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We rose at 10:30, packed, left, and had breakfast at a local diner. We settled up accounts for the weekend in such a way that at one point we had created some sort of CDO or credit derivative and then parted our separate ways.

Traffic on the way back to PA was hell and Mike and I lost two to three hours over optimum time during the return. Mike mostly slept and I mostly listened to things. Each of us was doing what we needed to.

Back home, I unpacked, found that my dad had given Max the appropriate pills in my absence and prepared Mike and I dinner. We chatted; the Mike and Terry addendum to yesterday’s man-talk; and Mike left.

The weekend scratched a weird combinations of nerves. My original mental plan was for Joe, Pat and I to go camping as a farewell to Pat before he left for Rochester. This time, I was saying “good bye” to Pat and “hello” to Spinrad as this was the first weekend the latter and I had spent in any social capacity. I didn’t mind Spinrad’s company but I found it jarring how little I knew about him despite how present he seemed at some point in life. Maybe it was the goatee.

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Mike invited me out to the Philadelphia Convention Center. He was selling cards for Nick Coss and would probably have stretches of boredom. I took the train down and brought my camera. It had been a while since I had been to a tournament and might be a while until I go to another one.

The event was in the Philadelphia Convention Center and Mike and headed to Reading Terminal Market for lunch.

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Bustle

The Reading Terminal Market has at least three cheesemongers in it between the Amish, the Organic, and the Italian and each had a different view of me taking their picture.  The Amish don’t care, the Organic lady said “no” and the Italian fellow said “sure” kind of as a question while shifting his eyes back and forth.  Between the three I managed to spend about $80 in artisanal meats and cheeses and I again realized that charcuterie is my crack.

Mike and I returned to the Convention Center and I was hit by the smell.  When I judged, I was used to the wash of human stench that would occur after I returned from a lunch break but now there was a moment’s hesitation.  “I don’t need to go in there, so why am I?”  After watching Craig Berry eat a fist of ice cream as quickly as possible and seeing a lot of ass crack I decided to leave; there were aspects of Magic I missed, those were not them.

On the way out I stopped an waved to Nick DePasquale.  He didn’t recognize me until I spoke.  I had been away for a while.

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A friend indicated she wished to go ice skating, and I, not wishing to look like an idiot, immediately took on myself the task of gathering as much skating experience as I could muster.  Mike and Kacey offered to take me skating and we went to IceWorks in Aston, Pa for me to lose my skate-ginity.

The first step was getting skates.  Since I normally wear a size 14-15 shoe and was told to get snug skates, I got a pair of size 14 skates that appeared to be made out of Caribou leather and bone.  Lacking a jackhammer or marlinspike, I forced them onto my feet as best I could and made my way onto the ice.  At this point, I didn’t know how one was supposed to skate but having one’s ankles canted at 45 degree angles didn’t seem like the right way.  I made a lap and felt like my ankles were on fire so I got another pair of skates, this time a size down.  Somehow these went on much easier and I began ice-walking with enough sucess that Mike mocked me for ice-walking instead of ice-skating.  Thanks, Mike.

After my second through fourth lap, I gained the ability to glide for very, very short distances, and having already fallen (my first fear) got to face my second: Being terrified of cutting a child in half.  I see it perfectly in my mind’s eye, I’m gracefully gliding, possibly looking over my shoulder giving someone a devil-may-care smile when an innocent child reachs for his or her mother, falls, and descends to the ice.  I look forward, see him or her, and not being able to stop, cleft the youth in twain and become the Solomon of the ice.

After a few more laps, I felt that I could go short distances without staring at my feet and for about 30 feet of every lap could talk with Mike or Kacey as they passed.  During one such lap, a child fell in front of me.  Knowing I couldn’t stop in time, I attempted to stear around, and did, so much so that I was now going backwards.  In my attempt to face forward, I fell and fell hard.  I stayed on the ice for a moment and was able to make out the outline of my keys, fitbit, knife, and change in my pocket in screaming pain receptors and learned quickly that there’s no reason to bring yours keys with you onto the ice.

I hurt, my Fitbit was shattered, my pants and shirt were wet, but today, I killed no children.  Victory.

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Suzie and I woke up late or at least well rested and packed our things to return home.  The weather was faultless in contrast to the two previous days and the ride to my house was unexceptional.  Our only calendar item for the day was to meet up with Ben, Kacey, and Mike and have dinner downtown.  We changed into fancy pants clothes and our chariot was SEPTA.

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Ben in Motion

Ben lives in Philadelphia and his hallmarks are a mix of sagacity and paper folding.  Here he passes in a blur.

Dinner was at Buddakan, a Stephen Starr restaurant that was my first big kid dining experience some 12 years ago when Paul Dickler took myself and other students here after an Foreign Policy Research Institute presentation.  I had finished that meal with the chocolate pagoda and have spent the time since counting the seconds until I could again eat a tiny chocolate house. I said less than I normally do as the geometry of the table prevented me from dominating the conversation and a small grin kept creeping over my face.  It is nice to be nice to nice people.  Merry Christmas.

The rest are in photos.

On the way back, I ran into my high school men’s choir coach who asked me to join his choir.  I desperately wanted to say “yes”, but not right now, Garry.  I have a few things to take care of.

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We left Chicago with the fluid grace of someone throwing a beanbag chair.  Mike woke early, I next, then Suzie, and we left a standard deviation after I hoped as I vacillated between “stay” and “go”.  The day was bright but the roads were unkind and we missed a visit to someone due to delays from road construction.  Mike will never meet Banks.  We had lunch at a McDonalds where two middle-aged men were arguing over Christian rock.  We received no ticket on the way through Indiana.

Before dropping off Suzie, I asked my standard question of “how do we make this better next time?” to which I already knew the answer: don’t drive to Chicago after spending two days in New York City.  Suzie left our company and Mike and I puttered home taking turns being sleepy and being the driver.  Mike and I parted company in his driveway with a hug and wave and we turned our backs to each other and walked our separate ways to go become adults.

NYC+ was the last trip in the extraordinary run of good trips I had that spanned a six month arc and I set myself the 12th as the first day where I’d need to parlay my job into a career, switch industries, or go back to Act Sci.  Mike and Suzie had the first days of their next semesters to attend to so we all took a small lurch towards being our future selves.  I think I lingered too long in each place not for fear but for loathing of having to face that Monday.  Let’s see where it goes.

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I am an advocate of the idea that the biggest criterion in road trip partner selection is tolerability.  This may not seem like an insight of any worth but please do not conflate friendship with amicability as, for instance, Kyle is a good friend of mine but after seeing each other two days in a row there is a good chance blood will be spilled on the 3rd.  In comparison, Joe Naylor and I have had weeks where we spent 120 or more hours within 50 feet of one another and only after weeks of this am I hit with shoes.  Chris, Suzie, Mike, and I don’t appear to get on one another’s nerves and in cases where there’s tension, it’s usually my fault, often coupled with some sesquipedalian failure where I’m too clever by half.

I think breaking sleep synchrony was a genius move on Mike’s behalf, in that the first driver for the next day would call it a day early, and this may be the only mechanism for recovering from entering a road trip pre-fatigued.  This time, he graciously chose to call early nights; next time I need to volunteer.  Having Chris as a 3rd driver proved to be a blessing and I look forward to Suzie eventually getting her license should road trips still occur then.

This trip also marked I-95 losing its magic for me.  My first trip to Florida where I drove gave the road a grandness as a unifying force of the east coast, it is not.  Spurs and bypasses go around and back to major cities and enough of life is on some other corridor that the road no longer has the mental dominance in my internal US map that it once did.  There were stretches where I knew without signage where I was despite being four or five hundred miles from home and caught myself going “oh, this again”.  The only other stretch of road as far and as familiar is probably the stretch of I-35 between Dallas and Austin.  Maybe there’s a region beyond Boston where I-95 has majesty, but now it, like the PA Turnpike is another road that is as freeing as a straight jacket.

I think we were more human this trip.

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I had six items on my To Do Before Florida and realizing I’d only be able to finish two, I opted for the important one: drag Mike and Suzie to the Churchville Nature Center and photograph the shit out of them.  Why there now?  Because everything looks good over the Churchville Reservoir during the golden hour.

Friends w/Framing
If they were both 40 to 50 years older, this could have been used in a Cialis commercial.

Mike Sad
Mike’s frown doesn’t look like a frown so much as an upside down smile, a la a Kiddy City commercial from the very early 90s.

Eye as Mirror
I’m a sucker for “eye as mirror” shot. Although in every one that contains me I look like a stalker, the 200mm lens here didn’t help.

Finally, humility:
Gratuitious Sunset HDR
This photo simply sucks. It lacks composition, balance, proper tonemapping technique and is an abuse of the tools humanity has crafted to make good pictures great.

We returned to my house after dinner and the evening wound down. Mike got to bed early (unusual for Mike), I largely skipped sleep (unusual for me), as did Suzie (in no way unusual for Suzie).

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I woke at 3 PM after having a long night and longer morning with my only To Do items being “pick up bulk rares from Nick Coss” and “meet with Mike”.  There were a litany of lessor things to do but these were the ones that crossed over to “need”, the former task being necessary for camp and the latter for my probable sanity.

The drive to Nick’s was uneventful once I departed Feasterville as parades had inverted the standards of traffic with a thousand cars on every side street but with the Interstates and major road ways being largely clear.  I got to Nick’s a little after 4, we talked about cards, and birthdays, and Scouting and he agreed that he sometimes felt non-Scouts were morally handicapped.  I suppose this is arrogance but a less damning way of putting it is that Scouts seem to have a head start in terms of personal moral growth.  I talked about the difficulty of finding people willing to do work for something they claim to love and he talked about the quotidian squabbles over pseudo-justice in terms of things like splitting checks, getting people birthday gifts, knowing when to make a loan you’ll never get back, and the logistics of a backyard barbeque.

Mike said he’d be over around 6:30 and I met him at my house then.  I was in the kitchen making a raspberry ganache for truffles and we talked punctuated by bouts of silence as he thought and I stirred.  I felt the stirring added a kinetic quality to the silence but eventually my arm gave way and we moved outside to stare at a copse of pine trees as the sun set.  Again, we exchanged insecurities, semi-thoughts, and shoulder shrugs as islands within the quietude.  Later, I was still a spot peckish after eating a sandwich and we sat on my porch and ate strawberries.  It was now fully dark when the 4th of July fireworks started at the Dolphin Swim Club.  The show seemed nice but only a few crested the trees so there was little to actually look at.  Our chat had wound down, so, Mike and I sat there, listening to fireworks.

I wish all days were as productive.

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We were supposed to meet Clay at a pizza place in Farnsworth, Il at 11:30 AM but were stymied by the restaurant opening at noon.  We pulled up early and I exchanged odd glances with some I thought was he which terminated in the “I’m looking at you” face.  He then cocked his head and got out of his car, leading me to believe I’d just gone crazy sniper stalker on someone I didn’t know.  I found out a few minutes later that he’d jumped in Peter’s car that was on the other side of his parked macro-van.

I ordered Ach-n-Lou’s supreme which was $22 but as each slice weighed 9 lbs I felt I got value.  The pizza was so massive I could polish off a mere 2 slices and that was all I ate for the next 18 hours or so.  There I also got a bad ass picture of Mike.

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Badass gonna badass.

FermiLab’s Wilson Hall towers over the surrounding plain as a citadel of science and everything there helped this idiom.  Even the handicapped sign guy was charging for science.

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TO THE FUTURE!

The opening presentation was neat as were the site tour stops but the Ask-a-Scientist program was the real reason I wanted to be there.  For the last two years, I’ve had a question that I never got answered of  “if photons can only exist at discrete energy levels due to quantization, does the redshift occur stepwise or continuously across expanding space”.  The answer is “Terry, you’re a moron.”  The slightly more detailed answer is “while emission photons have discrete energy levels they may occupy, a dozen other things like interactions with electrons, a bunch of scattering phenomena, and other interactions are continuous leading to photons existing at all possible energy levels”.  During the Ask-A-Scientist program cookies and punch were served, which I wasn’t expecting and we got hear yet another round of otherwise avuncular particle physicists get angry at having lost the chance to finish the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas.

One scientist took us under his wing and allowed us to pepper him with questions at one point uttering the phrase “spectrometers are fucking complicated”.  This was very humanizing and coupled with the washed and dirty view of the accelerator cooling ponds made particle physics much grittier than it is in my head.

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Concrete + Steel + Vacuum + Brains = Discovery

Throughout the weekend I had a persistent photographic challenge of getting a reasonable headshot of Suzie.  She has somewhat cherubic features which requires a larger depth of field than I normally use for portraits, slowing the shutter time, making a lot of scenarios low light.  As Peter peppered Dr. Dave Christian, I got one.

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GOTCHA

I chose to drive the first leg back but after about 45 minutes I felt a sleepy.  I looked around the car and everyone else was asleep so I slowly raised the radio volume until some woke up and I asked to switch with them.  The rest is snow, roads, a very aggressive vagrant in a Cincinnati gas station, and sleep.