Merrily We Slog Along in Trichotomy

Astro- and Particle-physics

Last weekend we spent a lot of time visiting La Professeure's friends in the city. On Saturday afternoon we went to the Theatre district to meet with her college roommates. They had good time hanging out, though I feel like we've entered the stage of life where we talk a lot about traffic patterns in the suburbs and home renovation stories - both of which I have no experience of, living in New York.

After lunch we we went to see Particle Fever at the Film Forum. It is a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, mostly about the people involved with the project. The filmmaker and many of the subjects of the documentary - physicists involved in CERN - actually had come to New Hip Company to give a talk and Q&A about the movie, so it was great for me to see the finished product. La Professeure liked it more than I did I think, since she is still an academic, and could relate a lot to the experience of dealing with experiment data.

On Sunday we went to Queens to visit her recently-divorced co-worker's party. It was nice her doing well after the divorce and we met some interesting people. She is into game-playing so there were some gamer friends, work friends, and her sister's friends. So it was a large group of diverse people. We didn't spend much time there though.

By the time we were done with all the visiting we we were tired. But it is now a routine for us these days on a Sunday night is to veg in front of Cosmos. It is a nice program.

• N
  
  

What I do for the Arts

This weekend has been exhausting, even though we were only active one day.

Yesterday we went to the open rehearsal of the amateur musician's group's Carnegie Hall concert. It was held at the DiMenna Center, and went ok. I still play faster than I wanted and as a result got pretty messy, but, as pointed out by the Violist, what's important is the melody, as long as I have that, the rest is just noodling. So, that made me a tiny bit more confident. I did hit a lot of wrong notes though, so that's a concern. I think I am not going to do a solo at Carnegie Hall next year. It's a lot of pressure, especially being the designated soloist to close the whole concert. In fact I was tired the whole day today; I think the rehearsal took a lot out of me. Besides, I'm running out of things I'd like to play, plus it will give somebody else a chance to perform solo, and Dramatic Soprano is happy I'll accompany her again, so it'll be a win-win-win arragement. Dramatic Sop has already written to me about accompanying her and her tenor friend for Butterfly's Acti I love duet for next year's Carnegie Hall concert. She really thinks ahead.

Wise Young Friend and family came to the rehearsal so afterwards we went to get food and visited their place. Little boo-boo has a recital coming up too, but it's on the same day as our Carnegie Hall concert, so we don't get to make it to each other's concert. He is much more into violin now; he keeps wanting to play piece after piece for us. It was so cute.

Today, however, I was tired all day. I think it was from the stress and lack of rest I had the day before. Luckily we have nothing planned and all we did was to spray vinegar on the Ivy and get some furniture for the rats. So at least it wasn't that stressful.

• S
  
  

What I do for Money

It has been a busy quarter at work, and will become more busy for the next year. I'm on track to complete all of my assignments ahead of schedule and should be biting off a fairly difficult piece next quarter, so I'm glad about that.

My group moved into a new office - apparently the average worker at my company moves his desk once a year on average, so I am actually overdue for a change of scenary - and it is a more cramped space, so we are all in each other's faces. My neighbour dislikes my desk's orientation, so now I am facing a wall.

Not sure if I'm more productive, but I'm feeling like more like a drone. It may just be as well, because I don't want to use much of my head.

I'm supposedly in the middle of interview training and should be interviewing candidates now under supervision, but I've only had one interview and nothing else. I'm suspecting the hiring committee does not like my report and does not give me.

All in all, having strategic incompetence makes it easy to focus on my actual job.

• D