Swans on Tea

Things have been rather hectic lately. On top of the normal (and abnormal) bureaucratic stuff, there was a little matter of moving our clocks to their new home in another building. The capacity for disaster was simply terrifying, because this represented several Simoleons worth of equipment, and scientist-years of effort. Breaking a vacuum system isn’t really that hard, and even though it would be fixable, it would represent a significant delay and so there was a wee bit of stress in all of this. We had mentioned the impending move at the conference a few weeks ago, and that induced a retelling of lab horror-stories of moving heavy and/or expensive apparati, and that fed our rampant paranoia.

But we pulled it off.

The air sled system worked like a charm; even when a hose popped out of place it wasn’t a problem — there’s a check valve that prevents the air from releasing through the hose attachment, and the load settled down gently. We gathered a contingent of folks to do things like manage the extension cord so it wasn’t a trip hazard, and move the 4′x8′ polyethylene sheets to the front after we’d slid over them. Our group did the pushing and pulling — we weren’t about to trust things to anyone else — which was a decent workout on the inclined surfaces.

I may post some pictures later on, but for the moment I’m taking a breather to relax and try and shed this cold that’s been attacking folks.