So Meg is in Florida this week. I never realized it before, but I am a very, very lonely sort of guy without my wife around. Other new news (I'm really just posting now because I feel that it's been too long since the last one-- I really need to get into a better habit of this), school starts next week, so there's that. I'm really curious to see if I have a better handle on teenagers now that I've taught a year. I guess that I should get some lesson plans done.

In other news, there's an interesting large-scale structure in the Universe, which is kind of interesting. This is the sort of thing which I want to plug into the (hopefully) upcoming astronomy course at Leominster. That, of course, is dependent upon my deciding to remain a teacher-- no clue what's going to happen there.

Well, as much as I would love to continue, I should really get more prep-work done for next week. Maybe if I make a point of making this a weekly update thing, I might actually get around to having regular posts

The other day, I had a conversation with Alex about his advanced exam subject-- the Higgs boson. Last week, I watched Dan's practice lecture for his own (about finding Z particles at CERN). Anyway, Alex was explaining to me about the Higgs field and how it couples with other particles to give them mass, and then found this awesome equation, the Lagrangian for the Standard Model. The Standard Model is pretty much an overall explanation for how 3 of the 4 Fundamental Forces work (General Relativity explains the fourth, gravity), and a Lagrangian is an equation which describes and interaction of a force; so this one piece of math which was being explained to me describes everything in the Universe other than gravity-- heavy stuff.

So, this made me masochistic and I began reading all about the various details again-- I think that I might have a better understanding of how the weak force works, as well as some more details of the Higgs. And, yeah, reading these again made me really miss doing physics. I had been working to be a physicist since I was twelve years old, and having to leave the program at Brandeis just felt destructive. Well, this has been my jeremiad today... the hard part is figuring out what's next. Meg has just been so absolutely wonderful and supportive and loving and utterly perfect, but I feel like I need to be moving somewhere-- after all that she's done for me, the very least I could do is something to make her proud.

I always liked the phrase "not all who wander are lost". And I have wandered and loved it, but it's a new thing to be lost.