whine whine whine

I don't wanna write any more documents for this research grant, I don't wanna.

At least it will be over by Tuesday.  :-/

On Being Home (reprise)

Here I am, at my mom's house in Illinois.  Every time I come back for a visit, I find myself driving aimlessly around C-U for a bit, just sort of... trying it on for size.  I'm back in town for my 10 year high school reunion, and I also find myself thinking about all of the things I've done in the past 10 years.  In a way, high school seems so recent.  I remember it so vividly, just like it was yesterday.  And in another way, it seems like an eternity ago.  10 years ago, I had probably just decided for sure that I was going to the U of I for college.  Since then, I've graduated from college, spent a year of my life in France, gotten married, moved to California, spent 5 years of my life in California, nearly completed my Ph.D., gotten divorced, and now am fairly certain that I am moving to the other side of the country in just 5 months.  And what's truly mind blowing is all the people I've met along the way.  When I think back on all the wonderful people who have become such an important part of my life, to think that I didn't even know that they existed 10 years ago is just astounding.  People who have touched my life and my heart, who have changed me as a person, who have made me grow and think and feel things I never would have imagined.  And just think - it's probably going to happen again in the next 10 years.  How many people are out there that I haven't met yet, just waiting to come into my life and make me forget that I ever could have existed without them?

This is what's weird about being back in C-U: it doesn't change.  It's essentially exactly the same as it always has been, and yet it feels so, so different than it did 10 years ago.  But the strange part is realizing that the reason it feels so different is because I'm different.  I look at it through very different eyes than I did 10 years ago, and to know that I feel the same on the inside, but I'm demonstrably quite a different person is very weird.  It's hard to remember what I was like 10 years ago.  I've always been a little bit too old for my age, so it's not like I was completely immature, but within the past year or two I've really started to feel like my age suits me for the first time in my life.  I feel like 28 is about right, because I finally feel like a real adult.  A young adult, certainly, but I've really been growing in to my own skin recently, and I feel like 28 suits me.

So where does this leave "home"?  I always feel wistful when I come back here, and it does always feel like home.  But now that I'm here with the knowledge that I'm about to move away from California, I'm surprised to find myself feeling a bit reticent.  When I moved to California nearly 5 years ago, I never thought it would grow on me as much as it has.  And now, 5 years later, driving around Champaign on a cold Wednesday night, I've been psychologically "trying on" life in a small college town again.  How would I feel if I were moving back here?  Would I actually want to do that?  Because I'm moving to a very similar place in a very short amount of time, and I'm mentally preparing myself for some reverse culture shock.  Berkeley has gotten into my bones in a way I didn't expect, to the extent that it's much more difficult than I anticipated imagining myself living in a small college town again.  I am still so, so thrilled and excited about it, and I think it will feel really right once I've actually moved and settled in.  But realizing that there are things about life here that are annoying or foreign to me now is a very strange realization.

It will be really nice to see everyone from high school, too.  I'm looking forward to a very nice but very strange week!

Henry W. Coe State Park

It's Spring Break!  Jevon and I had been talking for a while about going camping over Spring Break, but there's still snow in Yosemite, and we didn't want to be gone for too too long anyway, so we opted to explore a park in our own backyard: we packed up the tent on Sunday morning and drove down to Henry W. Coe State Park, which is around 90 minutes southeast of here.  I had no idea what to expect going in, but it was really beautiful, and we had a great time.  We went for a long-ish hike after we arrived yesterday afternoon, ate a camp food dinner (apples, peanut butter, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and a few hunks of bread), and then read until the sun went down, at which point we promptly crashed.

Then we woke up this morning, ate more camp food, and went for another short hike before packing up and driving back.  It was a great little trip!

There's our little orange tent, on the left.  What a campsite!

The barn by the Visitors' Center.

Looking down the Visitors' Center steps on the fog this morning.

More morning fog.

California poppies on our hike.

Cool tree!

Beautiful weather yesterday.

Look at this huge turkey!!

Parked at the campsite.

Morning fog, and Jevon sitting at the picnic table.

The fact that I'm leaving California soon makes it all the easier to appreciate trips like this.  This is a beautiful state, and I am so happy to have called it home for a time.

But it's time to see my other (real) home soon - I'm leaving for Illinois on Wednesday, and I hear a small mountain of snow awaits me!  See you all soon, my Illinois loves!

well would you look at that, Part II

Pssssst.  I think something may actually have happened in my dissertation experiment.  Maybe not - it's too early to tell - but I made some graphs today, and it looks like something interesting might be going on.

I'm whispering because I am not getting my hopes up yet.  Instead, I am going to go back to labeling sound files so that I have more data.  And then I will come back and try again for real sometime next week.

In other good news, my grant proposal is also trucking along.  I did the biosketch (including the personal statement, grumble grumble... what am I, applying to college or something?) and I finished up the project summary today.  Progress, progress!  And a Skype meeting with my sponsor tomorrow, who will hopefully have nice and helpful things to say, and then I'm headed down to Stanford to see a very dear friend defend her dissertation tomorrow afternoon.

Go go go!

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.