well would you look at that

I've been putting many hours lately into writing up a grant proposal that would give me three years of my very own funding.  It would be my first big grant, and I'm really, really hoping I get it.  (I'm keeping my hopes squarely in check, though, partially because of this crap.  Don't get me started on how angry this makes me.)  The writing itself has been taking a very long time.  I've been writing for a few hours a day, at least a few days a week.  Most days it actually goes pretty smoothly, but there were two or three days last week that were just like pulling teeth.  Write, erase, write, read, write, erase, read, erase, etc.  For three days in a row.  That was kind of rough.

Anyway, I have the bulk of the research proposal finished now, and I think it's getting close to its final form.  But it just occurred to me this morning why it's felt like so much work; they ask for 11 point font, single spaced, with half inch margins.  So even though it's "only seven pages", I just realized that that's actually a ton a text.  Just for fun, and to feel like I've actually accomplished something in the past few weeks, I plugged the text into a new document and made it 12 point font, one inch margins, double spaced, like most papers are.  And this thing is 20 pages long!  I've been working on a 20 page paper, and I didn't even know it!

(As a sidenote, it's been interesting realizing that this is what my life is going to be like for the next few months.  Roll out of bed, make some breakfast, and sit at my desk and write and analyze data for a few hours.  I've taken to going for a run in the evening, to clear my mind and to get out of the house for a bit, and all told, it's actually not a bad life at all.)

There are so many pieces left.  I have to write up a "biosketch" of who I am and all my qualifications, with a personal statement about why I'm qualified to conduct this research.  And some stuff about why Penn State is a good sponsoring institution to conduct this research, what their facilities are like, and what my on-the-ground support will be like.  Thankfully, my sponsors have done this before and have a lot of that language ready for me (especially since I've never actually been to Penn State, and the only stuff I know about their facilities is what I've gleaned from their website, and what they've told me).

So there's a lot left to do, but the big, hard part is almost done now, and I just have all the niggling little bits and pieces to pull together.

Today, I am giving my workshop on R again, and I need to keep working on analyzing my dissertation data, and then I'm getting Ethiopian food with friends tonight.  It's going to be a good day!

brain freeze (but not from ice cream :( )

I am SO TIRED of working on this research proposal.

Blah!!!!!

feeling like a big ol' dork

So far today I have finished my Skype meeting with my potential post doc advisors, begun stewing a very delicious smelling rabbit (because hey, why not? I've never cooked a rabbit before), and played the piano for a good long while.  Now I am munching on baby carrots and sitting around in my new Huckin' Wugs t-shirt (see photo) and not really knowing what to do with myself until our frisbee game tonight.

What a huge dork.  I mean, seriously.

... How weird is it if I read a statistics book?  I have this thing lately where when I don't know what else to do with myself, I just work.  But I'm enjoying my work a lot right now, so I think it's okay.  And one can always stand to learn some more about regression models, right? ...

On the very bright side, there are currently 13 people signed up for my summer course on language acquisition!  And my Skype meeting went very well, and I'm very excited about my potential post doc project.  I will be quite disappointed if I don't get to pursue it, at this point.

So things are looking pretty good.  Busy, and up-in-the-air feeling, but good.

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.

BOOM

It's my class!!!

Nobody's enrolled yet, but I think they will be soon...

Edit, 2/12: Who's got 4 people signed up for their course in the first day of registration?  THIS GIRL.

rollin' rollin' rollin'

It's Friday!  This week is finally over!!

I've been anxious about this week for some time now, and now it's finally over!  And what a good week it was!

This week was our first phonetics candidate's visit, plus my first Skype meeting with my potential post doc advisors, plus the trial run for the workshop I'm offering on R, for D-Lab.

The phonetics visit went off without a hitch, but gosh, this job search is a lot of work and totally exhausting for me... I can't even imagine how exhausting it must be for the job candidates!  Then, my Skype meeting, which was so much fun, but gosh (again), I'm really glad I prepared well for it.  I'm about to start working on a huge research grant that would pay my salary for three years, as well as all of my research-related costs, with Penn State's Center for Language Science as my sponsoring institution.  So I'm having these Skype meetings with the two women who would/will be my post doc sponsors/advisors, if I get the funding, and I had my first one on Thursday.  They've been sending me a bunch of papers to read, so I've had to carve out a few hours a week to just read and digest articles on things I don't usually read about, and try to think about what kind of project I can do that's related to these types of questions.  So I've been reading them, and taking notes on them, and trying to come up with reasonable project ideas that are kind of related to my dissertation, but not too much.  I came up with two main ideas that I was feeling pretty good about, but you never know if other people are really going to connect with your ideas...  Then I had my Skype meeting yesterday morning, and I had to talk about how my dissertation is going, and what my project ideas are, and how all of this makes sense and fits together.  And it went really well.  I really, really like these two women, so I'm glad I was decently prepared and able to communicate my ideas effectively, and they seemed to really like what I had to say and were excited about my project ideas.  Things are rolling right along, friends.  I will be writing up a mini project proposal over the next two weeks, at which point it's time for Skype meeting #2.

This morning was my introductory R workshop, which I was feeling a little anxious about, just because I haven't had that much time to devote to it, and I didn't know who was going to attend my trial run, and whether they'd be way better at R than me!  (It sucks getting questions you don't know the answers to...)  Anyway, it's over now, and it went well, too, and now I'm excited about doing my workshop, too.  I still have to put together the second part of it, but the first part is now done, and I think people will get a lot out of it.

So now, I am going to sit on my chaise in my lovely apartment with the windows and door open wide (it's still 65 degrees here... sorry, Illinois) and do some dissertation-related reading.  And drink some yummy tea.  And maybe take a break to play the piano.  And probably get dinner with friends tonight.

Yay weekend.  Yay February.  :)

IT'S WORKING

OMG THE KIDS ARE LEARNING THE WORDS.

(Maybe.  I've only completed the first day of testing, but it kind of seems like it might be working.  Who knows if I will get interesting results, but at least I now have a non-failing methodology.  Little victories are important.)

oh the blog

Oh right.  I'm supposed to say stuff on here.

It's 2013!  And the past few days have been about 65 degrees and sunny (it is my experience thus far that January in Berkeley is considerably nicer than July in Berkeley), so I've been throwing the windows open during the day and trying to spend a decent amount of time outside.  I just got back from a really, really nice walk around town.  Well, back up.  First I accidentally spent the whole morning working.  I've started on a new project, and it's actually kind of fun, so the past few days I've been sinking several hours a day into coding.  On Friday evening, I thought, "Hey, I'll just write the first part of that script real quick," and then of course several hours slipped through my fingers... I'm not really getting any better at programming, probably largely because I only attempt it every few months, so every time I try to write a little program, I have to re-learn everything I've forgotten.  I am learning to think like a programmer a little better, though; when I approach a project now, I at least feel like I know where to start, and what the logic of the program should be.  It's the implementation (and the debugging!) that takes so darn long.

Anyway, I spent a few hours getting the outline of my script in place on Friday night.  And then I spent a few more hours yesterday getting it mostly working.  And then I spent all morning today tweaking and making it do exactly what I want it to do.  And now it's pretty much done!  It's totally done, actually.  I'm going to have to tweak little bits of it as I move ahead and decide I want to look at this or that little thing, but all of the machinery is in place and it's 100% working, so now I can just go in and change the little bits that will let me look at different stuff.  (I'm looking at word durations and sound durations in several dozen hours of transcribed spontaneous speech, so I had to write a program that will go in and find the particular words I want to look at and return the information I need.  So now I can find whatever words I want - I just have to narrow down which types of words I want to include in my analysis.)

After I finished writing my program to my satisfaction, it was suddenly 1:30 and I was still in my pajamas.  So I took a shower and then didn't know what to do with myself, and I decided to go for a long walk around Berkeley.  I was gone a little over an hour and a half - I went up through North Berkeley and down through the Gourmet Ghetto, stopped at Philz Coffee and paid too much for a cup of coffee and a cookie (because that's what you do at Philz), headed through downtown, and then looped back up to my house.  And it's still sunny and 65 degrees, and I'm so glad I got out to enjoy it for a bit.

I guess I should also write an update on the rest of January.  My talk at the LSA went quite well!  When it was over, I thought, "Well hey, that was pretty all right," and I think if you get to the end of a conference talk and you feel that way, that probably means you did about as well as you could have.  (Maybe someday I'll get to the end of a talk and think, "Yeah!  Rocked it!", but I'm not holding my breath.)

Now that the LSA is over, it's time to get back to thinking about my dissertation.  I'm going back to try testing more kids on Tuesday (after a much needed reprieve), so I'm feeling a bit anxious about that.  You may recall that my dissertation experiment has yet to really work.  So I've been re-thinking things, and I've decided to accept the fact that I can't do everything I wanted and scale my experiment back.  The upside is that the experiment itself keeps getting simpler and more doable.  The downside is that I can't really write a dissertation on it anymore, because it's a somewhat small project at this point.  So I've decided to supplement my experiment (assuming I eventually get it to work...) with a corpus study. (This is the new project I've been wading into the past few days.)  Now I'm coming at the same basic question from two completely different angles: an experiment with preschoolers, and a study of conversational speech produced by adults.  The trick will be weaving these into one cohesive narrative, but I think I can do it.  It's definitely changing the focus of the project as a whole, but I think it's the way to go.

So tomorrow will be spent in preparation for my day of testing on Tuesday.  Please cross your fingers for me that I'm able to finish getting things ready tomorrow, and that Tuesday goes smoothly.  It would be so great if I could get this thing to work.  (Serious understatement.  Bleargh.)

I also sense my plate already filling up for the next few months... I'm giving a workshop on the R statistical programming language (I never thought I'd see the day...) and I have to have a practice version ready in the next two weeks.  We're also having candidates visit for the phonetics job in our department, and as I'm part of the hiring committee, I'll be pretty busy meeting/entertaining/interviewing them over the next month or so.  And on top of that, I'm starting work on my NIH NRSA grant next week, as I need a working version done by mid-March.

Whew!

Life is busy, but quite good.  Or maybe that should read, "Life is busy, and quite good," because I always feel better about myself when I'm being productive.

That's it!  You're updated!

here comes 2013

I spent quite literally the whole day working (7:30 - 12:30, break for lunch, 1:00 - 5:30, break for dinner, 7:30 - 12:00) and then didn't even finish what I was trying to finish.  I was just too tired and couldn't make myself do it.  And then suddenly 2013 was here, and I was sitting in a room by myself at my grandparents' in Colorado, feeling frustrated for many reasons.

2012 is over.  It went by really, really quickly, as all years do now.  It's funny to think that in a couple more years, I'll look back at 2012 and think, "Yeah, wow, that was a crazy rough year," in that sort of detached way you can afford to have with perspective.  But for now, right now, it just feels like I'm still slogging through the same old crap, and like I still don't know where I'm going or what's going to become of me.  It's still up and down and up and down, although with less frequency than before.  Most days I feel really good about my life, like even if everything is totally up in the air, I'm really excited about all of it, and I just know it's going to turn out good.

But right now all I feel is tired.  2012 has left me very tired, even though it went by in a whirlwind blink of an eye.  I'm absolutely exhausted, and still looking forward to the day when I can look back at 2012 and not feel exhausted and confused about it.

I'm going to try to sleep, and hope I don't lie awake with my wheels turning.  I'm going skiing tomorrow morning, for the first time ever, really, and somehow it feels like throwing myself down a snowy mountain is the perfect way to begin 2013.  I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and I'm probably going to fall all over myself and it'll be mildly terrifying, but you know what?  It's going to be a crazy adrenaline rush, and I'm probably going to laugh my head off when I'm not falling on my face, and when I get to the bottom, I'm going to be so relieved that I made it.