On Being Home

I think everyone who reads this knows by now what my "secret" was, but in case I have somehow attracted anonymous internet stalkers who need to know, the secret is out: I was in Illinois last week! (And it was wonderful!)

The "secret" aspect was because we (read: my mom) wanted to surprise my Grandma. So Jimmy and I "secretly" flew into Bloomington last Friday morning and went straight to Grandma and Grandpa's house to "surprise" them. No heart attacks were had, but there was some crying and lots of hugging, and thus began my lovely weekend back in Illinois.

I got to see lots of people I had missed very much, and I spent the rest of my time soaking up the delicious Midwest-in-the-summer-ness of it all. I loved the heat and humidity of August; the sweat that drips down your back from just walking around outside, how much more tasty a glass of cool water is, and the way the air is just cool enough after the sun goes down. I took every opportunity to drive through the country and admire the long stretches of open farmland, the corn still lush and green before it starts yellowing and gets harvested, rolled down the windows and drank up the stillness of summer nights with clear starry skies and the droning hum of cicadas and crickets in the fields. Yes, it was very good to be home.

Honestly, I was worried about coming back to California. There's just so much wonderful, beautiful space in Illinois, and I remembered the claustrophobic feeling of first moving here and never being able to get away from people/things/cars/houses EVERYWHERE. Row upon row of little California bungalows set so close to the street that they just make you want to scream!

But get this: it's nice to be home in California too. I couldn't believe it - now that I'm back, I love being back, and it really feels like home too. Sure, I miss the wide open spaces and the homey familiarity of Champaign-Urbana, but it's absolutely gorgeous here right now. I love that it's just chilly enough in the mornings and evenings to warrant a jacket or a sweatshirt, but that when the fog burns off in the middle of the day, it's getting up into the 70's now, with big blue sunny skies and a clear view of the Bay once you get up the hill just a little bit. I love that it smells like flowers just walking down the street, and that the Berkeley farmer's market in August has to be just about the greatest thing in the world.

But maybe most of all, I love our new house. It was so very nice to come home to. So very nice, in fact, that I thought I should share some pictures with you now that we have our stuff everywhere. And I decided to take pictures without cleaning so you can see what it actually looks like. So without further ado: House With Stuff.


Entryway, looking towards the kitchen and dining nook.

Kitchen, looking towards the dining nook and front windows.

Rye enjoying the sunspot created by our skylights. He'll follow it across the floor all day if you let him.

Bathroom. I decided to go with curtain panels rather than curtains for here and the big room, since they filter the light without blocking too much out.

Our room. Nothing special. It's small but does the job - room for our bed and two dressers, which you can't see in this picture. I used all of our pictures/decorations for other rooms, so it's very zen right now. I decided to go with it and bought a shelf for some candles. I might keep it minimalist; it's actually kind of nice.

My office. Whoo! We finally got my desk and bookshelf put together the week before I left for Illinois, and I put up some fun decorations. I like it. :)

Other side of my office. Pictures of Paris on the wall above my bike.

Roger's office nook in the big room.

Huck sleeping on the couch below my curtain panels. There are enough black ones to cover all the windows, so we can use our movie projector! That's it sitting on the shelf above the couch.

Rye chilling in the backyard. That dog loves sleeping in the sun.

Huckleberry posing for the camera.

Our apple tree! This thing just doesn't stop. It's actually three different species grafted together, so we have Golden Delicious, Macintosh, and something else (maybe Gala?), but they ripen at different times. So the Golden Delicious are pretty much done now, but the Macs are ripe for the pickin'. I've already made two big batches of apple butter, plus multiple apple pies, though. Other ideas for things to do with apples?

Looking at the back of the house, Huckleberry, and our "grillin' table". Now all we need is a grill!

This always happens: I had other things to tell you, but now I'm tired of typing. I hope you all are well, and I'll try to update again soon. Classes start on Wednesday!

Secret-secret, I've got a secret

(Do you know that song? I have no idea who sings it. Anyway, it's true, I do have a secret, but I can't tell you what it is yet. If you don't know it already, you will find out very soon.)

More exciting things going on in life! As of this week, I have been named the new coordinator for our department's Phonetics and Phonology Forum ("Phorum"). I am very excited about this, but a little weirded out. I have the habit of saying, "I dunno what' going on, I'm just a first year!" But now I'm in charge of organizing this thing, and I'm also the treasurer for the Berkeley Linguistics Society, and it makes me feel like I should probably know what's going on.

Phorum meets once a week in the Phonology Lab, and all the people who study phonetics and phonology (grad students and professors) get together and we have a speaker on a cool and interesting topic. Well, it is now my responsibility to find cool and interesting speakers and arrange for them to come talk to us. This is very cool because it means I can invite whoever I want, but it also means if I can't get someone scheduled, I have to figure out how to fill in the gaps! Our first meeting is going to be August 31st, and I have a grad student from the Neuroscience Institute scheduled to give a talk on auditory cues for gender identification in humans and animals. She usually studies birdsong, but has been working on a project on human speech. Then I scared one of our undergrads into presenting her senior honors thesis, but she's very bright and her thesis was great, so I'm sure she'll do fine.

And, my classmates and I are currently working on putting together this year's meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. My job there is primarily to secure funding for the conference, which consists mostly of applying for grants and writing letters. We're also in the process of inviting speakers for that, too, and we've had a good time coming up with our themes for this year; our over-arching theme is "Writing Systems and Orthography", and our special session theme is going to be "Language Isolates and Orphans". Language isolates are languages that are not known to be related to any other living language, and I guess orphans are languages whose history is unclear, or which are the only remaining member of a language family. (We made that last term up.)

Anyway, I think it's going to be a very cool conference, and I think we're going to have some very cool Phorum talks, so I'm excited about this semester.

I'm trying not to think about the fact that I only have two semesters until I have to take my master's exam. Eeep. But then I will (probably) have an M.A. in linguistics from UC Berkeley, and that's pretty cool!

Also, I have an idea for my dissertation, but I feel like that might be kind of absurd. I think I want to look at differences between little boys' and girls' speech before they hit puberty and try to figure out how much of them are due to differing anatomy, and how much are learned behaviors. It's language acquisition, it's hardcore articulatory phonetics and anatomy, it's fine-grained acoustic differences and how people perceive them... it's basically everything I'm interested in rolled up in one (potentially huge) project. I haven't run it by my advisor yet, and he might laugh at me for coming up with a dissertation topic after my first year, but it's never too early to start tossing ideas around!

Well. I probably need to get off of here for now. Sorry, this was way more boring than I anticipated. Next time I'm going to try to tell you about our new neighborhood and how much I like it. :)