Spirituality ....

... it's 4:07 UTC, that's Coordinated Universal Time -- somebody didn't put their letters in the correct "acronymal" order, did they? That translates to 20:07 Pacific. I am sitting in the control room of the Hanford LIGO detector but I can tell you, I am not in control...
It's my last shift as a "Science Monitor". All LIGO scientists are asked to come to one of the two US detectors at some point and do some helping out with the real deal. I chose the WA state desert over the Louisiana swamp land where our second US detector is located -- I went for half-life Hefeweizen rather than Carnival Jambalaya.
One can wash down a plutonium pizza with that Hefeweizen; the owner of the local "Atomic Brew Pub" has quite a sense of humor.

Do you know about Hanford's nuclear past and present? Nagasaki's plutonium came from about 10 miles down the road from where I am sitting right now and the desert landscape these days is littered with power plants, nuclear testing facilities, army training territories and a whole load of firing ranges. Between the these three, there's no room for the avid hiker (me) and more often than not I ran into fences, "No Trespassing" signs and a shocking amount of shells and trash left by the local gun nuts.
On one of my outings, I found myself rather disturbed on a meadow full of dead cows and alpacas in varying stages of decay and lying amongst piles of trash.
On the other hand, we (my friend Kurt and I) ended up hiking the largest local mountain in solitude today, surrounded by soft-faced hill sides and endless fields of yellow grass land reaching a set of four trees all winded-ly leaning in the same direction, one of them housing a rather large bird nest that Kurt quickly claimed to belong to an eagle, mainly because that would be a cool thing to run into, not because he knew it to be an eagle's home. It was paradise out there ...

When visiting the detector, LIGO scientists (me) work some shifts in the control room while the detector is doing its thing: detecting.
"Science Monitor" translates to being the (Ph.D.-holding) scientist that is supposedly in charge of operations during the shift but, due to lack of knowledge and experience with detector-related things, the SciMon really can't do much other than keep the "Operator" company. The operator is the person that actually knows stuff around here. In most cases they are Physics majors who want to go on to do a PhD. And even though they know the job inside out they have to run things by us, the fake bosses. It sounds like gibberish to us when they talk detector talk and it feels quite silly to be the permission giver purely on the grounds of having one more PhD in pocket.
We just "lost lock", which means the mirrors of which the laser beams are supposed to be bouncing off went crazy wobbly and messed things up bad. This can happen when there is seismic activity in the area, a big truck drives by, a plane flies by, a redneck is off-roading... the list goes on. It's really hard to figure out which of the above the culprit was so usually the ops just wave their arms and mumble seismic under their breath when asked by us ignorant SciMons.
But I am learning stuff and I certainly have to admit that it feels pretty cool to sit in this monitor-filled room waiting for a gravitational wave to swing by...