By request

At the request of Abbey, who lately has become a blogging superstar, I’m going to give a bit of mid-week update. There doesn’t seem like there’s much to talk about, but one person’s trash is another’s treasure, or something like that, so maybe you’ll find my mundane weekday life and observations interesting.
I usually don’t do much after leaving the lab. If the weather is nice, I walk or run around an outdoor track next to my apartment building, then make dinner (sometimes a challenge without a microwave), flip through the entire set of TV channels wishing that I’ll stumble across a previously undiscovered English-speaking channel, and then maybe I’ll read. My roommate makes fun of me for reading so much, but I’ve made good progress on a set of books that piled up in my bedroom at home. I just finished “Invisible Monsters” by Chuck Palahniuk (the guy who wrote “Fight Club”) and as expected, it was definitely a disturbing story with lots of plot twists. Other books read since I’ve been here: “Wicked,” “A Million Little Pieces,” “My Sister’s Keeper,” “Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason,” and I think a couple others I can’t remember.
I think one of the most exciting parts of my day is the bus ride. Mostly because of the people-watching. Every day, I walk to the same stop. And every day, this elderly guy waits there, too. He looks the same each morning: blue velvety textured pants, blue coat, brown briefcase and a blue baseball cat over his white hair. Every morning I stand at the stop, watching, as he does the same routine. He emerges from an apartment building across the street, crossing the road while looking anxiously in both directions and stands about 10 feet away from the stop. I usually smile to acknowledge him, I mean we see each other every day, but he avoids eye contact or smiles and then quickly looks away. Still standing a bit away from me, he waves his hand in the direction of the apartment building. Each time he does that, I try to spot the person he’s waving to. But after more than a month of this, I still can’t find her, or him, or maybe it’s not a person but just a cat or a plant. After the initial wave, we wait. And as soon as the no. 9 bus pulls around the circle, he waves again, blows a long kiss and waves once more. Then he walks quickly toward the stop, passes me and boards the front of the bus, never the back. I’ve never talked with the man, mostly because I’m afraid he won’t speak English. And besides, my main reason to talk with him would be to find out who he’s waving to, and asking flat-out might be intrusive. So each day I hope that I’ll spot the person I couldn’t the day before.
Today was pretty average. Like clockwork, I saw waving guy on my ride in. Then I interviewed a physicist about crystals. Not Swarovski, or any other brand you might find in jewelry, candlestick holders or those little figurines that cost a truckload, but the kind of crystals used in a particle accelerator detector. They’re kind of pretty, rectangular-shaped and extremely clear, not something I would associate with the rest of the detector, which looks like a huge mass of brightly colored metal and wires. Energy from electrons and photons in the particle collisions are deposited in the crystals, which then turn into light. I won’t get much more technical, but the physicists want to know the energy of these particles passing through the crystals so they can identify anything new made from the collision. To do this you need lots of crystals, about 76,000 in all.
Not much more after that. This weekend I’m going to Florence, so as usual, you can expect a Monday update.