Go Wugs!

We lost again, but it was still pretty fun.

random phone pictures

I tried to capture the coolness of the view out my kitchen window this morning, but my phone camera just didn't cut it, and my good camera's battery was dead.  The rain/fog was really awesome, and then there was this strip of blue sky below it, and below that you could see San Francisco.  I'll try again sometime, now that my battery's charged.

A car parked on the street right by my house.

Pelicans.  Chillin'.
(See the guy perched on top of the outhouse structure?)

An awesome display in someone's front yard as I walked home from campus the other day.  In retrospect, I totally should have played with the dinosaurs and signed the guest book.  Probably would have made some kid's day.

I'm really tired, but I don't know if I can sleep yet.  I had a really productive day, despite the fact that the amount of time I spent working was fairly short.  I heard back from the IRB (finally!) and I don't have too much to change about my dissertation study before it gets approved and I can start collecting data.  So I did all my revisions and re-submitted my protocol, and I'm hoping I can start collecting data in November!!  Wow, I typed that and then realized it needed an extra exclamation point, because it hadn't really sunk in yet, but that is really exciting!

I also roped an undergraduate research assistant in to recording the voice stimuli for my experiments, and we set a time to meet later this week, and my friend who's drawing my picture stimuli is hard at work on them, so they should be ready to go in the next week, too.  I also managed to do a little bit of writing today, and am hoping to have my methodology chapter done (or at least in working order) by the end of this month.

We lost our softball game tonight, but I was still really proud of us.  We played totally respectably against The Best Team in our league (they actually recruit players... ugh) and had a pretty good time, too.

And then I walked all the way home (it's a bit of a hike from the softball field), and some of the packages I ordered with birthday gift cards had arrived.  Yay new dishes and silverware!  And then I read through a dissertation chapter written by a friend of mine, because she needed feedback by tomorrow.

So now it's time for bed, and sleep, hopefully, and an early start tomorrow.  What a day!  Good night.

winding down

It is wonderfully quiet in my apartment tonight, and I didn't know it when I bought it, but the cheap little globe lamp that sits next to my bed on the nightstand gives off a lovely muted glow.  It's a warm, Berkeley, fall evening - sort of like a cool, Illinois, summer night - but really the only similarity might be the temperature.  It might be 65 degrees or so, but somewhere in my bones, I can tell the difference between the cool breeze that follows a midwest summer thunderstorm, and the cool breeze that blows inland off the Bay.

Out the window, there is the constant low hum of late night traffic, punctuated by the whisking and whistling of the BART train as it passes through the underground station across the street, and the clock in the corner soldiers on, marking each passing moment with its unending series of regular, muffled clicks.

Sometimes I am struck by the sense that I don't know where I'm going, but I sure am going there, and I think it's somewhere good.  Time passes all too quickly these days, but I do try to stop and look around and appreciate the glorious buzz of life that has me wrapped up in it.  I don't know where the weeks and months go, and someday soon I'll be leaving Berkeley, setting off for some as yet unknown new land, where I'll be starting all over again.  It could be scary, but it's not, really.  It's just somewhere else to explore, something new to learn about, new people to meet and love and be annoyed by and keep with me in my heart.

It's a good place to be.  I feel safe, and I feel calm, and I feel ready.  I feel like I can do this, whatever it is.  I can write a dissertation.  I can teach a class.  I can find a research job.  I can move wherever my life takes me.  I might mess it up sometimes, and I might feel like I'm faking it more times than not, but the funny thing about faking it is that if you keep it up long enough, you're not faking it anymore.  Whatever it is becomes real.  So I'm trying to make sure I'm faking the right things, you know?  I'll act like I have a plan and I know what I'm doing, and eventually, I'll feel like I have a plan and I know what I'm doing, and then someday, I'll look back and realize that I did have a plan and know what I was doing all along.  I think.  I think that's how it works out.

My eyelids are droopy with sleep, and my body is tired from exercise, and stress, and a cold that keeps lingering.  So I will try to quiet my mind now, to give it some rest while the clock clicks and the train whistles by, and I will wake up tomorrow and do it all again.

linguist in-jokes

I designed these shirts for our intramural softball team!  And they just arrived!!

Trust me.  That is a quality linguist joke.

good (non-productive, oops) weekend

There were so many things I was going to do this weekend, and yet, here it is Sunday night, and how many of them got done...?

Well, one, at least.  I accidentally started my dissertation today, I think.  I was going to write an abstract, but instead it came out too long and detailed, and I think it's now an introduction.  So hey, that's pretty awesome.

One of my good friends and her husband were also in town, and I got to hang out with them today, eat delicious Nepalese food, and talk to her about my dissertation experiment.  She's a great artist, and also a child language researcher, and she has agreed (happily, it seems!) to draw the pictures for my dissertation experiments.  I'm teaching words to preschoolers, so I need lots of fun, colored pictures of real words and the ones I made up for the experiment, and I think my friend is uniquely qualified to draw those for me.  They also helped me brainstorm about games I can play with the kids to teach them the words, and we came up with some really good, workable ideas.  So that was actually pretty awesome too.

And oh yeah!  I received the news today that the course I proposed has been approved for summer semester 2013, which means I'll be the instructor of record for a course on Language Acquisition for Berkeley undergrads this summer.  No direct supervisor, no one else in charge of organizing, giving lectures, deciding on course material and readings, just little ol' me.  I am teaching my very own class at UC Berkeley!  And I am ridiculously excited about that!

And I went out for Ethiopian food on Friday night with Jevon and another friend, and it was so so so good.

So really, I had an excellent weekend.  And it wasn't even that un-productive, I just... wanted to get some other stuff done and didn't quite make it.

Oh well.