Long Overdue

Holy moly, this post is way overdue! I can't believe it's been almost a month since I updated. Time is really flying.

Well. First and foremost, I promised Jimmy I would share these pictures with him, and they came out really good, so I'd like to share them with you, too. So last weekend, very impromptu, I went to Las Vegas to visit Jimmy. I was there from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, and we had a really good time! (Well, I did, at least. I hope he did too!) On Saturday, we drove out to Red Rock Canyon and I took these pictures. It was really beautiful and awesome and impressive.

It's such a foreign landscape to me, but just undeniably beautiful. It has that open, unending feel of central Illinois, but it's a touch more desolate and less welcoming, and the color palette is obviously quite different. A very, very cool experience that I highly recommend to anyone who visits Vegas - it's just outside the city!

After our drive, we went shopping and Jimmy bought me some new clothes! (He got himself a new case/cover for his iPhone, too, so it wasn't just about spoiling me.) I got some shorts, a really great skirt, two shirts, and a jacket! Did I mention how fantastic my brother is? We went out to a very nice dinner that night, then both slept in in the morning and I headed home on Sunday afternoon. It was really great to see him, even if just for a little while. I wish we could do it more often!

I didn't get any work done over the weekend (which was partially my own fault, since I could've tried a little harder to get some stuff done in the airport), so I've been pretty busy this week. It's also getting to that point in the semester where I need to start getting my final projects together... blah, I don't want to talk about this.

I am MUCH more excited about these things:

1) Big Sur Marathon in less than 10 days!!!

2) Waiting to hear back from two grants I applied for. One is from the Berkeley Center for Race and Gender to fund a project I want to do about how people perceive race and gender in speech. The other is a 3-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation that I probably won't get, but still might. Fingers crossed!

3) Running a pilot study for my cognitive linguistics class in the next two weeks.

4) Signing up for classes for next semester, and for classes at the Linguistics Institute being held at Berkeley this summer. This fall, I'm planning to take Field Methods (where we have a speaker of a weird language come in and we have to basically learn it from scratch), Advanced Cognitive Linguistics, and Cognitive Neuroscience. And if my Race and Gender grant comes through, I'll be taking an "independent study" with my adviser so I'll have time to work on that project. Fingers double-triple-quadruple crossed!

5) We found out today that we have 11 incoming first-years for the fall! (This post is a little heavy on the exclamation points, isn't it? !!?) My year is only 6 people, so it will be a little weird to have so many newbies running around, but I really liked the people I met at the prospective student visit, and it'll be very cool to have some new faces and personalities in the department.

I think that's all for now. Rye is barking his head off and I need to figure out a way to make him be quiet.