Day Off

Yesterday, I said screw it and did next to no work.  The only remotely work-like things I did were stop by the preschool where I do my research and had a really nice chat with the research director about how everything has gone really crazy but really interesting this week, and how I'm going to be around continuing my work for a long time (more than likely doing my dissertation there), and then I mailed off my passport so I can get a new one before I leave for Europe in June.  I started looking at plane tickets the other day so I can be sure to get the best deal, but then I realized I still hadn't changed my name on my passport since getting married (since I haven't been abroad in... 5 years now).  Normally you can just get your plane tickets in your maiden name and it's totally fine, but I'm going to have to get reimbursed for everything by UC Berkeley and various grant sources, probably, and that might be a pain if my tickets are in a different name.  So whatever, I have time, I decided to just bite the bullet and renew the thing.

Then I went out to lunch with a friend from high school who just finished his PhD in physical chemistry at Berkeley, and he's now a post-doctoral researcher here working with lasers and nanoparticles and all sorts of awesome things.  We decided to make it a long lunch and trekked up to North Berkeley to this awesome little kiosk called Grégoire, where they have the most amazing fried chicken sandwiches you will ever taste in your life.  No joke.

While taking my long lunch and purposely not thinking about my QP, I got a text message from another friend who had wanted to go to lunch, but since I missed it, I basically went straight from a long lunch to a long coffee break.  (Although I don't really know if you can call it a 'break' if it's not interrupting any work.)  We met up in the linguistics lounge, this cozy little room in our department with couches and a whiteboard with markers where people hang out periodically.  We were having a rollicking discussion about accent marks in various Romance languages.  Accent marks in French denote the quality of the vowel, for example, but accent marks in Spanish tell you where the accented syllable is, and apparently accent marks in Italian do a little of both.  Then a few of us got coffee and I finally got back to my office around 4:00.  It was such a lazy, Mediterranean feeling day, in the very best way possible.

I decided to ride my bike home and let the dogs out before heading out again last night.  So I did a little laundry and listened to the Jackson 5 and let the dogs run around outside before leaving for San Francisco.  Aforementioned coffee friend and I went to this random bar/café thing in the Mission District of San Francisco, which is the most predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of the city.  He knew a Russian (opera-singing) girl who's visiting our department this year and does work on African languages, whose language consultant is in an African band.  So I'm in a vaguely Indian-themed bar called the Bollyhood Café in the Mission District of San Francisco with a Russian opera singer and my French friend listening to a band called Voice of Africa which is led by a Guinean Jesuit priest.  Have I mentioned how much I love my life?  The band was pretty good, and after a little while we even got up and danced.  Then afterwards we wandered around the Mission and eventually went into a different random, subdued looking bar and sipped on some sangria until it was time to get the last BART back to Berkeley.

We talked about life and Paris and moving and languages and friends and karaoke.  We're going to go do Japanese karaoke one of these days.  We talked about going tonight, but I'm kind of sleepy today, and we have our prospective grad students arriving tomorrow, so it's going to be a long few days.  On the one hand, I love it when the prospies come.  I'm hosting one from the University of Colorado at Boulder starting late tomorrow night, and I also volunteered to lead a campus tour and take the people interested in phonetics and phonology out to lunch on Tuesday.  Then there's possibly my favorite party of the year at one of our professor's house in the Berkeley hills, and another student-hosted party on Tuesday night, and we're all usually pretty dead by Wednesday.  So on the one hand, it seems like a terrible idea to add one more thing by doing karaoke tonight.  On the other hand, I'm going to be dead by Wednesday anyway, so why not add another fun thing in there?

Right now, though, I need to take a shower, and clean the house, and probably go by Old Navy and exchange my jeans.  (Why can't you even be internally consistent in your jean sizes, Old Navy?  I finally found some jeans I really like, so I ordered two of the exact same size and style from the website, and they don't fit.  Which means they've changed their sizing from last year to this year.  Harrumph.)

Anyway, I'm feeling much better about the QP situation after having one crazy, fun day completely away from it.  (And after meeting with both of my advisors last week, who are such helpful, understanding, eminently reasonable people.  And also after having an email conversation with the person organizing the England conference, who was totally cool with me changing the title of my talk to reflect my recent change in findings/minor upheaval.)  So now I'm going to step back for a few days, have some fun hosting prospies and hanging out with my friends that I love so dearly, and then be ready to attack those reaction time measurements and collect some new data next week.  La vie est belle après tout!