Emerald City

I got back from Seattle around 7:00 last night.  It's nice to be home, but what a great trip!  As promised, here are some of my pictures.

The view from my hotel room.

I stayed with Beth and fam for most of the trip, but because there was a session I wanted to attend at the conference on Friday morning, and I needed to leave straight from there to go to the airport, I just stayed at the hotel where the conference was on Thursday night.  (Also, I love staying in hotels.)

Entrance to Pike Place Market.

Beth was kind enough to give me a fantastic tour of Seattle on Wednesday, the day I had off from the conference.  Unfortunately, I picked up some weird stomach bug or something and was feeling pretty queasy all day, but I was at least able to walk around and check out the market.  It's right on the water, and it was so cool.  (I actually went back by myself on Friday right before I left, when my stomach was feeling better, so I could taste all the goodies they had to sample!)

Back side of the market, seen from a pier.  The weather was pretty Seattle-y that day!

Back side of the market, on the other side.  The market itself is in the long stretch inside all those windows, and it actually extends down a few floors too.  I didn't realize it was that huge!

View of part of downtown from the street in front of the market, with little cafes and shops on the left.  We went to a fantastic French bakery which you can barely make out on the left in this photo, Le Panier.  Mmmmm, butter.

The pig at the entrance to the market.

There was so much fresh seafood there.  It was really cool!

This is so gross that I just had to share it.  There's a wall by the market where everyone sticks their gum.  :-P

On Thursday before I left, we went to a really nice park, called Volunteer Park, and climbed to the top of a big tower overlooking the city.  (Beth, I hope you don't mind me sharing this picture here - please let me know if you want me to take it down, but I just thought it was so sweet!)

Beth and kiddos at the top of the tower.

View of downtown from the top of the tower.

Remember the song "Black Hole Sun", by Soundgarden?  Apparently this is the black hole sun!  You can see the Space Needle through the middle of it, too.

Then I took a few more pictures on Friday morning before I left.  Because my stomach was finally feeling better, I had to get a big latte for breakfast.  The stomach troubles really interfered with me consuming as much coffee as I would have liked, unfortunately!  But this latte was reeeeeaaaalllly good.

Possibly the best latte I've ever had, at Cafe Migliore.

Cool buildings and pretty sky downtown.

Looking across part of the Puget Sound (I think; there were too many bodies of water around Seattle to keep track of).

Thankfully I didn't see any guys on skateboards actually being pulled by cats.  But we did see a guy with a cat on a leash at Volunteer Park.

And that was Seattle, more or less.  I loved it.  I would definitely go back, any time.  And the conference was really fun, too!  The next time it's being held in San Diego, so I might see if I can get an abstract together for that one.  If not, next spring it'll be in Hong Kong, and that would be pretty amazing...

Time to walk dogs!

Phoneticians Take Seattle

Jeez, what a week, and the fun is just starting!!

So I passed my qualifying exam last Tuesday.  Hurray!  (That means I get to write a dissertation now!  Hurray!)  I mean, I guess.  I'm excited about writing a dissertation, in some ways, I just don't know what exactly to write it about yet, so that's a little daunting.  This is partially what my qualifying exam and advisors are for, of course; I talked about my qualifying paper and the research articles I've been reading for about 3 hours on Tuesday, and then I got sent out of the room for about 3 minutes while my committee "deliberated", and then they called me back in and shook my hand and said "congratulations, you passed!" That was nice, and it feels *so* good to be done, but part of the point of the exam is to challenge me and ask me hard questions about why my work is important (or not), and of course I didn't have all the right answers, or even any answers at all in some cases.  The downside is that now I'm feeling kind of... less confident about my work after it's been picked apart by really smart people, and more than ever, I'm aware of all of the problems with it.  And yet I haven't figured out what to do next, as a follow-up, like as a dissertation.  So I'm in this weird in-between state of feeling like, "well, that wasn't quite right", but I don't know where to go next.

And now I'm in Seattle, by the way.  This week was so weird.  Qualifying exam on Tuesday, followed by brain mush and spacing out for about 24 hours, followed by reanalyzing data (again) and updating my conference poster for the particular conference I'm at this week.  Here's the new version, in case you're curious:

I don't know how much better it is, but it's a little different from the last one, anyway.

I left the house at 6:00 this morning, flew in to Seattle around 10:30, and took light rail into downtown, where I made my way to the Seattle Sheraton and promptly ran into my advisor in the hotel lobby.  "Well hey!  I didn't know you were gonna be here!"  Such a funny, fun surprise.  Then we had a little academic family pow-wow in the lobby, with my advisor and a bunch of his former students who are now new professors and a few people they know.  Then I got to meet some people whose papers I've read and whose names I've seen around, which is a weird experience that I'm still getting used to.  Like, "Oh!  You're Person X!  Of 'Person X and Person Y, Journal of Phonetics, 2008!'" or whatever.  Putting a face to a citation, in other words.

Sidenote: No one will care about this but other linguists, but on the light rail system, there's this disembodied woman's voice who announces the stops, and for every stop she says, "Now arriving, Stadium station.  Exits on my left."  Or something like that.  The weird thing was the "my left".  Disembodied voices are not supposed to use deictics that way.  I think the L in Chicago says "exit to your left", which is of course ambiguous because you could be facing any direction when the disembodied voice tells you that. So I see what they were going for, with the "my", but I've just never heard a mass transit system speak in the first person before.

Anyway, then I bummed around the conference for a few hours, met people, talked about experiments, and then started to get tired.  So I called my friend Beth who used to work at the Nature Center with me, and who lives in Seattle now and has graciously offered to let me stay with her and her family for most of the week, and she told me about this cute little coffee shop right by Pike Place Market.  So I am now sitting in a cute coffee shop by Pike Place Market, having just finished an iced Americano but not feeling much more awake yet, and waiting for Beth to call so we can go get sushi.

Seattle is really great, as far as I can tell!  It feels a lot like San Francisco, but... cozier, somehow.  Less pretentious, for sure... the barista at this coffee shop was very genuinely friendly, the people at the hotel were very friendly, the people next to me on the train were very friendly.  So far, so good.  I'll be taking pictures over the next few days and hopefully putting up a "Seattle pictures" blog post pretty soon.

The other thing I did this week (and weekend) was try to get experimental stimuli ready to go to France.  Because dude, I'm leaving for France in just over a week.  (!!!!!!!)  And my stimuli are not ready, and that will have to remedied very soon.

Well, I just got a text message from Beth, so it's time to wrap this post up.  I'm so happy to be traveling.  I love traveling.  I can't wait to go to France.  This week is going to be fun but really tiring, but no complaints.  And hopefully I'll get good comments on my poster on Thursday and I'll be ready to turn it into a talk in the next few weeks!  (Yikes!!)

QP approved!

Hey!  My QP was approved!

That is so great!

I mean... that doesn't make it any better of a paper.  (There are still plenty of things to fix.  In the future.)  But now I can check that off my list, and I just have to take my exam on Tuesday.

I'm strangely not that nervous about my exam.  In fact, maybe I should be more nervous, so I'll study/prepare more.  But... I'm feeling pretty good about things.  My exam chair said there will be about an hour of discussion about my QP, then about an hour of discussion about the annotated bibliography I submitted to my examiners, then about an hour of discussion about what my "dissertation plans" are shaping up to be.  And "if you could prepare an outline of your dissertation plans, that would be very helpful - the more you prepare, the better, since that will give us more to talk about".  Uhh yeah.  I have some ideas, and I know the general direction I'm going, so I can talk about that, but I am in no way prepared to make up an outline.

So... I need to think about that some more this weekend, and make up a little outline of issues/questions that came up in my QP to help organize my thinking some more.  And write a conference abstract by Sunday night.  And probably at least start on my poster that has to go to the printer on Wednesday.  (I'm leaving for Seattle next Monday - yikes!)

But!  For now, there is graduation tomorrow, and it's breezy and sunny and I'm going to curl up with some more reading and some tea.  One of these days, I'll read a novel or something, but for now it's more articles about bilingualism and lexical access.  (I just ordered a statistics/programming book off of Amazon that I'm intending to read over the summer.  I never thought I would be perusing statistics books in my free time... of my own free will... partially because I want to.  But I kind of like it.)

QP (re-)submitted

Well, I turned in another version of my qualifying paper tonight.  Every single day this week, I really thought I would get it done.  I mean, it was already done, how long could it take to make some revisions, right?  Wrong.  Decidedly wrong.  It could take 7 days straight of working on it 4-7 hours a day, in fact, if you were wondering.  Including 8-12 and 2-7 today!  But: it is mostly done.  Unless I totally messed up the statistics (which is by no means impossible), it might - might - get approved in its current version.  And that would be great, because then I can stop rewriting this paper at least for a few months, and come back to it this fall sometime with fresh eyes and new data and no looming due date.  Oh how nice that would be.

Now I just have to prepare a short presentation for my meeting about our Paris project at Stanford in the morning (and I get to catch the train at 7:27!), but I think I'll have plenty of time to throw it together on the train(s).  And then I have to get my annotated bibliography ready for my meeting with the chair of my exam committee on Tuesday (lord help me with that... the bibliography, not the meeting, the meeting will be fine), and then I have a week to prepare for my qualifying exam, which will be on Tuesday the 17th.  And then (then!) I get to throw together my poster for the conference I'm going to in Seattle, because it has to go to the printer on the 18th.  (Oops.)  And then I have 4 days to get my Paris experiment ready before I leave for Seattle, then 5 days in Seattle (which I'm really looking forward to, especially once my poster is sent to the printer!).  Then 4 more days at home getting stuff ready for Paris, I guess, including a second poster which will have to go to the printer while I'm actually in Seattle, come to think of it (oops).  And then, before I know it - Paris!

Lovely, lovely Paris.  I'm so excited, but there's so much stuff to get done between now and then.  I decided I'm not even going to try to work on my conference presentation until I'm actually in Paris, because I'll have 14 days while I'm in Europe to work on it, and I think that should be plenty.  It would be nice if I could collect some more data on my kiddies before I leave, but I'm not gonna hold my breath on that.  Because that would have to be sometime this week (when I should be studying) or sometime at the end of next week, when I might be scrambling to get my Paris stuff ready to go.  We shall see.

Shoot, it's 11:00?  Where does the time go?  At least I got to play some frisbee tonight!  It's so great that it stays light so late now - we played frisbee from 7:00 to almost 9:00 tonight, so that was an excellent break.  I am so glad this frisbee thing has been working out.  I look forward to it every week, and I'm going to miss it this summer!

Oh well, time for bed.  G'night.

Ok, I get it, dog, you're a coonhound!

Oh my god.  I'm awake at 1:31 a.m. because Roger let the dogs out to pee and Rye massacred a possum in the backyard.  And I guess after he shook the crap out of it, Roger told him to drop it, and he did right away, because he would apparently make an amazing hunting dog if we would actually take him hunting.  So the possum made its way into the corner of our yard, behind the shed and under a bunch of logs and crap, and Rye cornered it and barked.  And barked.  And barked.  And barked.  And barked.  At which point I woke up and realized something must be very wrong, because he was barking his friggin' head off in the backyard, enough to wake me up inside the house.  So I threw on some shoes and ran outside, and there's Rye, standing his ground behind the shed and barking his head off because hey!  He treed that possum, by golly, and there was no way in hell he was gonna let it get away.

We ran inside and got a leash, and some treats, and Roger had his flashlight, and I was able to hook a leash on his collar and drag him out from behind the shed.  He was actually very, very good.  He wanted to make sure everyone in the East Bay knew that that possum was TREED and he did it, but when I told him to come to me, he did, albeit very reluctantly.  Then we got him inside and Roger was finally able to tell me what the hell was going on (because at that point, all I knew was that I had just been woken up by Rye barking a lot, and there was apparently something hiding behind the shed), and we could see that the little guy had a little bitty spot of blood on the side of his snout.  So we swabbed it with some iodine and gave him lots of treats and told him what a good hound dog he was and put him in his crate to help him settle down.  He actually was really, surprisingly good, all things considered, just visibly preoccupied by the one thought he can successfully hold in his little coonhound brain: there is an animal in my yard that I cannot let escape.

So now he's asleep, but we called the emergency vet to make sure we were safe on rabies.  Apparently the only animals in the Bay Area that ever carry rabies are bats (good to know!) and especially since Rye just had his rabies booster last month, he should be totally and completely fine even if the thing did have rabies, since he apparently didn't get bit (he just attacked and shook the crap out of the thing) and his vaccine would have protected him anyway.

Holy moly.  How am I ever going to get back to sleep?

It's funny, though; I had just been thinking this past week about how I might want to rename my blog.  I mean, really, they're not actually the only coonhounds in Berkeley.  That was just a commentary on the fact that not many people in the Bay Area move out here with coonhounds.  But I guess Rye ain't havin' none of that.