Well, long time no post. Let me try to sum up what I did in the last couple of months.
First I went for holidays back home to Halifax, where I met up with Pat just before he headed back to Edmonton. I also met up with Jon, an old friend from school and some other friends from university back East. There was beer, LAN parties, and planes. Then there were snakes on said planes.
On the way back to Victoria I stopped in Ottawa to visit a conference at Carleton. I explored the Ottawa downtown, which on Monday and Tuesday nights is not so impressive. I did manage to visit the Zaphod Beeblebrox and have some Pangalactic Gargleblasters. All this while whatching a teenage punk band up on stage that had somehow managed to get all their friends in. There was a ton of drunk teens moshing in the pit there. Very entertaining. Aside from that I was quite impressed with the war museum in Ottawa. The civilization museum was OK, but not as good as the war museum.
I got back in Victoria just in time to leave for Vancouver where I attended Chris' bbq & good-bye party. I had an awsome steak. And beer, and more beer. And Calum offered some Scotch, which was also good.
After a weekend of that I went back to Victoria, got started with the fall semster, and promptly took off to Spain. There was a workshop in Sant Feliu de Guixols along Spain's Costa Brave (about 100 km Nroth of Barcelona) I got a day at the beach, a day (more importantly a night) in Barcelona, and loads of good wine and food out of that trip (well and I learned loads of stuff about ATLAS but I am not here to talk about work). Anyway, Barcelona is an awsome city. I got to see a good bit of the old town, Las Ramblas and Gaudi's unfinished cathedral. We had some Tapas and wine in the evening somewhere in the old city, then a fellow grad student from the Univeristy of Toronto and I went off to party. I finally returned to our hotel just on time to get my stuff and head to the airport ... finally back to Vicotoria for more then half a week :)
Here then I got started TAing and got back to doing work. I also participated in a couple of beach cleanup dives. I helped my landlords out with a discover SCUBA course for which I recruited some of the Grad students here. Good time were had, and yes more barbeque.
SO next is a workshop (Trigger and Phsyics) to CERN end of this month. I will also drop by in Hamburg, and hopefully Berlin after the workshop.
