
Planning the week in a nice setting: The IEEE NSS conference booklet, at the beach. It promises to be an interesting conference!
Fall is here, and with it the annual cold and flu season. This year, I got a good taste of that: A rather nasty cold, and, to make it perfect, in a week where I had to give a two hour lecture on Monday in Munich, attend the CLIC CDR Review in Manchester and give a one hour talk Tuesday and Wednesday, and teach a whole-day short course on calorimetry at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium in Valencia in Saturday (that last one together with two other speakers).
But with a bit of chemical help, and by consuming of what feels like a ton of those well-known Swiss herbal drops, I got through it all, without completely losing my voice or feeling close to asphyxiation half of the time. And there is that universal law that such things take 7 days no matter what you do anyway, so an end was in sight right from the beginning. Yesterday, with a day off in Valencia before the start of the main conference, I got the chance to go to the beach for a few hours, again able to smell the salt air, and with some vocal trance from the iPod, to just breathe…