like that bird and baguette thing that seemed completely overblown. The weird part is that the press is making kind of a big deal about it. Welcome to France (no offense France, but it seems to happen a lot more often here than at home). There was a power outage at CERN yesterday, yes. It's awesome, and there's a lot more to come next year. The Liquid Argon Calorimeter performed beautifully, calmly collecting data as if it was no big deal it was built for high energy collisions, not cosmics! This is what I got into physics for, this thrill. The beam intensity went up by steps, closely followed by my enthusiasm. I pushed really hard my last year to finish my thesis and get out in time so I wouldn't miss all of the fun :) Delays aside, here I am! The night we got the first stable collisions I was sitting at Point 1 until 3am, eagerly marking every LHC bunch injection. As a grad student on BaBar, I desperately wanted to be a postdoc at CERN, on an LHC experiment, for the startup of the new greatest collider in the world. Perhaps it's a bit cheesy, but I have this great feeling that I am living the dream right now. (Don't worry, I'll take some time off to celebrate Christmas and New Years' with friends.) And I'm really excited to be rid of the meetings and distractions for 2 whole weeks! I'll be looking at indicators of data quality and trying to extract some physics. So, it may seem kind of nerdy, but although many of my fellow collaborators will head home for some much-needed vaca with their fams, I will be hanging around my apartment in Saint Genis, analyzing this early data. I've really been looking forward to this Christmas shutdown.
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