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!