My conference went great! It was fun, and I got to meet a lot of cool, interesting, smart people and hear some very cool talks. I'm really glad I got to go this year, and I think I'll definitely go back to this conference sometime in the future, but it's not quite the conference for me. I guess I knew that going in, since it's called "The CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing", and I don't really do sentence processing, I do sound processing. There were a few more phonetics-oriented talks, and I got some good feedback on my poster and saw some other cool posters on bilingual speech processing. Man, bilingual research is totally the way to go. It's just so fun.
Anyway, I was lucky enough to be able to stay with a friend in Palo Alto on Friday night, so we kind of had a psycholinguist girls slumber party. It was great, but I didn't get too much sleep, and then I went to a birthday party last night and didn't get home until ... 4:00 this morning. (!!!) I left the party at a somewhat reasonable hour (around 2:00, probably) with two friends who live somewhat in my neighborhood of Berkeley, and the three of us walked the 3 miles or so home, since the bus service is so limited late at night, the weather was pretty nice, and a walk just sounded good. And it was a nice walk, with nice people, and we stopped to talk on the street corner for longer than I realized, and pretty soon I was walking in the front door at 4:00 am. I crashed right away, but since I just can't sleep in anymore, I woke up around my usual time, at 8:30, and couldn't get back to sleep.
So today has been lazy and long and sleepy, and I took the dogs for a really long walk late this morning, listening to NPR news and wandering around Berkeley in the cool breeze. Then I decided some bubble tea sounded good, so I went to Berkeley Bowl and bought a bunch of tapioca pearls, but it turns out there's a difference between instant tapioca pearls and, I dunno, infinite cook time tapioca pearls. These things have been boiling for like an hour now, and they're still not done. And I want my bubble tea, dagnabbit.
Speaking of culinary adventures, though, I made the greatest pear tart yesterday, in about 50 minutes flat. While I was sitting in the conference, my mind kept wandering back to the tart pan I splurged on this past week. A good friend of mine just bought an apartment in Chicago, so I sent him some French-style café au lait bowls as a combination housewarming/early birthday present, and while I was picking them out, I saw this great tart pan. A tart pan is one of those things that you don't need, but they're just so pretty, and every once in a while, I want to make something that would work much better in a tart pan. So I got it, and I must say, it was an excellent purchase. The pear tart I made was pretty dang good, if I do say so myself, and just so impressive with its fluted edges and browned top and crumbly crust, even though it wasn't hard at all to make. I wish I had a picture to show you! But I'll be making one again soon, so maybe I'll get a picture then.
Well, bubble tea is done, so I think I'll try to get some reading done, unless I fall asleep. Today might be a lost cause...
Completely unrelated P.S.: I think I'm taking Portuguese this fall and am starting to get kind of excited about it.
Completely unrelated P.S.: I think I'm taking Portuguese this fall and am starting to get kind of excited about it.
2 comments:
Man, your poster was so awesome. So what was the feedback on it? Just not relevant? I don't get your tea fetish, but glad it's a pleasure for you. Love you, punkin' pie.
Your mommy
Yeah, funny, not much response to my poster. One really great professor from Stanford who has similar research interests to mine stopped by and talked to me about it for a while, so that was really nice, and she asked me if I'd like to give a talk about it at Stanford sometime in May. So if nothing else, there was that. I got a few comments/questions from people who do first and second language acquisition work, but yeah, it was overwhelmingly people who care about things like relative clauses, and choosing prepositions. Which is fine and all, just not my thing, and I wasn't their thing, so ... a good experience, but not quite the right crowd for me, I guess.
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