Going to England in June!

Dudes!  I finally just heard back from the Child Phonology Conference I applied to, and I'm giving a talk in England in June!

Awesome and exciting and a little scary!!

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...