforth be referred to as "candidate". Also, I'm applying for my Masters.
The exam itself was something of an anti-climax. I've spent weeks preparing for the damn thing, giving multiple rehearsals and trying to think of every question my slides could possibly evoke. The reality? I went through each slide, making some wording errors to be sure, but watching as each of my nasty questions went by unasked. My scheduling was definitely smart though - 10:30 am for a 2 hour exam. Two of my professors had meeting/class just afterwards so they were itching to leave the room around noon. This meant no additional nasty questions :)

The rest of my time in California has been flying by. I've been eating my way through the required food in each city. Berkeley its: sushi at Tako Sushi (needs repeat!), burgers at Barneys, Naan 'n Curry, good Thai food (a few choices). In LA it has been In 'n Out, PresidenTwo, Zankou, Europane (a damn good sandwich shop near Caltech), my friend Tim's home-cooking (homemade pasta with meat-juice & truffle sauce), dessert from Daphne (cream puffs) and, finally, Chicken and Waffles last night. I've been wanting to try Chicken and Waffles ever since I stopped being vegetarian, but I was somewhat disappointed by the fried chicken. I much prefer what we call fried chicken at home - it is more juicy and a lot less greasy. The combination of the sweet waffles with chicken, that was actually rather sublime.

I spent yesterday wandering around Caltech reminiscing. nibot showed me around mini-LIGO and we used his laser to burn holes in business cards. The laser protection goggles are some of the most stylish sunglasses I've seen for a while. We're in Culver City today (more tasty food from Tim!) before heading up to Malibu for a night. Sunday we're taking the 1 all the way back to San Francisco, to conclude the official holiday portion of the trip.

I managed to miss my first flight! I was merrily picked up at 7:20 am this morning to head to the airport. As I was standing in line waiting for my flight, I realised that I'd forgotten my cancelled passport containing my American visa. A mad dash back to France (couldn't find it!), back to CERN (not there), back to the apartment and finally we found it but only 15 minutes before take-off. I called Continental. Initially they told me my flight was non-refundable, non-exchangeable (i.e. I'd lose the entire ticket), but after my roommate called they agreed to let me on the flight tomorrow provided I pay the difference in price. $400 later and I'm heading to California tomorrow. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!

The good news (I guess) is that I make a training session that I would have otherwise missed and get to play with some hardware down in the pit: "(1st task: find our equipment in the pit!)"

I recently took the whole learning French thing in hand and found myself a conversation partner: Christelle from Paris. We meet for lunch/dinner once a week and spend half the time speaking English and the other half French. The first time was rather difficult as I've never spoken French for 30 minutes in row ever. Luckily I managed to be funny even when I muddled my words horribly.

This week we're doing something different. Some people from the site where we met, GenevaOnline, are organising a language exchange dinner. This time it will be in French and the English speakers are required to bring a dish from their country of origin. I've hauled out my South African cookbook which features such useful recipes as "How to build a pizza oven out of a termite mound in under two hours", "A poacher's roast by the light of the silvery moon" and "Rangers breakfast on a spade". Luckily the recipes are really tasty and I'm debating between bobotie (mince curry with egg custard, mmm) or green lentil and banana salad and couscous with caramelised onions and raisins. Or perhaps a Cape Malay curry?