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!

An Adventure

The older I get, the more I relish a good adventure. I used to be kind of timid and hesitant to really break out of my comfort zone, but these days I really get a charge out of it. I like doing slightly crazy things, just to keep people guessing and to keep myself feeling alive. There's something very invigorating about doing something you've never done before.

I've been mulling this over for a while, and today I took the plunge. It all happened faster than I thought it would, but it was quite the adventure, and I even took my camera along so I could show you a little bit of what I saw today. Come with me on my adventure and see if you can guess what I did before you get to the end!

* * * * *

I left the house at 9:00 this morning, even though I've been fighting a little cold and going to bed around 8:30 the past few days. I went by the ATM and took out several hundred dollars, then I got on the bus and went to downtown Berkeley. I was kind of nervous with all that money in my pocket!

In downtown Berkeley, I got on BART and took it across the Bay to San Francisco.

Once in San Francisco, I walked down from the BART station and picked up this awesome little car from City Car Share. It's a Scion xD - I really loved driving it! It has quite a bit of pep and is a great size. Maybe if we get a car I can convince Roger it's a good one... plenty of room for doggies in the back!


I drove all the way through the city. (That was an adventure in itself.) Here I am on Broadway Ave, if I remember correctly.


Once I got to the northwest edge of the city, it was time to get on Highway 101. That is - the Golden Gate Bridge! You can't see it too great from here, since I was being a not-entirely-unsafe driver and wasn't actually looking through the camera when I took the picture. I just turned it on and blindly took a shot out the window.


Just in case you didn't believe me, here I am driving across the honest-to-goodness Golden Gate Bridge. It was amazing.


I don't have any pictures of Marin, but you'll just have to believe me that I drove up into Marin county, where I got lost. My Google Maps directions were wrong, and I had to wind around in the hills for about an hour before I arrived at some very nice people's house. We chatted for a long while, they gave me some tea, and eventually I got back in the car and was on my way home.

I got stuck in traffic in the city, but it really wasn't so bad on a day like today.


I was waaaay late bringing the car back. Between the hour of being lost, the nice nice people in Marin, traffic, and then having to stop for gas and getting kind of lost again (this time in the city), I was an hour and a half late. I called City Car Share three times to try to extend my reservation, but their system was down every time. I did find out no one needed the car until 1:30, which is when I got it back, so I didn't feel bad, at least. I just hope I can talk them out of charging me a bajillion dollars because I was so late.

After I dropped the car off, I headed back to BART. A really cute French guy stopped me and asked me where Chinatown was. I could tell he was French by his accent, so I started talking to him in French. He thought I was French too!! I totally still got it. That made me feel even happier.

I finally made it back to BART and headed back into the East Bay.


Then I made it home, cargo intact, around 2:30, I think. Huck and Rye were playing it all cool, but I know they missed me.


I took a look at our living room and noticed how asymmetrical the area by the door looked. I was glad I went to retrieve my cargo, because now our living room will be just about complete.


Did you guess what it is yet??

Ok, here, look what I got from those nice people in Marin:


Pure awesomeness is what. This baby goes for almost a thousand dollars new, and I got it for waaaay less than that because their 13-year-old son had outgrown it and he just wanted to get a reasonable amount of money for it to offset the cost of his new one.

I am a speed demon, baby. I'm going to ride this thing all over the Bay Area. It is so fast and light and totally worth however much City Car Share charges me for bringing their car back so late!

Did you like my story??

Rain, rain, go away...

Ok, Northern California. I get it. You rain a lot. I know my impressions of you have been unjustly skewed because I arrived here during a drought year, but now that it's been raining for the past four days, I believe you. The "wet season" does exist after all. You win. Rainy winters. Ok. Can you cut it out now?

Seriously. It's been raining for a few days now, and I'm kind of ready for a break from it, but I feel bad saying that because we really, really need the rain. This is the first time it's actually rained for more than a few hours at once since we've been here! And once we hit March/April, it probably won't really rain again until November. So I should just suck it up and deal with it and stop being so selfish. But I had to take the bus to the grocery store in the rain today because we were almost completely out of food and I couldn't put it off any longer, and it was pretty nul. Plus, the department's hosting a linguistics conference this weekend (did I mention that before?), so I've been forced to be out and about and my pants and socks and shoes get all wet, and then I'm cold all day.

Waah, waah, waah, I know. Here are some good things about my life.

I got to see George yesterday! For anyone reading this who has no idea who I'm talking about or why I'm so excited he's in town, George (and Matt and Dan) are my best friends from studying abroad in France, and I miss them all terribly. George is doing a graduate program in French literature at UC Irvine right now, and he and his friend drove up here Friday night to visit San Francisco. So I met them in the city yesterday for lunch, and then we went to Ghirardelli Square and got massive ice cream sundaes drenched with chocolate that we couldn't finish. It was drizzling in the city too, but we hiked up a HUGE hill and stopped at the top and looked out across the Bay. Alcatraz was right in front of us, and I pointed out the clock tower on campus waaaay in the distance, in the Berkeley hills, and the clouds were beautiful. We don't usually get interesting clouds here; most days, the sky is either completely blue or completely flat gray. Sometimes we get white little wisps of cirro-nimbus clouds drifting across the sky, but very rarely do we have the big, marshmallowy cumulus clouds we had yesterday. And the colors were great too - grays, blues, purples, and even pinks as the sun was setting.

So we stood on the side of the hill in the rain for a few minutes, looking at the landscape, and then we walked down Lombard Street ("the Crookedest Street in the World") to their hotel, so they could give me a ride back to BART (the train back to Berkeley). We weren't on the crooked side of Lombard Street, though; we walked down the other side, which is perfectly straight, but still not boring. It's still on some kind of crazy 45 degree angle or something.

I don't know what else to say. We don't have class tomorrow, but our conference is still going on, so I have to go to that in the afternoon. I hope the rain will let up in the morning so I can run with my dogs. Then I'll take a hot shower, drink some tea, and enjoy my warm house while I get some work done before I head in to campus.

Sounds good to me.