Tuesday, July 12, 2005

more updates

Unfairness of the day: Last night I had my first spider dream in months. They're not supposed to happen after stress goes away. It just ain't right.
What I find weird is that in waking life I am not bothered by spiders at all. There's a large spider living on the windowsill of my new bedroom (I think it's a wolf spider), and there was a large yellowish spider who seemed to spend most of her time crawling around the wall behind my bed in my old bedroom. The way I see it (when I'm awake at least) is that they've got their own spider plans and aspirations, and I shouldn't mess with them. When I'm asleep, it's apparently quite a different story.

Good thing of the day: Today was my first day working with my new boss. We'll call her Allie. She's a month older than I am. She's been a professor in the UK for a couple of years now. She's tremendous fun. It's gonna be great working with her. Today was a good day, because it was mostly manual labour: assembling delicate detector arrays, mounting them, connecting cables--the sort of thing that takes a lot of attention, but not a lot of thought, which is absolutely perfect after the strain of the past few days. Plus there was a beautiful moment when Allie and I and another female physicist (Italian, charming and sophisticated) were taking detectors out of their containers: to handle them, we put on latex gloves. I found myself thinking, "Three smokin' hot female physicsts (and yes I AM including myself in that category--got a problem?) wearing latex gloves...this HAS to be someone's fantasy."