It's been over a year since I updated this thing...

Trying to remember all the things that have happened since I got my drivers licese is rather pointless, so what's going on at the moment...

Well, I've been working in Gothemburg for the past five weeks, and I go home on Friday. So far I've learned how to solder, which is always good to know, and I've helped Erika sort out the new experiment. It took us for ever to get a signal on the blasted thing, basically three weeks of taking it apart, putting new bits on and then leaving it for several hours to get back down to vacuum again. It's very frustrating when you put in so much work and nothing changes.

Then when we finally got a signal we thought we'd be nice to the turbo pump and give it a treat, so we changed the oil. The last time anyone wrote down that they did that was ten years ago, and one side of the pump was running completely dry, so it really needed it. But let this be a lesson to you all, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. The pump oviously didn't like us being nice to it, and decided to break down a few days later. So now we're waiting for it to be fixed. It should have been ready today, but workmen are never on time. Mind you, Klavs keeps us busy. We got to play around with Swagelock a lot, which is slow and repetative, but better than taking time of flight spectra and finding nothing for five days. And it was fun watching Klavs talk to the safety officer and ask him whether the old hunk of junk he had in his hand at the time could withstand 100 atmospheres of pressure. Poor chap nearly had a heart-attack. We chatted afterwards though, and he seems friendly enough. He's austrian originally, but he's lived here for 41 years. I think he enjoyed the short oportunity to speak german again.

Oh, and I forgot to mention about the ISSPIC convention in the second week of being here. Not that it was all that fascinating in and of itself, I didn't really catch much of it. As a friend of mine put it (why am I so bad with names, I mean I know I haven't seen him for three weeks now, but you'd have thought I'd have remembered his name at least...) "You hear that whooshing noise? That's the sound of important points going right over my head. It's nice to know that even scientists find science difficult. But it was deffinately good to see, even if it did mean that I wasn't with my parents to celebrate my birthday. Mind you, we made up for that at the weekend. Göteborgs passet is really worth it's weight in gold; I haven't seen as much of Gothemburg in all the time since as I did that weekend. And I got the sunburn to prove it, too.

Oh, and let's not forget that Gothemburg is brilliant for skating, there are cyclepaths everywhere. Well, I say brilliant, I haven't done all that much skating. The weather here is very brittish (it was brilliant for the first two weeks, and then things went downhill VERY quickly. I don't think there's been a single dry day in the last two weeks...), and there are hills everywhere. It seems that no matter where you want to go, you have to go uphill to get there, and uphill to get back. I'm sure that's meant to be physically impossible... But it's still a beautifull city.

Darn, I haven't been to Lisseberg yet, better hope there's a dry evening some time; it'd be a real shame to miss the opportunity.

Anyway, I've been rambling far too long. Good luck to anyone who decides to read this!

P.S. It seems I am going to get payed after all. It would have been fun to finish this off with a sarcastic "I'm never going to get payed!", but I wouldn't trade it for the oportunity to get some cash . I offered to take Erika out for sushi before I leave on Friday, it seemed fair since we've been working together on the experiment for so long now. I wonder if she'll take me up on that...