Greetings all! Since I don't have much going on in my life that is worth reporting other than a trip to New York, going home, relaxing, eating food, working out, playing Starcraft, and writing my thesis, I will write today on other things going on at CERN that are both neat and almost as important as my work in rho particles. Possibly even more so!
I'll start with those things on the LHC (Large Hardon Collider for those of you familiar with fun typos) that I am most familiar with.
ALICE! The experiment I work for, ALICE or A Large Ion Collider Experiment, is unique from other experiments on the LHC in that it isn't looking for the Higgs Boson. For those uninformed, this is an elusive particle tied into, you guessed it, the spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry. Beyond that physicsy nonsense implied in that porker of a description, this has to do with explaining why certain particles have mass. ALICE does not look for this. We are a more specialized kind of detector looking at something called quark-gluon plasma which is what you get when you take two atoms (or protons) and hurl them violently into each-other at very very close to the speed of light. Basically EVERYTHING evaporates into the most basic bits of matter (quarks and gluons) and you get a very very hot soup that is similar to conditions just after the big bang (like 10^-14 seconds after. A very short time). That's what we're interested in (among other things): studying the early universe. We're most useful during the brief but exciting heavy ion run. This is when the LHC is smashing lead ions into lead ions (just the nuclei in fact, no electrons to throw off our groove).
ATLAS! A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS. More evidence that scientists can bend language to their acronym whims, this is the money experiment. If you watched angels and demons you saw the ATLAS experiment and it's control room (though there isn't a window from the control room into the experiment as the experiment has lots of radiation and is deep underground). If you've heard about something going on at CERN, it is probably ATLAS that was discussed (and possibly CMS which I'll get to in a minute). Though this experiment also does some work with this early universe plasma, the main point is searching for the aforementioned higgs boson. Recently ATLAS and CMS had a press release stating their lastest results. It continues to be "compelling" but thus far they have only managed to narrow down the mass range that the Higgs can be in. (The main way you "see" a particle is calculate the E=mc^2 mass which doesn't change no matter how fast the particle is going). It is designed to measure a very broad range of particle properties (higher energy that ALICE is capable of) to be sure to find the Higgs (as well as other things).
CMS! The Compact Muon Solenoid, this is like ATLAS in that it is a general purpose detector (it can look at a lot of things) that also look for the Higgs boson at high energies. It also has a good PR group and gets into the news more often than ALICE. Pretty much everything said about ATLAS applies here.
LHCb: Large Hadron Collider beauty, this is a specialized experiment that specifically studies particles that contain a b quark. The b is either for bottom (if you don't care about hurting the quark's feelings) or beauty (if you do) and corresponds, shockingly, to the top quark! This is one of the six known kinds of quarks. What they do is complex and less exciting to read about than what I do and what ATLAS and CMS do, so you can wiki it if you like!
Other stuff that goes on at CERN! Yes there is more to CERN than the Hardons. One of the cooler things happening is research in antimatter, that substance that if you hug it, you will explode! Among things that go on here, a space based detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was launched last may and mounted on the international space station. This one looks at cosmic rays (particles that comes from spaaaace!). Another experiment, ALPHA, which I don't care to look up what it stands for, in June trapped anti-hydrogen for a reasonably long period of time, thus showing it is reasonably stable. This is like regular hydrogen expect with a positron and an anti-proton (similar to an electron and proton except that they have opposite charge and annihilate when they collide).
Other items are the CLOUD experiment which studies how clouds form, ISOLDE which study how heavy nuclii break up (what goes on when particles collide rather than what is produced), and OPERA which you may have heard of, if not by name. OPERA was the one that found neutrinos that seemed to be traveling faster than light. They were able to do the experiment again and got the same faster than light result. This is very VERY strange, especially because this would likely break all of physics if it turned out that things can move faster than light, so I'm excited that this might happen. More likely there's some hitherto unknown glitch in the experiment, but one can hope!
So, hope that wasn't too terribly dull and was reasonably understandable. I'm having a blast at home and am looking forward to seeing family in Boise over Christmas.
Caio!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
L'Escalade and other soup festivals
I lied. Its only about one soup festival.
This weekend was a good one! In celebration of the start of my winter vacation, Geneva's weather system which alternates between freezing and clear and raining heavily decided to avoid the raining heavily aspect for two fourays into Geneva proper for myself and a roud round of rambunctious royalits. Well, and one other American. We aren't royalists.
It all began with Polly (of ALICE Matters interview fame) volunteering me to cook some fajitas for a group of her friends, which I was eminently in favor of since I both love cooking and love meeting people, especially people as amusing as these turned out to be.
Our dramatis personae reads as follows:
Polly Bennet: Royalist - bringer together of this little group and supplier of a flat where we could cook said fajitas. She is the only person who can manage to keep a fire going in her thrice accursed wood stove. I'm not bitter.
Morag Hickman: Quite possibly has one of the coolest obsessions I've ever come across. She... learns things. All sorts of things, most of which she has taught herself. She is talented at picking up discout at at . Anything from silver smithing to making stuffed animals to learning HTML. Rather artsy and about as weird as I am.
Laurel Coffey: The American respresentative to the group and a minority until I joined up. She works at ATLAS which is probably the place you envision me working at except I'm working at ALICE. ATLAS is the one that gets all the press. Laurel is a PhD student and is unamused by the lack of Mexican food on this continent, so she was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the bunch on the idea of fajitas.
Monique Tsang: half American, half English, half Chinese, she completes the balance of this little group by adding equal parts US and England. The way she gets away with this is she lived several years in the US and has lived the past several years in the UK and is currently living in Geneva all the while, if you can believe it, having been born in China. Quite a talent, that. She's quite entertaining, outgoing, and throws out phrases like "let's get some cheese and crumpets, yo!" thus mixing 90's american culture with various britishisms.
The hall is rented, the orchestra engaged, it's now time to see if we can dance (props if you get the reference). The start of our adventure begins with me buying more chicken than I possibly thought we could eat and making a delightful marinade out of lime juice, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, onion, garlic, tequila, and red wine all sort of thrown in as I felt like it and sturred before dousing the chicken and letting it sit over night. As it happened this was delicious (once cooked).
The next day began with Polly and Morag picking me up to head into Geneva for the day. Fortunately, things are open on Saturday and everyone and their mother was around doing Christmas shopping, and we were no different. We visited all sorts of stores and places that I don't want to tell you about because I bought presents at some of them. So this part of the story is shorter than the rest. We met up with Monique at the train station in Geneva later and headed back for Fajitas!
We picked up the chicken at my place as well as wine (no wine does not go with fajitas beer does, but this is France dammit!) and headed off to Polly's flat for a fun evening of cooking and, most importantly, eating. Larel met up with us there and we all set to, with everyone helping. I made some guacamole which really wasn't very good, but as those of you who have tasted my guac when I have the right ingredients can attest do, this was hardly my fault. I tried mixing in lime juice and coriander which while not too bad, did not do enough to cover the horrible quality of the avocados (one of which was almost falling apart, the other of which was barely starting to be ripe). We had a third avocado which was basically made of green plastic that I couldn't do much with. Morag made some coriander and lime sandwiches which were actually quite good (if you like coriander and lime).
Laurel brought some delicious pico de gallo that she made herself as well as nacho materials that we had as an appetiser. The cheddar cheese over here is rather sharper than one finds in Mexican restaurants in the US, but it was still good. I then started with the chicken, ending with the assistance of Morag who did something with the chicken that doubtless those of you who cook often would say "duh" to. But as most of my cooking has been my own experimenting, it hadn't occurred to me. She got the pan quite hot until all the remaining liquid has boiled off and the onions started to carmelize, then put in about half the chicken (already mostly cooked) and kept it on high until it had started to brown delightfully and was no longer somewhat soggy (even if it tasted good). As it happened this was a perfect touch and I greatly approved.
We then laid out grated cheese, sour cream (made from plane yogur and, I'm not sure, alchemy or something. I wasn't around for its making), guacamole, salsa that isn't but still tasted ok, the chicken, and some amazing spiced rice that Polly cooked and ate every last scrap. It satisfied both Laurel and my craving for Mexican quite well (though I would have preferred a good guacamole) and I think it was a huge success with everyone. We all sat around chatting and either drinking tea (the English do this well), or wine (the French do this well) while Polly prepared dessert.
Dessert was a pear cake made from scratch with big ol' huge honking delicious juicy chunks of pear throughout. It was amazing and wrapped up the night perfectly. I started to light a fire before polly physically picked me up and threw me across the room because "I wasn't doing it right" and started it herself. The fire caught for a while, but started dying because the ratio of giant log to kindling was low (also there isn't much room for building a proper tepee and none for building a log cabin in the stove). Despite my attempts to save it (polly was baking) and all I really did was introduce smoke to the room which smelled nice but also was probably not good for us or the flat. So I sulked for a while until cake cheered me up.
We talked and enjoyed ourselves for a few hours before Laurel kindly drove us all home.
The next day the weather was again nice and we headed into geneva for L'Escalade. This is a celebration of a time when the swiss drove off the invading French in 1609? Possibly 1602. I dont really care to look it up. Anyway, the fort was under seige and the French were beaten off by some famous woman whose name I cant remember who threw boiling hot soup out the window at them. I assume the Swiss army was involved somehow as well, but that is less important. Celebrations involved small groups of pikemen, drummers, and piccolo...ists marching around the old town while street vendors sell mulled wine (dear Lord I love mulled wine), hot vegetable soup, and raclet. It was quite fun, even if muskets going off occasionally do cause one to jump a bit. Sadly Monique wasn't able to make it until later when we all were getting tired, so she was unable to join us.
We wandered around for a while enjoying the noise and the old town (and the mulled wine in my case) before trying to find some friends of Laurel who "were by the cannon in the old town with a red umbrella." We kept following the sound of explosions hoping it would turn out to be a cannon (it was supposed to fire every 20 minutes) but it was always muskets. We eventually wandered into the part of the old town that Oz and I had been to previously, and then into the park on the edge of the old town where we ate lunch whilest in Geneva. Oz will remember defeting me on a giant chess board? We went past that. All quite nostalgic.
We wandered back up the hill towards the muskets and came back to a square we had been through before to find a tall British guy with a red umbrella! As it turns out the cannons, well hidden, we had been past at least twice and failed to notice. Oh well! We all went to stand in line to go through a secret passage way that the open only once a year for people to go through, so that was kinda neat (if very narrow). We then separated again and we wandered off to find food. Not much was open, but I did find a McDonalds. Before you shout bloody murder at me for eating there when french food exists, it was open and it was cheap, and I tend to try various McDonalds around the world. None quite get it right (though this one was better than most).
We headed back shortly after eating having declared it a successful day. I had wanted to get a traditional chocolate thing for Katarina (landlady's daughter), but I was unable to find one except in some shops that were closed... I had thought they would be at street vendors along with the other traditional items of mulled wine and soup. Oh well. The traditional chocolate thing is a chocolate cauldron with marzipan vegetables that is for kids who dont like vegetable soup (so, you know, for kids).
Thus ended our excapade, and a fun one it was. I returned home to pack as I am going back to the US today (as I write this I'm 20 minutes from catching a shuttle to the airport). I'll be in New York for a week or so at STAR again before going home for Christmas! I can't wait. The one damper in all this is my body decided now was the perfect time to catch a cold. I haven't had a cold for over a year and it decides to get sick just before an international flight when I have a FINAL EXAM the following morning. Ugh. James is not amused. Anyways, I'll survive. Hope to see many of you soon! A week or so. I dont know if I'll be updating or not over Christmas, but I will return to Geneva on the 17th of January and shall at least continue then.
Later all!
caio!
-James
This weekend was a good one! In celebration of the start of my winter vacation, Geneva's weather system which alternates between freezing and clear and raining heavily decided to avoid the raining heavily aspect for two fourays into Geneva proper for myself and a roud round of rambunctious royalits. Well, and one other American. We aren't royalists.
It all began with Polly (of ALICE Matters interview fame) volunteering me to cook some fajitas for a group of her friends, which I was eminently in favor of since I both love cooking and love meeting people, especially people as amusing as these turned out to be.
Our dramatis personae reads as follows:
Polly Bennet: Royalist - bringer together of this little group and supplier of a flat where we could cook said fajitas. She is the only person who can manage to keep a fire going in her thrice accursed wood stove. I'm not bitter.
Morag Hickman: Quite possibly has one of the coolest obsessions I've ever come across. She... learns things. All sorts of things, most of which she has taught herself. She is talented at picking up discout
Laurel Coffey: The American respresentative to the group and a minority until I joined up. She works at ATLAS which is probably the place you envision me working at except I'm working at ALICE. ATLAS is the one that gets all the press. Laurel is a PhD student and is unamused by the lack of Mexican food on this continent, so she was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the bunch on the idea of fajitas.
Monique Tsang: half American, half English, half Chinese, she completes the balance of this little group by adding equal parts US and England. The way she gets away with this is she lived several years in the US and has lived the past several years in the UK and is currently living in Geneva all the while, if you can believe it, having been born in China. Quite a talent, that. She's quite entertaining, outgoing, and throws out phrases like "let's get some cheese and crumpets, yo!" thus mixing 90's american culture with various britishisms.
The hall is rented, the orchestra engaged, it's now time to see if we can dance (props if you get the reference). The start of our adventure begins with me buying more chicken than I possibly thought we could eat and making a delightful marinade out of lime juice, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, onion, garlic, tequila, and red wine all sort of thrown in as I felt like it and sturred before dousing the chicken and letting it sit over night. As it happened this was delicious (once cooked).
The next day began with Polly and Morag picking me up to head into Geneva for the day. Fortunately, things are open on Saturday and everyone and their mother was around doing Christmas shopping, and we were no different. We visited all sorts of stores and places that I don't want to tell you about because I bought presents at some of them. So this part of the story is shorter than the rest. We met up with Monique at the train station in Geneva later and headed back for Fajitas!
We picked up the chicken at my place as well as wine (no wine does not go with fajitas beer does, but this is France dammit!) and headed off to Polly's flat for a fun evening of cooking and, most importantly, eating. Larel met up with us there and we all set to, with everyone helping. I made some guacamole which really wasn't very good, but as those of you who have tasted my guac when I have the right ingredients can attest do, this was hardly my fault. I tried mixing in lime juice and coriander which while not too bad, did not do enough to cover the horrible quality of the avocados (one of which was almost falling apart, the other of which was barely starting to be ripe). We had a third avocado which was basically made of green plastic that I couldn't do much with. Morag made some coriander and lime sandwiches which were actually quite good (if you like coriander and lime).
Laurel brought some delicious pico de gallo that she made herself as well as nacho materials that we had as an appetiser. The cheddar cheese over here is rather sharper than one finds in Mexican restaurants in the US, but it was still good. I then started with the chicken, ending with the assistance of Morag who did something with the chicken that doubtless those of you who cook often would say "duh" to. But as most of my cooking has been my own experimenting, it hadn't occurred to me. She got the pan quite hot until all the remaining liquid has boiled off and the onions started to carmelize, then put in about half the chicken (already mostly cooked) and kept it on high until it had started to brown delightfully and was no longer somewhat soggy (even if it tasted good). As it happened this was a perfect touch and I greatly approved.
We then laid out grated cheese, sour cream (made from plane yogur and, I'm not sure, alchemy or something. I wasn't around for its making), guacamole, salsa that isn't but still tasted ok, the chicken, and some amazing spiced rice that Polly cooked and ate every last scrap. It satisfied both Laurel and my craving for Mexican quite well (though I would have preferred a good guacamole) and I think it was a huge success with everyone. We all sat around chatting and either drinking tea (the English do this well), or wine (the French do this well) while Polly prepared dessert.
Dessert was a pear cake made from scratch with big ol' huge honking delicious juicy chunks of pear throughout. It was amazing and wrapped up the night perfectly. I started to light a fire before polly physically picked me up and threw me across the room because "I wasn't doing it right" and started it herself. The fire caught for a while, but started dying because the ratio of giant log to kindling was low (also there isn't much room for building a proper tepee and none for building a log cabin in the stove). Despite my attempts to save it (polly was baking) and all I really did was introduce smoke to the room which smelled nice but also was probably not good for us or the flat. So I sulked for a while until cake cheered me up.
We talked and enjoyed ourselves for a few hours before Laurel kindly drove us all home.
The next day the weather was again nice and we headed into geneva for L'Escalade. This is a celebration of a time when the swiss drove off the invading French in 1609? Possibly 1602. I dont really care to look it up. Anyway, the fort was under seige and the French were beaten off by some famous woman whose name I cant remember who threw boiling hot soup out the window at them. I assume the Swiss army was involved somehow as well, but that is less important. Celebrations involved small groups of pikemen, drummers, and piccolo...ists marching around the old town while street vendors sell mulled wine (dear Lord I love mulled wine), hot vegetable soup, and raclet. It was quite fun, even if muskets going off occasionally do cause one to jump a bit. Sadly Monique wasn't able to make it until later when we all were getting tired, so she was unable to join us.
We wandered around for a while enjoying the noise and the old town (and the mulled wine in my case) before trying to find some friends of Laurel who "were by the cannon in the old town with a red umbrella." We kept following the sound of explosions hoping it would turn out to be a cannon (it was supposed to fire every 20 minutes) but it was always muskets. We eventually wandered into the part of the old town that Oz and I had been to previously, and then into the park on the edge of the old town where we ate lunch whilest in Geneva. Oz will remember defeting me on a giant chess board? We went past that. All quite nostalgic.
We wandered back up the hill towards the muskets and came back to a square we had been through before to find a tall British guy with a red umbrella! As it turns out the cannons, well hidden, we had been past at least twice and failed to notice. Oh well! We all went to stand in line to go through a secret passage way that the open only once a year for people to go through, so that was kinda neat (if very narrow). We then separated again and we wandered off to find food. Not much was open, but I did find a McDonalds. Before you shout bloody murder at me for eating there when french food exists, it was open and it was cheap, and I tend to try various McDonalds around the world. None quite get it right (though this one was better than most).
We headed back shortly after eating having declared it a successful day. I had wanted to get a traditional chocolate thing for Katarina (landlady's daughter), but I was unable to find one except in some shops that were closed... I had thought they would be at street vendors along with the other traditional items of mulled wine and soup. Oh well. The traditional chocolate thing is a chocolate cauldron with marzipan vegetables that is for kids who dont like vegetable soup (so, you know, for kids).
Thus ended our excapade, and a fun one it was. I returned home to pack as I am going back to the US today (as I write this I'm 20 minutes from catching a shuttle to the airport). I'll be in New York for a week or so at STAR again before going home for Christmas! I can't wait. The one damper in all this is my body decided now was the perfect time to catch a cold. I haven't had a cold for over a year and it decides to get sick just before an international flight when I have a FINAL EXAM the following morning. Ugh. James is not amused. Anyways, I'll survive. Hope to see many of you soon! A week or so. I dont know if I'll be updating or not over Christmas, but I will return to Geneva on the 17th of January and shall at least continue then.
Later all!
caio!
-James
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Christmas related events!
Greetings everyone! I've been more busy than usual the past week, which is my excuse for the lack of a post.
One of the cooler things I've done was several training shifts in the ALICE control room. Most of the time not much is happening in there (data is taken during 'runs' that can last 5 or 6 hours) and it is only when changing what data to take or if something happens with the LHC beam that you need to do much. It's a good time to do some work as long as you keep an eye on what is happening at your station.
My first batch of training (which I did a bit last week as well) was finishing up my DQM training. DQM is Data Quality Management, or quality assurance for those of you familiar with the term. It requires a bit more attention than the other shift I trained for. There are six screens with various interfaces open on them (six screens mounted so each screen can be rotated separately is really quite awesome and I'm thinking of getting such a setup for my desktop at home), and you have to make sure that various agents are still running (agents are programs handling everything else that is going on), you have to watch for errors popping up in the log (which you also have open) and, most importantly, there are about a hundred histograms to check periodically. These are all at a glance once you get the hang of it, but it can still take 15 minutes or so to click on each detector's specific tab and look at the histograms for that detector. You want to make sure they are updating and that they have no problems (generally they pop up an alarm if they do have a problem). There are a lot of things to keep track of here.
The other shift I was training for was actually more fun: DAQ or Data AcQuisition. This is the station that starts those data runs I mentioned and really is the post with the most action when things are happening. Since the whole purpose of this experiment is to take data, this is the central station in the place and the shift leader keeps close tabs on what is going on here (which is good because in general the shift leader is the most competent person in the room). The shift leader during my training shifts was a hilarious short italian (?) guy with white hair and a respectable mustache with a great sense of humor. The shifter training me was a Slovakian tech nerd with absolutely epic hair and beard. I had more fun here than training for DQM (except the few hours I had sitting at the station with a beautiful Italian woman). Between data runs, there is nothing to do at all but make sure errors aren't cropping up so I actually started an outline for my thesis (which hope to have finished by the time I meet with my thesis committee shortly after finals).
Beyond training, I did have some real fun with the people living with me. We put up Christmas decorations! Me being the one American in the house, and Americans (apparently) being rather more obsessed with Christmas decorating than most Europeans (though you wouldn't notice it compared with this group, whatever Yiota says about Americans), I was "in charge", that is Senior Chairperson of the Subcommittee for the Purpose of Putting Lights Trees. This definition of "in charge" means the task has been delegated to me to make it the way Yiota wanted it. It was quite a lot of fun! I even have some battle scars (well, scratches). Sadly I haven't gotten pictures of the outside at night, but the inside has a lot more stuff on it. Back yard is a tree with lights and the front has a huge garland with the same. Here are pictures of our task!
The intrepid group! Left to right: Marillys, Katarina, Moritzo. While I was bringing the last few boxes down from the attic (which is fun because the ladder descends through a trap door in the ceiling), they started sorting things. Well Marillys and Moritzo did. Kati was taking various plastic animals out of their boxes and playing with them (a regression to when she was 6 no doubt)
Our Fearless Leader, Santa hat and all. Here we have some of the decorations up! Nice garlands on the back door there and a few on various objects that were handy and needed things that sparkle draped on them.
Marillys and Katarina with further Santa hats and a tree! This is one of the trees (artificial, sadly) that I was Chief Person in Terms of Illumining Aesthetics and String-Based Photon Production Bulbs for.
Moritzo was in charge of Window Partial Coverage and Decal Positioning in the kitchen, as well as one of the important members of the Garland Committee that we all assisted in(headed by Yiota).
The finished product! Well, one angle of it. I was Plant Bowman Extraordinaire, and Marillys and Katarina handled Lighted Garland Operations for this picturesque scene as well as Petite Tree Ornamentation and Placement.
Until next time friends and family! Ciao!
One of the cooler things I've done was several training shifts in the ALICE control room. Most of the time not much is happening in there (data is taken during 'runs' that can last 5 or 6 hours) and it is only when changing what data to take or if something happens with the LHC beam that you need to do much. It's a good time to do some work as long as you keep an eye on what is happening at your station.
My first batch of training (which I did a bit last week as well) was finishing up my DQM training. DQM is Data Quality Management, or quality assurance for those of you familiar with the term. It requires a bit more attention than the other shift I trained for. There are six screens with various interfaces open on them (six screens mounted so each screen can be rotated separately is really quite awesome and I'm thinking of getting such a setup for my desktop at home), and you have to make sure that various agents are still running (agents are programs handling everything else that is going on), you have to watch for errors popping up in the log (which you also have open) and, most importantly, there are about a hundred histograms to check periodically. These are all at a glance once you get the hang of it, but it can still take 15 minutes or so to click on each detector's specific tab and look at the histograms for that detector. You want to make sure they are updating and that they have no problems (generally they pop up an alarm if they do have a problem). There are a lot of things to keep track of here.
The other shift I was training for was actually more fun: DAQ or Data AcQuisition. This is the station that starts those data runs I mentioned and really is the post with the most action when things are happening. Since the whole purpose of this experiment is to take data, this is the central station in the place and the shift leader keeps close tabs on what is going on here (which is good because in general the shift leader is the most competent person in the room). The shift leader during my training shifts was a hilarious short italian (?) guy with white hair and a respectable mustache with a great sense of humor. The shifter training me was a Slovakian tech nerd with absolutely epic hair and beard. I had more fun here than training for DQM (except the few hours I had sitting at the station with a beautiful Italian woman). Between data runs, there is nothing to do at all but make sure errors aren't cropping up so I actually started an outline for my thesis (which hope to have finished by the time I meet with my thesis committee shortly after finals).
Beyond training, I did have some real fun with the people living with me. We put up Christmas decorations! Me being the one American in the house, and Americans (apparently) being rather more obsessed with Christmas decorating than most Europeans (though you wouldn't notice it compared with this group, whatever Yiota says about Americans), I was "in charge", that is Senior Chairperson of the Subcommittee for the Purpose of Putting Lights Trees. This definition of "in charge" means the task has been delegated to me to make it the way Yiota wanted it. It was quite a lot of fun! I even have some battle scars (well, scratches). Sadly I haven't gotten pictures of the outside at night, but the inside has a lot more stuff on it. Back yard is a tree with lights and the front has a huge garland with the same. Here are pictures of our task!
The intrepid group! Left to right: Marillys, Katarina, Moritzo. While I was bringing the last few boxes down from the attic (which is fun because the ladder descends through a trap door in the ceiling), they started sorting things. Well Marillys and Moritzo did. Kati was taking various plastic animals out of their boxes and playing with them (a regression to when she was 6 no doubt)
Our Fearless Leader, Santa hat and all. Here we have some of the decorations up! Nice garlands on the back door there and a few on various objects that were handy and needed things that sparkle draped on them.
Marillys and Katarina with further Santa hats and a tree! This is one of the trees (artificial, sadly) that I was Chief Person in Terms of Illumining Aesthetics and String-Based Photon Production Bulbs for.
Moritzo was in charge of Window Partial Coverage and Decal Positioning in the kitchen, as well as one of the important members of the Garland Committee that we all assisted in(headed by Yiota).
The finished product! Well, one angle of it. I was Plant Bowman Extraordinaire, and Marillys and Katarina handled Lighted Garland Operations for this picturesque scene as well as Petite Tree Ornamentation and Placement.
Until next time friends and family! Ciao!
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