An open letter or "Bye bye, so long love."

(Newark, N.J., USA) – Dear Friend, Sorry I’ve been out of touch recently. It’s been that ‘life’ thing again, getting in the way of ’life’. I wake up every morning in a panic thinking that I probably have (at most) 60 years left on the planet, and there is a lot to do before my number gets called. So it is rush-rush-rush buzz-buzz-buzz all day long, but sometimes I don’t get it all in. It is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and since you don’t usually squeak I don’t usually get around to making space for it. Anyway. There are some things you should know. You are (likely) a good person. And I (likely) miss you. Anyway.

I will be back in the US for almost a month, on account of family-visiting, holiday-thing-ing, conference-going, etc. It is a while away for the current gig, but I was constrained by my flight today being my return leg of my Sept. flight and a conference in Colorado in mid. January. And so my itinerary - roughly:

Geneva-NYC-Nashville : Dec. 14

Nashville-San Antonio : Dec. 24

San-Antonio-Phoenix-Aspen: January 6

Aspen-Denver : January 15

Denver – Geneva : January 16

So it is a full month, and the weight of my bags reflect that. Conference clothes, Life clothes, Ski clothes, Books, Papers, Computer, etc. It is such a full months, I had to check 2 bags - like a girl. First time in my life. Seriously.

And so I sit now in the Newark airport. My flight leaves in an hour or so for Nashville and so I take it all in and revel in the New Jersey-ness of it all. Man alive, these people are funny looking ...and talking! I can't decide if I love them or hate them. I saw the town where I grew up on the approach into Newark. My high school. The streets where we lived. The downtown. I was looking for it and looking for it and then… BLAM! There it was. Madison, NJ, is still there.

30 seconds after takeoff this morning we were in blinding sunlight. Seriously blinding. I think it was the first time I'd seen the sun in weeks and weeks. The whole top of the Saleve was covered in radiant yellow, so the cloud level was really low. It really is true that you just need to get 'up' a little bit to get out of the Geneva fog. I didn’t see much else, as my seatmate, closed the window almost immediately, and missed the Alps, Normandy, Ireland, and the south coast of Greenland. I had to get up and walk the cabin to see the view.

A few more hours and I will be in Nashville. It was a funny flight out of CH. Like mayflies, this couple in the row behind seemed to have lived through the whole life cycle of their relationship in the 9 hours on the plane. Apparently, they met when they sat... and started loudly exchanging life stories almost immediately and seemed to really hit it off....there was giggling, and then cuddling and cooing sometime after lunch... as we hit the Canadian coast they were taking a cute little nap together...but somehow, in the midlife of their mayfly day, I could feel relations were a little strained through dinner as we flew over the Gaspe and into Maine….circumstantial unhappiness then turned to searing freak-out when her boarding card for the next flight wasn’t to be found and that was that...he was out of there as soon as we landed..."Bye bye, so long love."

Or rather…

" 'What did you think when you first saw me?' The information is always the same. Your partners always decide in the first five minutes. After that, the only change can be in the negative direction. After you win, you can only lose. Married. Killer. Kenny G. Smells bad. Kisses badly. Democrat. Bye, bye love."
-Penn Jillette, from SOCK.

Take care,
Your friend,

-P

Correction

So I had lunch with a Swiss-German guy today who kinda set me straight on the whole germanstroopsinsideSuisseduringWWII-thing. The troops of the 3rd reich never even "advanced one meter into Switzerland." I apologize for the speculation... but still wonder what these huge bunkers facing south away from Germany were.

Relics of a different age

( Bruegg, Switzerland) - I've been out of the 'blogosphere' this week, as I have been doing some experiments at the Paul Scherr institute near Bruegg. A friend of mine who is now a professor in UBC, Vancouver had some beamtime at the new synchrotron here and I offered to help out. Running these experiments have been a total dogfight, as we've been working with difficult samples and recalcitrant equiptment. I thought I would have time to catch up with some ideas I have had of late and put fingers to keyboard, but alas we've been too busy. The only thing I have done other than bang our collective heads against the wall was go for a quick run in a short break yesterday afternoon. Luckily the equiptment is totally broken now, so I can get caught up.

It was pretty interesting actually. I ran into Villingen (the little village outside the insitute), saw some kind of monument on top of the highest point of the neighboring ridge, and as is my way, decided to make for the top of it. I followed a gently winding thin road up and around. The asphault doubled back on itself and so I continued straight onto a dirt path on the switchback, which looked more promising in my bid for the top. Eventually though this path too seemed to cut across rather than up the hill, so I decided to bushwack.

In the end it was fine, but I was seriously doubting my sanity about halfway up, as I climbed up over scree and dug my running shoes into dirt to keep from sliding down on loose sections. The top confronted me with a 20 ft. cliff, that I decided to skirt around rather than scale. I found a low gully up through the remaining rocks and pulled myself up over the edge and....

...whew...I was on a road...? huh? Actually it looked like some kind of little open area, with a few benches, old stone buildings, a sign with some place names in German, and some big concrete embankments. I ran the 100m to the top of the hill and surveryed the surrounding valley. This part of Europe is grey all year long it seems and I would have been able to see the beginning of the Bernese Alps had the visibility been more than a few miles. Still, it was a good view and the tiny town of Villingen looked even smaller below. I had climbed a long way. I noticed the clean line of sight up through the river valley, which is looking away from the German border 40k to the north. So what was this place? I started my jog again, and the path brought me down and and under my previous vantage point. The concrete berm I had been standing on was a now quite decayed old, but huge fortified artillery position akin to the ones we used to explore back on Sandy Hook in ol' NJ. Those had been placed to defend NY Harbor in WWII. I ran further along and saw a few little ones, along the path which became a road as I got farther down (the road I had given up on earlier).

I checked it out on the net after I got back, and found no mention of it, but what the place must have been was the some of the far southern extent of fortifications of the 3rd Reich. Switzerland was formally neutral in WWII, but this region is heavily German and I am not even sure that it wasn't inside Germany in the 40's as the borders could have been a little plastic in those times. This area would have been prime terrain for the moving of troops and possible advance of the Allied forces up from the south, as it is east of the Jura and west of the big lakes of Zurich and Konstanz. I am sure the local population didn't like a Nazi artillery position above them. It is weird as I think this area has been Suisse for a long long time. That has too be what is is though, as the gun placements point south. Perhaps it is the only logical defensible position along here, and the local government decided there was nothing they could do when a German company drove the 40k south and dug themselves into the hill. I am going to look into it.