blah blah blah

I am so tired of reading!!!

Since there are no classes this Monday for Presidents' Day, my Stanford class is meeting twice this week.  That means that not only do I have to go down to Palo Alto again today after just being there on Monday, but I also have twice the amount of reading to get done this week.  I'm trying to do it all, I really am, and I'm trying to concentrate on it and actually get something out of it, but dude.  I am so tired of reading this stuff.

I also really need to get a finalized version of my qualifying paper in to my readers so they can give me suggestions and we can try to get it approved really soon, but I still need more preschooler data before I'm comfortable reanalyzing and updating my paper.  Because I don't want to go through the trouble of reanalyzing, drawing conclusions and re-writing the whole thing only to find that I have to do all of that again once I get more data.

And I was supposed to hear back yesterday from the conference I applied to in England, but they said on the website that the decisions will be going out today instead.  Except that it's 1:45, which means it's like 9:45 in England, so it's not looking good for today either.

Harrumph!

In happier news, we hosted our annual conference over the weekend, and it was really fun, but I got next to nothing done and am feeling so behind on everything.  I'm enjoying this semester and am excited about getting my QP finished, since I'm excited about the work I'm doing, but it will be really nice when this semester is over.

Linguist FAIL

Yesterday when I was walking the dogs, we came across this cute little old lady on a walk with her granddaughter and a little while fluff ball Shih-Tzu thing.  The little dog was yapping a little bit but looked like he might want to say hi, so I asked the lady, "Does he want to say hello?"  (This is something that dog people say to each other to signal that their dogs are friendly and just want to check each other out.)

She looked at me a bit startled and said, "No sé inglés."  (I don't know English.)  Then turned to her granddaughter and said, "Qué dice ella?" (What is she saying?)

So I'm like, "Oh!"  Do it!  Do it!, my brain says.  Break out the terrible and rusty Spanish!  You know you want to!


me:  Uhhhhhh ummmmm quiere.......... decir............... (feeble wave)
Translation:  Uhhhhhhhhhh ummmmmmm does he want............. to say............ (feeble wave as I cannot for the life of me remember the word 'hello' in Spanish)

old lady:  Ah!  Que se lleguen amigos?  (They want to make friends?)
me:  Sí!!

Dogs say hello.  I feel ridiculously stupid for temporarily forgetting how to construct a basic sentence in Spanish.  (Why is it so much harder when you're on the spot?)

I figure:
+2 points for making an attempt to speak Spanish in the real world
-2 points for forgetting the word for hello (seriously - worst linguist ever)
+1 point for understanding the rest of what she said and ending with 'gracias'

So it wasn't a total loss...

California Is Lovely

We drove up along the coast yesterday, for no particular reason (which is absolutely the best reason).  I brought my new camera with me.  We stopped at a seafood shack along the ocean for dinner and I had fish tacos.

Northern California is so lovely, especially when you can get away from the hustle and bustle and the golden sun just sets the whole world aglow.

Ohhh, this town...

Everything about this video is so Berkeley.  Everything I really like and everything that drives me crazy about this town sometimes, right there.  And some nice shots of Berkeley, too!

Last night, my friend Greg and I played at an open mic night at an Irish pub in south Berkeley called The Starry Plough.  Well, Greg played the 12-string acoustic guitar, and we both sang.  It was really, really fun, and I think we'll do it again soon.  I hadn't sung in front of people in literally years.  It's such a rush, and I wasn't nearly as nervous as I thought I would be.  Probably because at every open mic night at the Plough, there are some people who are terrible beyond belief.  It really would be a challenge to be the worst act at the Plough, so that's a confidence booster, right there.

Back in the Swing of Things

Just for fun, here are a few pictures I snapped on my phone camera while I was in Illinois.

Mmmmmm, the lovely nothingness of central Illinois.  (And I really do mean that.)

The lovely somethingness of Chicago in winter.

And then there was this ridiculous thing asleep on the bed when I got home:

He was sleeping like this, in the dark.

But now I'm back, and it's January, and it's time to get back in the swing of things.  I've been back in the campus preschool this week, collecting more data, and it is so fun.  I started the kids on a new and different task this week, so it's been really interesting to see what they do with it, how they respond to it. We've moved on to production now, which means instead of just listening to words and "silly words", they're saying words and silly words, as fast as they can.  So I'm getting some really cool data on how long it takes them to figure out how to say stuff, and what kinds of errors they make.  (And still what they had for breakfast, and what their favorite movie is, etc., etc... Kids are way more interesting to work with than adults for many reasons, one of which being that they just do stuff that adults don't.  Like stop doing the task in the middle to tell you about their favorite cartoon.)

I snapped this picture of my research room today (you can see me in the one-way mirror on the left side snapping the photo).  I really like my little research room, but it's gotten almost comical how much equipment I have to set up to get it ready.

Your tax dollars at work, folks.  Linguistic research in action.

First I have to plug in the special audio equipment and headphones on the other side of that mirror, so my research assistant can watch and listen in and take notes.  Then I have to set up the laptop, which gets connected to the speakers and the button box.  The button box (that thing on the right) both controls the presentation of the stimuli and gets reaction times for me.  But it's actually really awesome and it can get the reaction time from the kids' voices - except that to do that, you have to hook it in to a microphone.  So I also have a wireless microphone set up.  The mic itself gets hooked to the kids' shirt so it gets their voice, then it sends the signal to the receiver, which is plugged in to the back of the button box.  Then because I'm tricky and clever, I realized I could plug a second receiver into the laptop, so that the laptop can record everything they're saying, too.  So the laptop records the whole session and also presents the stimuli, which is basically a bunch of sound files of me saying "bird!" or "cheek!" or whatever.  And then the kid has to say them back as fast as s/he can (in one of the tasks), and the mic sends it to the laptop to be recorded, and to the button box to get the reaction time for how long it took them to say it.  Whew!  But I'm pretty proud of my little setup.

And finally, a Cute Rye-Dog Picture: 

Cuddle buddy.

I think that will have to be all for now, friends.  I'm kinda tired and still have to walk the dogs and look at my data from today.  Bye for now!


Update:  Wait!  I forgot half of the reason I wanted to write this post!  A really cute and interesting story. One of my professor's son is 3 and goes to the preschool where I'm doing my research.  I actually tested him for the first time today, and we had this exchange:

me:  Did you know I see your mom at my school sometimes?
him:  No!  I didn't!
me:  Yeah!  She's a teacher at my school.
him:  Oh... but she turned back into my mom right now.

I told my professor about it, and it turns out they went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium yesterday, and he was very concerned about missing school.  So they were talking about how it's okay to take vacations sometimes, and the difference between work and school and vacation.  But I guess this little guy took away from that conversation that you can only do one of those things at a time, and by golly, she's his mom right now.

Healthy and Beautiful

My friend Steph and I went running around Lake Merritt today, and afterwards we stopped into the café at Whole Foods to get something to eat.  It was chilly today, for sure - maybe around 45 in the shade down by the lake, but in the 50's in the sunshine where there was no wind.

We're sitting eating by the window in our shorts and short sleeved shirts (she even had a tank top on), and this lady comes up behind us and taps up on the shoulder.  I think she was Chinese, probably in her 30's, and she had this little old lady with her, staring at us in a disoriented sort of way.  The younger lady starts gesturing with her iPhone, saying in not-very-good English, "Can I take your picture?  With my mother..." Steph and I exchange very weirded-out glances and are like, "Uhhhh ummmmmm sure..." and this little old lady comes and stands between us while we smile strangely and her daughter takes our picture.  Then they're standing there staring at us, and the younger lady keeps saying, "You are... so beautiful... and healthy..."  And her mom keeps opening her coat at us and gesturing at the inside of her coat.  "So... healthy..."  Open coat at us.  Smile in an impressed sort of way.  "Thank you.  Thank you."

We're like, "Okay, uh, you're welcome, uh, bye..."  They finally left and we realized the older lady was probably visiting from China or something, and was apparently impressed at the "healthy" American girls wearing so little clothing while she had a coat on, so she wanted a picture of herself all bundled up next to the tall, healthy American girls in the running shorts and short sleeved shirts.

Then it was a little less weird, but it was still pretty weird.  If you were in a foreign country and you saw someone that looked funny to you for some reason, would you go up to them and ask to have your picture taken with them?  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.  But I guess I'm glad we made it into the Chinese lady's scrapbook about her trip to America.

New Beginnings

I can't believe I only posted once last month. I can't believe December is over. I can't believe it's 2011. Can you believe it?

December went by so quickly. Like, even more quickly than most other months go these days. I remember being a kid and hearing adults say things like, "where does the time go?" and "time just keeps passing more and more quickly!" and now it really is slightly alarming how quickly the time passes. Do you realize I'm turning 27 this year? Granted, not for another 9 months, but still.

Part of the reason December went by so quickly is that I was really busy, running around a lot, doing lots of different things. One thing I finally accomplished is this:

I got a new battery charger for Roger's awesome camera. He's had this fantastic digital SLR camera (that is: a camera that takes incredibly nice pictures and gives you a lot more control over the image) for a while, and he just hasn't been using it. Well, I've wanted to get into photography for some time, and I kept bugging him to look for his battery charger but of course he has plenty of other things to do. So I gave in and ordered a new charger for the thing and have started playing around with it a bit. Admittedly, I partially just want to be one of those artsy fartsy alternative chicks that wanders around with a camera around her neck taking random pictures of things (because the East Bay needs a lot more of those...).

Anyway, this post is to share with you both what I've been up to the past month, and also some more accurate pictures of ... things. There are so many lovely things in my life, and I try to post pictures of them sometimes, but it's hard to do them justice. Unless you get good at taking pictures, and then you come a lot closer.

So, what have I been up to? Well, here's my long-ago-promised update about my marathon in October. Here's what the start line looked like:

I think it goes without saying that I did not take that picture. I'm probably somewhere around that first palm tree on the left; the line snaked down to the left, around Union Square in San Francisco. I think there are around 20,000 people who run this race. It was pretty cool.

I also pulled this down from the website:

It's supposed to represent my pacing. Except that it has no units. So what can we learn from this "graph"? 1) It sure looks like I got impressively faster towards the end of the race, but 2) graphs without labeled axes are pretty useless. It looks nice though, right?

Also, here is what one might look like at the end of a 26.2 mile foot race in the pouring rain:

Not as bad as I expected, actually, but that's probably because the image isn't zoomed in more... I think that's actually me crossing the finish line, judging by the orange cone and the woman behind me with her arms raised up in apparent triumph. That means I'm probably thinking "IT'S OVER OH THANK GOD IT'S OVER" in this picture.

Well, I did other things in December besides download pictures of a marathon I already experienced in person. For one, I went to visit my brother in Las Vegas! The view from his apartment is pretty spectacular (here's where my own pictures start):

I also snapped this one in the car, but it didn't come out very well:

Not quite the same as the real Eiffel Tower, but it'll do in a pinch!

I got to meet Jimmy's puppy, too. Oscar is quite possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen.

I also wrote a lot in December. In case you want to see the fruits of my labor, you can check it out here, in the UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report. I was very proud to be able to contribute to it this year! I'm still waiting to hear back from the two conferences I've submitted to thus far, and I'm also planning to submit two more abstracts to another conference in England in June. So... we'll see.

In between writing and visiting Jimmy in Las Vegas and visiting family and friends in Illinois, I also wandered around Berkeley one evening to play with different light settings as the sun went down.

I really love the warmth this camera can pick up, and I love playing with the different shutter speeds and ways of focusing. I had to have a dog photo shoot, too, since they're captive and generally pretty uncaring about me taking their pictures anyway.

And finally, this one came out a bit blurry, but it's hard not to smile at a little coonhound wearing reindeer ears and grinning like a fool.

So, playing with my camera and writing and visiting people, that was pretty much my December. It was nice to be home for a little while; it's easy to love Illinois in December when you can treat the cold as a novelty. I know that's a terrible thing to say, but it's true. When I got off the L in Chicago and was walking to Amtrak, it was painfully, breathtakingly, skin-stingingly cold. I didn't consciously forget what that kind of cold feels like, but my skin and body had definitely forgotten that kind of cold, and I really did need a blast of it for my internal thermostat's sake - after a week of 0 to 15 degree temperatures, it felt so warm here when I came back. And I needed that. I don't want to be one of those wimpy Californians who wears a down coat as soon as it drops below 60!

Taking Amtrak down to Champaign was really nice, too, surrounded first by the city and then by nothing but cornfields filled with clean white snow. (I was inspired to write a poem on the train that I'll post at the end.) It's so funny how much I love Chicago now! I've mentioned this before, but as a Townie at the U of I, you can learn to hate the Chicago kids pretty quickly, with their daddy's BMWs and horn honking and annoying accents and complaining about central IL. But now that I'm out here, my heart melts for Chicago accents. It's some sort of perceptual warping - while you're in the Midwest, there's an important distinction between downstate IL and Chicago, and Wisconsin, and Indiana, and Michigan, etc., but being far away makes it all blend together.

Anyway, where was I? I've been typing too long, so I'm going to sign off now, but I just wanted to add that it turns out I'm starting my semester tomorrow! (Surprise!) A friend/colleague of mine at Stanford forwarded me an email about a really great course being offered in their psych department this quarter, and I decided to jump on it and take it. The thing is, they're on the quarter system, and their winter quarter goes from tomorrow until the beginning of March. So on Mondays until around March 10th or something, I'll be taking the train to Palo Alto to sit in on a psych course at Stanford. It's called "Models of Language Acquisition" and I think it's going to be really great in many many ways, it just sort of came out of nowhere and I wasn't expecting to start classes again already. But it'll be good for me, and I have a friend at Stanford taking it too, so it should be lots of fun. And I love traveling, even just to Palo Alto once a week.

Ok, enough. Signing off for now, with lots of Midwest love.

mmmmmmm Chicago in the winter

you are sweet with your Christmas lights draped along gritty gridded streets

red and green sparkles on gray and white concrete and slush-snow

grooved and icy sidewalks and skin that stings while I wait for the light to change

you are so lovely and full of a life I used to lead

oh Chicago in the winter,

can't I call you home someday?

your cozy brick buildings keep their glowing hearths so safe and warm

you are the most wonderful kind of dirty

brick and steel and straight lines slushily nestled in a wonderland of pillowy white snow

ahh Chicago

your contrasts and extremes call to me –

I want to drip with sweat in your summer and watch my breath freeze in your winter

my heart pangs and swoons for

something I never knew that I could miss!

Exciting!

I just submitted my first abstract to a real conference! I'm so excited! The main, biggest, most well-reputed psycholinguistics conference is being held at Stanford this year, and since Stanford is like a 90-minute train ride away and I have some results from my qualifying paper experiment now, I thought it was pretty much my duty to submit something. Worst case scenario, I get rejected, and I have a decent abstract I can submit somewhere else. So that's really exciting - I might get to present at a big psycholinguistics conference in March!

We'll see if I still think it's exciting if I get accepted and then I'm flipping out in March because I have a zillion other things to do and also have to be nervous about presenting research in front of a bunch of psycholinguistic big-wigs for the first time. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere.

I just sort of dropped in to shoot the breeze with my advisor today, and he was so great and warm and encouraging, as usual. I'm feeling excited about my burgeoning academic career these days; presenting some of my own stuff at QP Fest last week was really energizing, and now I'm thinking about getting my work out there and presenting it at like, real, big time conferences, and that's exciting too, albeit a little scary. It's such a weird process. You get this idea and are worried it might be a hare-brained scheme, so you look into it some more, and it's like, hey, this might actually make sense. So you pursue it and pursue it for weeks and months - thinking about it, writing about it, doing the research, thinking about it some more, and all the while you're finding all these little holes in your logic and potential problems with your argument, but you're too invested now, so you keep going. And then you get some results. And they're not what you expected, and you're not sure if that's because your premise was wrong to begin with, or maybe some of those many imperfections in your research procedure caused this weird result. And part of you doesn't even really care anymore and you kind of just want to stop thinking about it and make it go away, and "why did I ever think this was a good idea in the first place?" and so on. Self doubt, loss of self confidence, why-am-I-in-grad-school-and-do-I-really-want-to-be-an-academic-anyway, etc. etc. But if you're lucky, you're forced to turn all of your thought processes and doubts and slightly flawed methodology into a presentation somewhere in there, and if you're lucky, you get really excited and encouraging feedback from people whose opinions you really care about. And suddenly you're all excited again! Like, oh yeah, that's why I got all excited about this! Because it's cool! And maybe those little flaws aren't as big of a deal as I thought and I shouldn't fixate on them too much and maybe these results are pretty interesting after all.

The life of an academic, friends. It's a strange mental world we live in.

Addiction

Today was the first day I went running this week. I couldn't believe how strong I felt... like I could run - fast - for hours. I've been working a lot this week, and it's actually felt really great. I finally got clearance for my research (barely in the nick of time, since we have to present our qualifying paper research to the whole department on Monday...) so I've been at the preschool every day this week, running my speech perception experiment with little kids. They are so gosh darned cute. Some of them are so focused on the task and they try really really really hard to do a good job. Some of them couldn't care less and they just want to jabber and jabber. This one little girl told me, "I have a cat! She's like a grandma cat! Except she didn't have any babies." I took that to mean her cat was old. And then I tried to get her to listen to some more sounds. :)

Anyway, running. So I've been leaving the house around 8:00 this week, and getting home around 6:30 or 7:00, and that's a lot of working for me. (I have to say "for me", because of course Roger works way more than that, so it's all relative.) I can normally do at least some of my reading at home, so it feels less like work, but this week being out and about all day, and running back and forth between the preschool and my classes, and trying to keep 4-year-olds on task for several hours at a time has been exhausting and exhilarating all at once. It's been really fun, and I'm kind of looking forward to my presentation on Monday (after I put a few more hours' work into it). But running, running... I just haven't been getting up early enough to do it. I think it's great timing though, because I just realized today that it's only been a month since my marathon, so I should still be taking it somewhat easy anyway. The training rule of thumb is to take it easy for about as many days as miles in your last race - so for a 26.2 mile race, you should take it easy for about 26 days afterward. I think I took 4 days completely off after my race, and then I started going for easy runs again, and I felt totally fine, but I dunno, maybe a little tired. I think I had a little less spring in my step, but it was only really noticeable on the hills.

So today I headed up into the hills for a good, solid 7 mile run, at a good little clip, with my sweet dogs in tow. Poor guys have been home alone a lot this week, and only getting one decent walk a day, when I get home in the evening. They were so happy to be out running today. Just smiling and tilting their heads back like they were riding in a car with their heads out the window. I hadn't done a good Berkeley hills run in a while, so we went way up into the hills, around this gorgeous, wooded park with trails and trees and a creek. It rained last night, but the sun was coming out this morning, and Northern California in the winter is so green and lush, so the sun was streaming through the trees and the little rain drops falling off of the leaves were catching little glints of light and just sparkling as they fell to the ground. It was gorgeous, and so peaceful, and I just felt so good. Then we came downhill a little bit and went by Indian Rock Park, this big boulder with a little park area around it, and the view of the Bay literally stopped me in my tracks. I stopped, and stood, and looked, and breathed in the cold fall air, and I almost started crying, to tell you the truth. Here's an idea of what it looked like, poached from Google images:

As I stood there, perfectly still with nothing but the sound of my own breathing and the breeze rustling the leaves, I realized my whole body was just buzzing. I have no other way of describing it... I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and felt this strange, zen, buzzing calmness. I was so completely in the moment, and all I could feel was the chilly air and this very low key humming sensation just emanating from inside me. I know this sounds completely weird, but it was just... warmth, and light, and peace, and calmness, and like nothing else in the whole world mattered except that moment. I just looked down at the Bay, and looked at my dogs looking down at the Bay, like they too could stand there peacefully forever, and I was overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of being alive.

When I took off again, I realized that the buzzing sensation had to be my body's response to not running for a week and then suddenly getting hit with the endorphins of going for a long-ish, hard-ish run. I've talked before about how I feel sluggish if I don't run for a few days in a row, but if it goes longer than a few days, the sluggishness mostly goes away and I feel pretty normal. So from this strange slightly otherworldly experience, I think I must conclude that I am physically addicted to running. I've noticed it before, but today I think was the most extreme instantiation of it. I think I trained hard enough for long enough that I got really used to having that regular rush of endorphins, and then I suddenly took long enough off that I had minor withdrawal (in the form of sluggishness) for a few days before I readjusted, and then bounding up into the hills today must have made the normal endorphin rush much more potent than usual. Jeez, who needs drugs when you can go running?

Okay, it is noon and I need to take a shower and go by the grocery store and make some food for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck tonight. And I should probably crunch some numbers and work on my presentation for Monday. So that's all for now, but I'll do my best to write again soon, even though the semester is going to be somewhat insane from here on out...

Can't sleep.

Why am I blogging at 4:30 a.m., you may ask? Well, I will tell you. I seem to have developed this very unfortunate problem where I can't sleep after having had any substantial amount of alcohol. It's so weird, and it's happened to me multiple times now, to the point where I think my brain has created a pattern out of it. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy now. Anything beyond two drinks and I wake up after just a few hours' sleep, and I can. not. get. back. to sleep. And I'm lying in bed going, "Hmm, I guess I'm going to do that thing now where I lie in bed for 5 hours and can't get back to sleep." Whereas if I didn't think that was going to happen, maybe it wouldn't happen.

Anyway, I had a great night tonight. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm hopped up on adrenaline. And I guess in general if I've had a few drinks, it's because I've been hanging out with friends for a long time, so when I wake up, I'm thinking about all the great conversations I've had, and what a nice night it was. It was such a nice night tonight. I invited some people over for what I think I referred to as an "Un-Halloween, Fall, Guess-I'm-26-Now Party". The idea was that I've wanted to have people over for a while, partially to celebrate my birthday (which I couldn't really do the weekend of my birthday because I was running a marathon), and it finally came together this weekend, except that today (yesterday) happened to be Halloween, and I didn't particularly want to have a Halloween party. Halloween is fine and fun and all, but I'm lazy and didn't want to come up with a costume idea, and I didn't want to force other lazy people such as myself to feel lame for not having costumes either, so I decided to just go for it and have a party anyway and put "Un-Halloween" in the name.

The point of this story is supposed to be that I love my friends. We had a better turn-out than I expected, with something like 10 people here, and it just makes me think that we need to do it way more often. I love cooking, I love entertaining, I love having an excuse to go cheese shopping (especially when certain French-speaking graduate students indulge me and go cheese-shopping with me). And I think a good night was had by all. One of my frisbee compadres gets the prize for cutest costume idea, in my opinion - tin foil hat with tea bags hanging off of it. He was a tea partier. In a tin foil hat. Love it.

So yeah, cheese-shopping was interesting too. We have this cheese co-op in Berkeley called the Cheeseboard... yes, a cheese co-op. This is Berkeley, after all. It's collectively owned by all the people who work there and has been open for something like 30 years and is semi-famous, at least locally, as the place to get your cheese. They also have a pizza co-op affiliated with them, and people rave and rave about Cheeseboard pizza. I'll tell ya. It's fine. You know, I feel like it's mostly gimmick, with fresh, seasonal, interesting veggies and good cheese. If you want to call that good pizza, then yes, it's good. I mean, it is good. As a food. It's just not what I think of when I think of a pizza place. They make one kind of pizza per day, always vegetarian, and there's always a line all the way down the street. So you wait in line for 20 minutes or so and pick up your $20 pizza straight from the oven, which they just crank out constantly all day long. They post the day's toppings on their website; Saturday was apparently sweet potatoes, yukon potatoes, caramelized onions, mozzarella, gruyere, garlic olive oil, and fresh herbs. All delicious things, to be sure, but do we really need to put them on a pizza?

Anyway, aforementioned Francophone graduate student was rather easily convinced to go check out the Cheeseboard with me on Saturday, and it was pretty fun. I've had cheese from there several times, and I'd been to the pizza place, but I'd never actually been in the cheese shop. It was somewhat overwhelming. It's a huge cheese counter, and there's a HUGE blackboard with a list of all the kinds of cheese they have, but unfortunately that doesn't really help me. I mean, I know basic kinds of cheese, but I don't really know names of cheeses. Like if you tell me something is brie or gouda or tomme or whatever, I know basically what to expect, but if you give me the name of some monastery or farm or middle-of-nowhere village, disons que ça ne me dit pas grand chose.* So we walked in and sort of made our way around the cheese counter, just scoping out what all they had, and the cheesemongers were clearly completely ignoring us. I already felt kind of lost, and that wasn't helping me. Then I realized people were yelling out the names of playing cards - "10 of diamonds! ... Queen of hearts!" - and then I realized that there was a stack of cards at the counter, and that you had to take a card in order to be waited on. That's apparently their take-a-number system, as opposed to, mmm, numbers.

So once we figured it out, it was fine. They let you try anything and everything, so we kind of took our time trying different stuff and wound up with three very different cheeses; a soft, creamy, less-than-mild sheep's milk cheese, a harder cheese I can't quite remember now, and a surprisingly tasty gouda. I was eyeing the tomme de savoie because tomme was my first experience with real French cheese, way back when I first went to the French Alps in like 2001, and so I've always had a soft spot for tomme. So in French, "tomme" is pronounced basically like "tum", like Tums, or tummy. So I asked the lady if we could try some "tum", and she gave me one of the blankest stares I've ever seen in my life. So I tried again and went for the other extreme, trying to sound as American as possible, and she still had no idea what I was talking about. This is a minor problem when you know how to speak French. When you encounter French words in English, you don't know how to say them in English anymore (if you ever knew in the first place). It's also a problem when you're speaking French, because they borrow so many English words, and then you have the choice of saying them the way you would in English (in which case you feel like you're not trying at all and being like oh-look-at-me-I'm-such-a-cool-English-speaker), or saying them with a French accent (in which case you feel like a complete tool).

Anyway, after some pointing and some more variations on "tum", she went to get some tomme de savoie, and I turned to Florian, and I'm like, "Why was that so hard? How do we say that? How am I supposed to say that?" and of course he's laughing and going, "shit, don't look at me, you're the one who's supposed to be helping me with these things".

Okay, now I'm starting to get a little tired, which is good, because it's almost 5:30 and I've only slept about 3 hours. I'm going to try to go back to bed, and maybe my brain has cooled down enough that I can sleep now. Bonne nuit!**

* (Let's just say that doesn't really mean anything to me.)

** Good night!