work hard, play hard

I am so physically tired right now, and it feels marvelous.  It's been a long time since I've trained for a big race (nearly a year since my last marathon - jeez!), not that I'm doing that right now, but I did go for a really nice, relaxing 10 mile run down and around Lake Merritt yesterday.  It'd been so long since I did a decently long run, and I kind of just wanted to make sure I could still do it.  Plus, it's so meditative just letting your mind wander while you scoot around town, and it's really fun to cover so much ground in a relatively short amount of time.

So yesterday, I woke up, drank some tea and had a little snack, and headed down to the lake, in downtown Oakland.  I did one lap around, and the sun was shining and the sky was blue, and they're finally almost done working on the new pedestrian path and bridge they've been building for the past several years.  It looks really nice, and you can go all the way around the lake on the same path now, without having to switch around and dodge orange construction cones and all that.

I probably ran for something like an hour and a half, felt totally comfortable and good (I remembered to put my Body Glide on before I left!), and was even able to pick it up on the last stretch, finishing in a sprint of glory at the corner of Grand Avenue and Lakeside Drive.  Then I walked over to Whole Foods and treated myself to a cherry chocolate cashew bar and a yummy latte as I walked and cooled down for a bit, hopped on BART, and was back at my door within two hours of when I left.  It was a really, really nice morning, and I slept like a rock last night.

Today, we had an excellent frisbee game.  There were only 5 of us who showed up, due to various people being out of town, but there was a huge group of barbecuin' frisbee playin' hipsters already hanging out at our park.  These guys were SO East Bay, it was really funny.  They all had tattoos and neon short shorts and generally looked like they just stepped out of 1982 (the guy with the sweatband and mutton chops, in particular).  And a bunch of their friends were just hanging out, drinking beer, having a picnic and playing weird 80s hipster music (plus plenty of the Black Keys, at least).  They could have been jerks, like "we're too cool for you" types, but it turned out they were really friendly and totally happy to have us play with them, and they learned all of our names and actually included us in the game.  (Which is much more than I can say for the last frisbee group we ran into - they "let" us "play" with them, but they never actually threw it to us, and I really didn't have a good time that time.)

So it was very fun, and we played for almost two hours, and now I'm very pleasantly exhausted.  I'm going over to some friends' place to play test a board game in a few minutes, despite the fact that I'm nearly ready to fall asleep, but I guess it's probably not a good idea to go to bed at 7:00, and I'm sure I'll have a good time, anyway.

What a nice, restful-but-exhausting weekend!  And now I'm feeling ready to tackle the week.  Work hard, play hard, I guess!

Wugs Are Back

So... after our quasi-disastrous foray into intramural sports with our linguist softball team last semester, we decided to try our hand at something we're actually competent at: ultimate frisbee.  A rotating group of us has been playing ultimate one day a week for the past few years.  It started my third year, I think, so I guess that means I've been playing frisbee once a week for about 2.5 years now!  We were all pretty... not that great when we first started, but those of us who have kept at it have actually gotten pretty decent over time.  We usually play 3-on-3 (or 4-on-4 if we're lucky) for about 2 hours on Sunday afternoons.  One of the guys who started playing with us last year was on an actual ultimate team back in college, so he's actually legitimately really good, and he's been helping us and teaching us stuff for the past year, too.

So Actual Frisbee Player decided to cajole us into fielding an intramural ultimate team.  I was pretty reticent, because softball was a little disheartening at times, and I wasn't too excited to get my butt kicked for an hour a week again, this time at something I feel somewhat competent at and would rather be able to keep having fun with (and not suddenly feel completely incompetent at).  But... we went for it.  AND OH MY GOD WE JUST TOTALLY WIPED THE FLOOR WITH THE OTHER TEAM WE PLAYED TONIGHT.  We actually felt really bad about it, because our team was having a blast, and they were obviously having quite a bit less fun than us, and we positively trounced them (13-0!).  I know that not all of our games are going to be like that, because we saw the two teams that played after us, and one of them in particular looked pretty darn good.  But we are definitely good enough to be competitive, and that makes me feel so good!  Here's a sport I was definitely not that stellar at to begin with, and now I'm good enough to play on a winning intramural team!  I'm good enough to launch a disc down the field and have somebody catch it to score!  Good enough to stick on the person I'm guarding and swat the disc away from them a few times!  Good enough to make a break for it and catch a few points!

I'm so proud of us!  Go Huckin' Wugs!!

All 7 of us on the line (I'm second from the right, in the shorts).

Alex and Jevon getting ready to jump for the disc.

Pile up!  Dominated by the dude in the weird tank top.

Jevon throwing the disc and me (in the pink shoes) running off in some direction.

QP (re-)submitted

Well, I turned in another version of my qualifying paper tonight.  Every single day this week, I really thought I would get it done.  I mean, it was already done, how long could it take to make some revisions, right?  Wrong.  Decidedly wrong.  It could take 7 days straight of working on it 4-7 hours a day, in fact, if you were wondering.  Including 8-12 and 2-7 today!  But: it is mostly done.  Unless I totally messed up the statistics (which is by no means impossible), it might - might - get approved in its current version.  And that would be great, because then I can stop rewriting this paper at least for a few months, and come back to it this fall sometime with fresh eyes and new data and no looming due date.  Oh how nice that would be.

Now I just have to prepare a short presentation for my meeting about our Paris project at Stanford in the morning (and I get to catch the train at 7:27!), but I think I'll have plenty of time to throw it together on the train(s).  And then I have to get my annotated bibliography ready for my meeting with the chair of my exam committee on Tuesday (lord help me with that... the bibliography, not the meeting, the meeting will be fine), and then I have a week to prepare for my qualifying exam, which will be on Tuesday the 17th.  And then (then!) I get to throw together my poster for the conference I'm going to in Seattle, because it has to go to the printer on the 18th.  (Oops.)  And then I have 4 days to get my Paris experiment ready before I leave for Seattle, then 5 days in Seattle (which I'm really looking forward to, especially once my poster is sent to the printer!).  Then 4 more days at home getting stuff ready for Paris, I guess, including a second poster which will have to go to the printer while I'm actually in Seattle, come to think of it (oops).  And then, before I know it - Paris!

Lovely, lovely Paris.  I'm so excited, but there's so much stuff to get done between now and then.  I decided I'm not even going to try to work on my conference presentation until I'm actually in Paris, because I'll have 14 days while I'm in Europe to work on it, and I think that should be plenty.  It would be nice if I could collect some more data on my kiddies before I leave, but I'm not gonna hold my breath on that.  Because that would have to be sometime this week (when I should be studying) or sometime at the end of next week, when I might be scrambling to get my Paris stuff ready to go.  We shall see.

Shoot, it's 11:00?  Where does the time go?  At least I got to play some frisbee tonight!  It's so great that it stays light so late now - we played frisbee from 7:00 to almost 9:00 tonight, so that was an excellent break.  I am so glad this frisbee thing has been working out.  I look forward to it every week, and I'm going to miss it this summer!

Oh well, time for bed.  G'night.

I am a caricature of myself.

Probably homeless woman in the grocery store parking lot: Got a few extra bucks?

Me: (lying uncomfortably, as I always do) No, I'm sorry...

PHWITGSPL: (looking at my groceries, then at me, somewhat disgustedly) You don't smoke cigarettes, do you?

Me: ... No.

It is true. I had a grocery cart full of fruits and vegetables, and I'm wearing running shorts and Chacos. I do not smoke. This was apparently quite obvious.

This reminds me of a funny conversation I had with some friends a few weeks back, about how it sucks to realize you're just part of a "demographic". We were talking about how we love Trader Joe's, but we hate that we love Trader Joe's. TJ's is a grocery store (the one I was at today, actually) that sells what I would describe as cutely packaged, fun convenience foods for a generation that revels in Americanized ethnic food.

"Why yes, Trader Joe's," I concluded ruefully. "I am a 20-something white person who likes bright colors, convenience, and Thai food. I cannot resist you."

It's weird to realize how much the culture you've grown up in has shaped your identity, and also the fact that there is an entire super market chain directed at you and all of your friends.

Time to go play frisbee!

Before and After: Melinda Version

Here's a picture of me right after I got my hair cut a few weeks ago:

And I here I am after I got bored yesterday:

I'm a redhead on the inside anyway, I think.

I should get back to work, but I'm (still, again, always) working on putting together stimuli for my QP perception experiment, and you can only stare at lists of made up words for so long. Bowp, chuss, pake, beel, mide... starts to drive you crazy pretty quickly.

So the only other thing I will add is that I got a group of friends together to play Ultimate Frisbee on Friday afternoon, and it was so fantastic. I think everyone had a great time, and I certainly did, and I can't wait to do it again. It was so freeing - running around in the grass with friends on a sunny afternoon. There are few better things in life, in my opinion! And at the end it was starting to get a little muddy, so a bunch of us took off our shoes and I could feel the cool, soft grass underneath my feet and the mud squishing between my toes. So good.

The only embarrassing part is that I am still sore! From frisbee! All of that changing directions and jumping up and down and chucking a disk around... much higher impact than I'm used to, and different muscles, I guess. Then I ran 20 miles yesterday (last time before my race!) and that actually made some of the soreness go away, except I'm just slightly tired and hungry and out of whack today.

So now I will go back to drinking my tea and staring at made up words.