lazy Sunday morning

All told, this has been a pretty good week.  I've been feeling down lately, so I decided to have some people over for dinner last night.  I haven't done a whole lot of entertaining here, just because my place is pretty small for entertaining, but gosh darn it, we had a really good time last night.  I made a pot roast with potatoes, leeks, onions, and carrots, and people brought various kinds of roasted veggies (and homemade Irish creme liqueur!), and we feasted on fall food in my little apartment.  It was really, really nice, and (I don't know if this is relevant at all) I made a point to invite only women.  I recently read this article that a friend of mine linked to on Facebook a while back, and it's had me thinking about women friends.  I don't agree with everything in the article*, but I've never really been one to have a lot of female friends, and I do think it's worth wondering why.  I've usually had one or two very close female friends, but never a whole group of them.  So I was thinking about how I've been feeling down lately, and how I know all of these awesome women that I love and respect so much, and also how no one cares if your place is small or messy or crappy, people just need food and a place to gather, and they'll generally have a good time (and my place isn't even remotely messy or crappy - just small).  So anyway, I had a great night hanging out with some awesome, funny, smart people, and I have resolved to do it more often.  Especially since a couple people I really wanted to come weren't able to make it.

* I find it especially weird that she goes on at length about how you shouldn't be petty and catty with your female friends, but hey, bullet point #10: "Don't let your friends buy ugly outfits or accessories you don't want to look at when you hang out."  Uhh...?

Anyway, in other 'improving mental health' news, I have my first appointment with a counselor tomorrow, and I'm mostly looking forward to it and feeling curious about how it's going to go.  I've never been to a counselor before, but we get free counseling through our health insurance, and I feel like, if ever there were a time when I should check out counseling, it's got to be now.  I'm (very) slowly getting back to normal, but god, it's so slow, and it's so schizophrenic.  I'll be doing really well for a few weeks, and then I'll just be devastated for a few days, kind of out of the blue.  And then it'll take me at least a few days to get back on the up-and-up, and I'll be good for a few weeks, and then I'll have another really horrible week.  Well, I'm totally sick of the horrible weeks.  And I know it's normal, and it's going to take a long time to process everything, and I'm okay, and so on and so on, but it would be really nice to get some practical tips from a mental health professional about how to get this show on the road, y'know?  So we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

So, today.  Today is beautiful, in that "isn't it supposed to be fall? oh right, Bay Area Indian Summer" way.  It's been chilly and foggy for weeks, and suddenly it's 80 degrees today.  I have a fair bit of work I need to get to, but I'm not quite ready to dig in yet (which is why I'm still in my pajamas and blogging at 12:30).  I think, though, it's time for a shower, and another cup of coffee, and maybe a little bit of pleasure reading before I do some work today.  I have an abstract to write, and some work to do for D-Lab, and plenty of academic reading I could be doing.  So I will sit in my sunny apartment with the windows open wide, next to the bouquet of flowers my friends brought me, and enjoy this beautiful day.

Whoo! Good. Day.

Today was so good!  I went to my weight lifting class this morning and it made me feel like RAWR I can do anything, which is always a great start to the day.  Then I had a meeting about a (paid!) project I'm working on for the up-and-coming UC Berkeley Data Lab, which also made me feel capable and productive.  And then I read an article about word learning, thought about my dissertation for a bit, then had another meeting with our department's undergraduate advisor because I'm designing a course to teach next summer about language acquisition, and I want it to appeal to as many undergrads as possible.

Then I was so excited about my class that I worked on the syllabus for longer than I probably should have, since I have other things to be doing, and then I realized I was getting hungry, so I came home.  And now I am drinking a beer and making a stir-fry and listening to Wilco and life is good.

Boston in January!

Never before have I been accepted to a conference and gone, "Oh no!!"

But I did get accepted to give a talk at our annual linguistics conference this year.  Normally this would be excellent news, except that the work itself is rather unfinished, which means I have a fair bit more work to do before it's ready to present.

So... yay?  :)

No, I'm very happy, or I will be once the initial pang of fear wears off.

ooooh, that's puuuurty

Welcome to my re-designed blog!

The time has come for me to change the name of my blog, since, well, I'm no longer living with my coonhounds these days (and let's not talk about that any. more. ever. again. because just typing those words is making me tear up), and also because I don't know how much longer I'm going to be living in Berkeley anyway, and also because... I'm perhaps not-so-gracefully transitioning into a different period of my life right now, and it just seemed like the right time to change things up.

So I'm Melinda the aspiring academic speech scientist now, and I will be putting forth all efforts to stay sound minded for the foreseeable future.

And plus: isn't that a really great pun?  A friend of mine unintentionally made it yesterday, and because I was the only one who noticed it, I feel justified in appropriating it for my own use.  I am sound minded, or trying to be!

interlude: a list of things

- WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PAPERS TO READ?  It is truly never-ending.  I do realize that that is the point of the whole pursuit - generate discussion to generate more experiments to eventually generate better understanding - but it's just this rabbit hole of tightly interconnected ideas and hypotheses, and you can spend your whole life trying to figure out where to start, let alone jumping in and contributing something worthwhile to the discussion.  Is this so abstract that it's completely opaque?  Now that I've decided what type of experiments I'm running for my dissertation, I have to narrow down what exact questions I'm asking, and how to set up the experimental procedure so I make sure I'm actually getting data that answer those questions, and not some other, related questions that I didn't mean to ask. I'm doing some word learning studies, so now I'm sifting through papers on word learning, and it's all so interesting, but absolutely paralyzing.  There are so many gosh darn variables, and I'm still figuring out which ones to try to ask questions about, and which ones I absolutely need to control for.  (Word frequency: should I systematically manipulate the number of exposures the kids get to each word, or should I let them get as many exposures as they need to learn all the words?  Memory consolidation: should I test them the same day I teach them the words, and/or should I make them have a night's sleep in between?  Should I test them on multiple days?  What if I count on testing them on multiple days, and then they don't want to be tested a second time?  Recognition vs. production: should I incorporate a word recognition task into the training, or just focus on word production?  If I incorporate a word recognition task, should I manipulate the phonetic details of the words they're hearing, so I get a test of whether they've generalized the phonetic information, or is that too many variables?  etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum)

- On the bright side, I'm very excited about what I'm doing, and after I sift through a few more papers, I think I'll be ready to go...

- It's a beautiful day out, and I have enough of a cold that I feel justified staying at home for the day.  So I slept in today and am now sitting in my screened-in porch style apartment with all the windows open, drinking coffee and taking notes on papers.  It's fantastic, except that there are so many papers to read (see above), and I have to take breaks periodically, because it's a lot of concentrating.  Hence the blog entry.

- I got paid last week!  So I ordered a new phone for myself!  Both things are very exciting for me, due to their very low frequency of occurrence; now that I've switched back to my fellowship, instead of teaching, I only get paid 3 times a year.  And I just never buy a new phone, because I'm perfectly satisfied being a curmudgeonly luddite when it comes to phones.  I don't want access to email and the internet 24 hours a day...

- One of my friends started a linguist intramural softball team!  So I played softball twice last week, and we have our first game next week!  It's really really fun to be playing softball again, but I'm fairly certain our team is going to be horrible, and that's okay.  It's more about the experience.

Okay, back to work.

Grad School WIN

I have the greatest advisors ever.  I really, really do, and I don't have enough good things to say about them.

They actually told me, in as many words, "This is a great idea.  And if you start having doubts about what you're doing - and you will, because we all do - just come talk to us, and we'll tell you to knock it off and get back to work, because this is a great idea."

Do I really have to leave this place and go out in the big scary academic world where I don't have wonderful advisors to talk me down and reassure me that I'm doing okay? ... I think I do, but not for a little while yet.

Epic Road Trip Recap: Part 3

I'm in kind of a crap mood today, so I'm going to do a blog post, and maybe that will make me feel better.

First, I had one horrible day last week (I think it was Thursday), and it kind of ruined the next few days for me.  I won't go into details here, because I never know who reads this thing and I don't want to publicize any information that others would prefer me to keep private, but suffice it to say that Thursday pretty much sucked on multiple counts.  So I didn't sleep well on Thursday night at all, which set me up for a crap Friday as well.  Thankfully, I had a good time on Friday night with some friends, but then after I got home I kept waking up and running to the bathroom because I felt like I was going to throw up.  Sorry if that's more than you wanted to know... the long and short of it is that Saturday I came down with some horrible stomach bug that had me in and out of the bathroom in incredible pain all day Saturday and Sunday.  And no, I don't think it's the ulcer, back with a vengeance.  I really think it was just a stomach bug, for various reasons that I will not explain in detail.  It's mostly gone now, but I've just been in this lame-o queasy funk for the past few days, and I'm about ready for it to be done.

On the slightly brighter side, I sat down and did some soul-searching regarding my dissertation today (which is part of what's been putting me in a funk), and I do feel a little bit better about it.  I sort of have a plan, but I've been struggling to reorient my research trajectory to position myself for the job I'd like to apply for for next year, and trying to figure out how to do that, and how to package a small set of mish-mash projects into one sensible storyline has been bugging me for some time now.  There are several studies I'd like to do, but I haven't made myself sit down and work out a detailed plan for them, and they feel a little all over the place.  I know they must have some thread tying them together, since I'm the one who thought of them, so today I sat down and thought about why exactly I'm interested in pursuing those studies.  It helped organize my thinking a bit, and I do think I'm making progress.  I'm just feeling kind of... discouraged and scatterbrained and slightly incompetent.  I'm going to do the same thing tomorrow, and then meet with my advisors on Friday with A Definitive Plan in hand, and hopefully then I'll feel like I have a definite direction again.

Okay, now.  On the much brighter side, I'm going to put up some more pictures from our road trip.  First, I'm going to add a great picture of some weird neon orange dirt to the Yellowstone post from last time, so you should go back and check it out.  Now I'm going to pick the narrative back up: we just spent the night at a rest area just over the mountains into southwestern Montana, after having spent the day at Yellowstone.

We woke up early the next morning (or in my case, never really got to sleep the night before), and Jevon drove while I napped.  We drove and drove and drove and drove.  Montana was really beautiful, and really big, and it felt nice to be getting into some landscape that felt 'close to home'; it's amazing how comforting a prairie can be when you've spent the first twenty-some years of your life in a prairie state.  By early afternoon, we crossed the state line into North Dakota, and we decided to stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Part of me wishes we could have done the National Parks in the reverse order from how we did them.  T.R. National Park was really awesome and beautiful, but it was hard for me to appreciate it when it was immediately preceded by Yellowstone and Crater Lake.  I mean, those are pretty hard to top.  But T.R. was beautiful in its own, badlands-y way.

The badlands are a really cool area of the country.  I still don't entirely know what 'badlands' means, except that it's apparently some kind of geological terrain that's characterized by cool rock formations that have been carved out by wind and water erosion, over a period of thousands of years.  I know it doesn't seem that exciting in the picture, but we saw some super cool rocks with holes right through them that had been caused by the blustery wind that just constantly pounds the landscape.  So this rock is the very small scale version of how the entire landscape was formed:

I've never been to Africa, but when we took the winding road up to the highest point in the park and looked down over the river and the flood plains, it reminded me an awful lot of the Africa shots from Planet Earth, a documentary we recently watched about all the cool ecosystems on earth.  We saw part of a herd of buffalo fording the river, too, with their babies in tow.  It was pretty neat.

See the buffalo herd, in the water?

What was even neater, though (despite freaking me out a bit), was when we were headed out of the park, and we came across said buffalo herd completely blocking the road.  There was nothing to do except stop the car and sort of idle our way through, as the herd parted and let us pass.  They were right next to me, out the driver's side window, and they seemed like they couldn't care less that we were there, but it was kind of freaky, nonetheless.

We didn't spend too too long at T.R. National Park before we were on the road again, headed straight south out of North Dakota.  My atlas perusal revealed that we would be passing almost directly through the geographical center of the United States, so of course we had to go there.  When else am I going to be driving through western South Dakota with nothing but time?

So we took a 12 mile detour to go through the center of the country, and it was totally worth it.  Not that it was particularly cool, but it was pretty fun to be in the absolute middle of nowhere, following a country road in the most deserted place I've ever been to.  There is nothing in the western part of the Dakotas.  Nothing.  There were a few towns marked on the atlas, but when we would pass through them, they would consist of a single trailer and a convenience store, if you were lucky.  It's apparently the kind of place where you honestly have to worry about running out of gas and being stranded.  I had never been to such a sparsely populated area, and it was surprisingly creepy.

Anyway, in case you were wondering what the geographical center of the nation looks like and you don't think you're going to make the trip any time soon, I am happy to provide the following documentation.

We could have easily missed it.  Do you see the landscape in the background?  That's what that entire afternoon's worth of driving looked like.  Which might go some ways toward explaining the following two pictures; sometimes you have to add some artificial excitement to your life.

Look at me!  I'm out of the car!

We also jumped the fence and went and took our pictures by the flag in the middle of the field, since we figured it was probably marking the exact center of the nation.  And also because we had been in the car for several days straight.  And also because we're silly.

Here's what the view across from the center of the nation looks like.  This was the only structure we came across on this road, and that's our car, parked next to the pile of rocks and the sign.

So after that excitement was passed, we got back in the car, drove the 12 miles back to the main road, and headed on our way.  Our last major national park/sightseeing stop was in the southwestern part of South Dakota, where we went to Wind Cave National Park (sort of), the Crazy Horse monument, Mount Rushmore, and Badlands National Park.

But that will have to be for next time!

... I do feel a bit better, by the way.  I think I might bake some bread and curl up with a good statistics book.

Epic Road Trip Recap: Part 2

Where we last left off, Melinda and Jevon were sleeping in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, which, it turns out, is mostly a desert.

We got up with the sun on Sunday morning and were ready to hit the road.  On Sunday, we drove the rest of the way through Oregon, and most of the way through Idaho.  Oregon and western Idaho mostly looked like this:

Lost of dusty hills and green-brown brush.  By Sunday afternoon, we had made it to Boise, and we stopped for two hours or so to get lunch and walk around a bit.  I really liked Boise and would love to go back and spend some more time there sometime.  It was not unlike Urbana, in some ways; it felt like a college town in the middle of a pretty rural state, but it did feel a little bit bigger than Urbana, since the state capitol is there.  Bigger than Urbana, but way small for a state capitol, that's for sure.  Anyway, we checked out the Basque quarter a tiny bit (did you know that Boise has the biggest Basque population outside of the Pyrenees?), but I had forgotten that I wanted to eat at a Basque restaurant, and we had already stopped for lunch at a local brew pub by that point.  I was disappointed, but the beer was pretty good, so it was fine.  We walked around downtown a bit, found an Apple store and bought a car charger for the iPad, which was absolutely essential and totally worth the $35 or however much I paid for it, and then hit the road again.

On Sunday evening, around the time we were getting hungry and tired of being in the car, we came upon some signs for a state park in Idaho.  So we decided to call it a day and set up camp for the night.  The Idaho campground might have been my favorite one of the whole trip, actually.  First, because it was beautiful (although they all were, really):

But second because the facilities were really nice - there were some pretty decent showers, even - and third because there was a frisbee golf course!  So while we were checking in and paying our fees at the main office, we inquired about the frisbee golf course, and the people there were so nice that they lent us a whole set of discs to play with, as long as we promised to drop them off before we left the next day.  The guy at the front desk was obviously really in to frisbee golf, so he was simultaneously excited and a little bit sheepish to tell us what all the different types of discs were for, and I think he probably would've stayed late to play with us if we'd asked him to.

Anyway, we set up camp and struck out to find the first hole on the golf course, but it took us forever to find it.  The campsite was right along the Snake River, so we basically ended up doing a really nice little hike along the river before we finally found part of the course.  Then we had to back track a bit to find the first hole.  And then we weren't very good, so there was a lot of walking involved.  And then I managed to lose my disc in some brush on the third hole, which involved a lot more walking.  And then we finally found it after what felt like an hour of searching, by which time the sun was going down, and I was totally disheartened and ready to quit.  So... it could have been really fun.  ;)

But then there was a glorious, much needed shower awaiting me, and I got to get all clean and fresh and walk back to the tent in the beautiful, cooled-down summer twilight, completely exhausted and ready to crash.  So crash we did, and hit the road again early the next day.

(I think the name of the campground was Massacre Rocks State Park; another part of our evening (or the next morning, I can't remember) was checking out the info at the visitors' center about the site itself, which was where a massacre occurred along the Oregon Trail.  If I remember right, some white people were killed by Indians, but I don't remember why, or whether they retaliated, or what the rest of the story was.)

On Monday, we decided to shoot for Yellowstone.  We got a nice early start, drove the rest of the way across Idaho, and made it to Yellowstone by early afternoon.  Yellowstone is huge.  I mean huge.  There's a big main loop that goes around the park, and basically just driving 3/4 of the way around the loop took us something like 5 hours.  We entered on the western side and were immediately greeted by views like this:

After just a little bit of driving in the park, we hit on some of the geothermal activity; Yellowstone is chock full of geysers and cool mud pits and things like that.  I'd never seen anything like it before, and I really loved the weird colors, caused by various naturally occurring minerals and acids.

This is molten rock/mud caused by some sort of sulphuric acid bubbling up out of the ground.

Geysers!

We did stop and see Old Faithful, but honestly, the picture (and the geyser itself) were kind of lame.  I mean, no, they were awesome, in principal.  But if you can picture a huge jet of water spurting out of the ground, well, that's basically it.  The coolest part was that we learned that given any one eruption, they can predict the time of the next eruption based on the height and duration of the previous one, but other than that, they only know that it erupts every 30 - 120 minutes or something like that.

Another thing I really loved about Yellowstone was the wildlife.  It's just... there.  Hangin' out.  So we saw some awesome elk and buffalo!  This one was on our hike:

Look closely, next to the telephone pole in the background.

And we did stop and do a hike, which was really nice.  It was only a few miles, but it was great to get out of the car, and get to the top of a cool little hill/ravine thing and get a nice view of Yellowstone Lake.

Jevon's favorite part of Yellowstone was this absolutely breathtaking valley we hit upon.  We actually pulled over on the side of the road, got out of the car, and just gazed for a while.  The pictures definitely don't do it justice - it was incredibly peaceful, and verdant, and just... soul-soothing.

The weird thing about Yellowstone is that it was honestly kind of overwhelming.  The whole park is just so unbelievably gorgeous that it actually blows your mind, and after a few hours of constant, idyllic natural beauty, we were kind of ready to get out of there.  It was totally weird... you could stay for a week, easily, exploring trails and fishing and being in an outdoorsman's paradise, but we both had sensory overload and decided it would make more sense to just complete our 3/4 loop around the park and call it a day.

So we did our 3/4 loop, down around the southern and eastern parts of the park, and eventually exited out the north, into Montana.  Here we are making our way out of the park.

We finally made it out around 8:00 pm, I think, and we stopped at the first place we found for dinner, which ended up being a little lodge/log cabin deal just outside the park.  Once we got some food in us, we were ready to drive a little bit farther, so we decided to cross the mountains into Montana before we called it a night.  If I had known how long it would take us to the cross the mountains, I probably would not have decided to do that.  But ignorance is bliss, and we did indeed decide to cross the mountains.  On the bright side, it was fantastically gorgeous, even though the pictures don't properly convey it.

On the not-as-bright side, I'm a nervous wreck driving on mountain roads, and the sun was going down, so even though it was beautiful, it kept getting right in my eyes when we would round corners, and I would have nightmare visions of some car careening into us as we rounded the bend.  Whee!

But we made it eventually, and Jevon graciously took over the driving, and we stopped the first place we could, which ended up being a rest area in the middle of nowhere in southwestern Montana.  That was the only night we slept in the car instead of in the tent, and I did not get a good night's sleep, but Jevon did, so he started the next day off driving while I napped for a while.

That's got to be it for tonight, friends.  Blog entries take a long time!  Next up: Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.