I have been trying to keep this under wraps, although Howard thwarted me a little, but now that the decision is made, I can tell you: we are moving to Chicago.  That is actually not quite true and sounds a lot more exotic than the truth.  We are moving to the cornfields northwest of Chicago.  I’ve accepted a job with Northwestern University to work at Fermilab on two neutrino experiments: MINERvA and NOvA.

It turns out that I am not very good at announcing major life events such as this.  On Friday, shortly after I decided which offer to take, and after keeping the details of my job search secret for months, I wanted to finally tell everybody the news.  But I realized there might be a few people in my life, e.g. my mom, who would prefer not to hear major news via Facebook (or via some acquaintance who checks facebook more often than she does).  So I wrote to a few people, posted to Facebook, then got on a plane.  It turns out that I forgot to inform one important person: Howard found out that I’d finally made my decision when his nephew called to congratulate him on our move.  Whoops.  Really, Howard knew what was going to happen.  But, in case it ever comes up, if your boyfriend is going to considerable personal effort to sell his house and alter his employment situation in order to follow you around the country, it’s really best to keep him fully in the loop.

So, as you might imagine, life is a little chaotic right now.  I have been imagining scenarios that involve moving myself, Howard, two cats and a dog and all of our stuff 700 miles and have so far been unable to come up with a reasonable scenario.  How does one do this?  Does anybody have advice on moving pets long distance?

You all have met my favorite person in the world many times:

I like to think that I am also among Gram’s favorite people in the world.  But we were chatting on the phone a while back and I was complaining about all this endless work-related travel I’m doing.  And she was all “yeah, yeah, yeah — what’s Howard up to”?  That’s my translation of it — she said it in a much more grandmotherly way, of course.  So I told her that he was traveling to Vancouver for work, and she was much more interested in this.  That I study the fundamental interactions of our universe and do it well enough that people fly me all over the place to talk about it (although, to be honest, that’s not saying a lot) is not impressive to Gram.  But, that Howard made something that broke (rather spectacularly!) and had to go fix it is very impressive.  Hrmph!  But really, I deserved it — she tried to talk to me on Facebook earlier that day, and I accidentally ignored her! I know — I’m a terrible person!

Anyway, the travel is going okay.  I made it home from Chicago, Howard made it home from Vancouver and now we are spending the weekend on Long Island to attend a wedding.  This is the event that forced me to consider the exact definition of “black tie.”  I’m still not entirely clear, but am hoping that there will be enough alcohol at the wedding to make me forget that I’m a dorky scientist rather than someone who has 16 ball gowns in her closet.  At this stage in my life, that level of intoxication only takes about 2 glasses of wine, so we should be good.

The picture of Gram is courtesy of my aunt Cathy — thanks Cathy!

The good news is that Howard and I both have successful careers. The bad news is that our respective careers are making us feel like someone has put our heads in a vice and starting cranking. Right after I finished three weeks of traveling to San Francisco, Chicago and Charlottesville, Howard got word that he would have to go to Vancouver on Sunday and I was all “Yessss!!!! For once it isn’t me!!!”. And then today I found out I have to go back to Fermilab on Tuesday. And then go to Fermilab again the following Tuesday. Not so “Yesssss!!!!”.  Fermilab is actually a very cool place, but I’ve been away so much lately that the cats are getting used to sleeping in my bed and get kind of pissy when *I* want to sleep there.

The other good news is that I get to spend the weekend with my adorable pets, and this past week was the second anniversary of Oliver’s adoption, and his approximate 3rd birthday.

Happy birthday, old man!

(Warning: lots of dorky photos of me standing in front of stuff below!)

We had a nice trip to San Francisco, and I survived turning 30.  Here’s some of what happened:

My talk at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) went well, except that it was a wee bit short.  I’m the only particle physicist in the world who gives short talks.  I feel bad that I didn’t give them their money’s worth, and, since I have to give the very same talk at least two more times in the coming months, I’m going to have to think up something more to say about semileptonic decays.  That’s easy, but coming up with something to say about semileptonic decays that other people would actually want to hear is less trivial.

We took not a single picture of SLAC!  It was the nicest particle physics laboratory I’ve ever seen, but that is not saying a lot — particle physics laboratories are notoriously ugly.

Palo Alto is a little weird.  Much more to my taste was Mill Valley, where we headed next.  We stayed at the Mill Valley Inn.

The innkeepers left a birthday card, chocolate cake and a bottle of wine in our room for my birthday.  Isn’t that nice?  There was also a redwood grove right outside our room.

We also drove up the coast to Point Reyes Seashore on highway 1, both of which were really spectacular.

We went for a very pretty and very windy walk on the beach.

On my birthday, we went for a hike in Muir Woods.

Howard was very good to me on the whole trip, and especially on my birthday.  Among other things, I got cool nike+ipod stuff. In San Francisco, we stayed at the Harbor Court Hotel.  The staff seemed to be high on something, but we had an awesome view of the Bay Bridge.

For dinner on my birthday, we went to Millenium, which was lovely and delicious.

My friend val loaned us an awesome book Stairway Walks in San Francisco, which was a really excellent way see and learn a lot without spending money.   The hills there are craaazy!  I have no idea how people drive standard transmissions in that town!

On our final night there, we walked out on the pier next to the hotel

And finally, we had dinner at the Tanga Room with my long-lost friend Sherry, and Howard got to hear about all the trouble I got up to in junior high and high school.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip.

As usual, I’m really happy to be home.

… but probably not wearing any flowers in my hair.  Howard and I are all packed, but as usual, the most difficult part of leaving is saying goodbye to my homies:

But they will be well cared for.  Oliver is going to stay at his doggie daycare, which he really prefers to home.  My friend Val is coming to feed and cuddle the cats, and there is no better cat sitter in the world than Val. I’ll still miss them though!

I was on a good run of updating this blog regularly, but then life got busy again and it all went to hell.  This week, I did manage to finish the second course of the Wilton cake decorating series and made the cake above.  I made all the flowers myself out of icing.

It is looking like I won’t get to take another decorating class for a while.  Amongst all of the other traveling in near future, it looks like I’m also going to squeeze in a trip to Charlottesville, VA.  Anybody know anything about Charlottesville?

There is a big birthday coming up at the beginning of October that involves me and the number 3 followed by a zero.  To celebrate, I have decided to drive myself crazy.  Here is my schedule for the foreseeable future:

• Sept 28th: fly to San Francisco to give a seminar & celebrate birthday
• Oct 17th: run a 5k in Ithaca
• Oct 23: go to Long Island for a wedding that is far fancier than I am
• Oct 29: go to Fermilab for a workshop
• Nov 5: My mother arrives to Ithaca and demands baked goods.
• Novish: Fly to Ottawa to give another seminar
• Dec sometime: Fly to Arkansas

Also, I decided to make myself feel really old by signing up for Twitter.  There is now a Twitter feed on the front page of my blog, and trying to get Twitter, WordPress and Facebook all linked up gave me a glimpse of what it must be like for old people to use computers.  Which is good practice, since I myself will be old in 15 days!  On the bright side, I can now send updates from my cellphone, so that you can all follow the craziness as it unfolds.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that I recently gave up caffeine.  It really does improve my productivity, but I don’t like being addicted to things.  Especially things that give me a raging headache if I don’t have them.  The actual stoppage occurred  while I was at CERN.  It wasn’t so hard there because, contrary to popular belief, European coffee is not good.  At least not the kind they serve to particle physicists.

So we’ll see how long that lasts.  Another addiction I have that I’m not ready to give up is cookbooks.  I have a lot, and recently went on a little cookbook-buying bender.  Most recently, I acquired “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,”  because I watched “Julia and Julia” and if you were able to watch that movie and not want to own that cookbook and make Beuff Bourguignonne then you are a stronger person than I.  And I am a vegetarian.

Also, this summer I heard one of those features on NPR where they bring on a famous author and have him/her say what their favorite book is.  This one featured Elizabeth Berg and she said her favorite book was a cookbook called “Beat This!”  I figured since I am the kind of person who likes to sit around and read cookbooks, and since a literary person chose this cookbook as her favorite book out of all the books in the world, I really had to have it.  And it didn’t dissapoint.  I actually stayed up late one night reading it because I couldn’t put it down.

Oliver apparently got bored of Julia’s discussion of mushrooms:

but is looking forward to all the buttery baked goods.

This weekend, we had the second of Howard’s two annual barbecues.  I guess they are now my barbecues too, but since they have been going on much longer than I have known Howard, I don’t feel much ownership.  We spent a lot of the weekend cleaning up in preparation, and then cleaning up in post-paration.  It was all very fun, but there was a lot of feet-dragging when we had to wake up early this morning.  Oliver was supposed to go to doggie day-care today, but we rescheduled him for tomorrow because this was the only evidence that we own a dog:

As it turns out, Fermilab’s machines are refusing to build my code this morning, so I might as well have just crawled under the bed with him.

Since I have documented every little tiny milestone of my thesis research here, you may as well know that our paper has been officially published.  As my partner on the project said, this finally puts a period on our work.

So, coming soon, exciting details my new job, working on CMS track trigger studies.  Try not to get too excited