feeling like a big ol' dork

So far today I have finished my Skype meeting with my potential post doc advisors, begun stewing a very delicious smelling rabbit (because hey, why not? I've never cooked a rabbit before), and played the piano for a good long while.  Now I am munching on baby carrots and sitting around in my new Huckin' Wugs t-shirt (see photo) and not really knowing what to do with myself until our frisbee game tonight.

What a huge dork.  I mean, seriously.

... How weird is it if I read a statistics book?  I have this thing lately where when I don't know what else to do with myself, I just work.  But I'm enjoying my work a lot right now, so I think it's okay.  And one can always stand to learn some more about regression models, right? ...

On the very bright side, there are currently 13 people signed up for my summer course on language acquisition!  And my Skype meeting went very well, and I'm very excited about my potential post doc project.  I will be quite disappointed if I don't get to pursue it, at this point.

So things are looking pretty good.  Busy, and up-in-the-air feeling, but good.

work hard, play hard

I am so physically tired right now, and it feels marvelous.  It's been a long time since I've trained for a big race (nearly a year since my last marathon - jeez!), not that I'm doing that right now, but I did go for a really nice, relaxing 10 mile run down and around Lake Merritt yesterday.  It'd been so long since I did a decently long run, and I kind of just wanted to make sure I could still do it.  Plus, it's so meditative just letting your mind wander while you scoot around town, and it's really fun to cover so much ground in a relatively short amount of time.

So yesterday, I woke up, drank some tea and had a little snack, and headed down to the lake, in downtown Oakland.  I did one lap around, and the sun was shining and the sky was blue, and they're finally almost done working on the new pedestrian path and bridge they've been building for the past several years.  It looks really nice, and you can go all the way around the lake on the same path now, without having to switch around and dodge orange construction cones and all that.

I probably ran for something like an hour and a half, felt totally comfortable and good (I remembered to put my Body Glide on before I left!), and was even able to pick it up on the last stretch, finishing in a sprint of glory at the corner of Grand Avenue and Lakeside Drive.  Then I walked over to Whole Foods and treated myself to a cherry chocolate cashew bar and a yummy latte as I walked and cooled down for a bit, hopped on BART, and was back at my door within two hours of when I left.  It was a really, really nice morning, and I slept like a rock last night.

Today, we had an excellent frisbee game.  There were only 5 of us who showed up, due to various people being out of town, but there was a huge group of barbecuin' frisbee playin' hipsters already hanging out at our park.  These guys were SO East Bay, it was really funny.  They all had tattoos and neon short shorts and generally looked like they just stepped out of 1982 (the guy with the sweatband and mutton chops, in particular).  And a bunch of their friends were just hanging out, drinking beer, having a picnic and playing weird 80s hipster music (plus plenty of the Black Keys, at least).  They could have been jerks, like "we're too cool for you" types, but it turned out they were really friendly and totally happy to have us play with them, and they learned all of our names and actually included us in the game.  (Which is much more than I can say for the last frisbee group we ran into - they "let" us "play" with them, but they never actually threw it to us, and I really didn't have a good time that time.)

So it was very fun, and we played for almost two hours, and now I'm very pleasantly exhausted.  I'm going over to some friends' place to play test a board game in a few minutes, despite the fact that I'm nearly ready to fall asleep, but I guess it's probably not a good idea to go to bed at 7:00, and I'm sure I'll have a good time, anyway.

What a nice, restful-but-exhausting weekend!  And now I'm feeling ready to tackle the week.  Work hard, play hard, I guess!

Wugs Are Back

So... after our quasi-disastrous foray into intramural sports with our linguist softball team last semester, we decided to try our hand at something we're actually competent at: ultimate frisbee.  A rotating group of us has been playing ultimate one day a week for the past few years.  It started my third year, I think, so I guess that means I've been playing frisbee once a week for about 2.5 years now!  We were all pretty... not that great when we first started, but those of us who have kept at it have actually gotten pretty decent over time.  We usually play 3-on-3 (or 4-on-4 if we're lucky) for about 2 hours on Sunday afternoons.  One of the guys who started playing with us last year was on an actual ultimate team back in college, so he's actually legitimately really good, and he's been helping us and teaching us stuff for the past year, too.

So Actual Frisbee Player decided to cajole us into fielding an intramural ultimate team.  I was pretty reticent, because softball was a little disheartening at times, and I wasn't too excited to get my butt kicked for an hour a week again, this time at something I feel somewhat competent at and would rather be able to keep having fun with (and not suddenly feel completely incompetent at).  But... we went for it.  AND OH MY GOD WE JUST TOTALLY WIPED THE FLOOR WITH THE OTHER TEAM WE PLAYED TONIGHT.  We actually felt really bad about it, because our team was having a blast, and they were obviously having quite a bit less fun than us, and we positively trounced them (13-0!).  I know that not all of our games are going to be like that, because we saw the two teams that played after us, and one of them in particular looked pretty darn good.  But we are definitely good enough to be competitive, and that makes me feel so good!  Here's a sport I was definitely not that stellar at to begin with, and now I'm good enough to play on a winning intramural team!  I'm good enough to launch a disc down the field and have somebody catch it to score!  Good enough to stick on the person I'm guarding and swat the disc away from them a few times!  Good enough to make a break for it and catch a few points!

I'm so proud of us!  Go Huckin' Wugs!!

All 7 of us on the line (I'm second from the right, in the shorts).

Alex and Jevon getting ready to jump for the disc.

Pile up!  Dominated by the dude in the weird tank top.

Jevon throwing the disc and me (in the pink shoes) running off in some direction.

BOOM

It's my class!!!

Nobody's enrolled yet, but I think they will be soon...

Edit, 2/12: Who's got 4 people signed up for their course in the first day of registration?  THIS GIRL.

rollin' rollin' rollin'

It's Friday!  This week is finally over!!

I've been anxious about this week for some time now, and now it's finally over!  And what a good week it was!

This week was our first phonetics candidate's visit, plus my first Skype meeting with my potential post doc advisors, plus the trial run for the workshop I'm offering on R, for D-Lab.

The phonetics visit went off without a hitch, but gosh, this job search is a lot of work and totally exhausting for me... I can't even imagine how exhausting it must be for the job candidates!  Then, my Skype meeting, which was so much fun, but gosh (again), I'm really glad I prepared well for it.  I'm about to start working on a huge research grant that would pay my salary for three years, as well as all of my research-related costs, with Penn State's Center for Language Science as my sponsoring institution.  So I'm having these Skype meetings with the two women who would/will be my post doc sponsors/advisors, if I get the funding, and I had my first one on Thursday.  They've been sending me a bunch of papers to read, so I've had to carve out a few hours a week to just read and digest articles on things I don't usually read about, and try to think about what kind of project I can do that's related to these types of questions.  So I've been reading them, and taking notes on them, and trying to come up with reasonable project ideas that are kind of related to my dissertation, but not too much.  I came up with two main ideas that I was feeling pretty good about, but you never know if other people are really going to connect with your ideas...  Then I had my Skype meeting yesterday morning, and I had to talk about how my dissertation is going, and what my project ideas are, and how all of this makes sense and fits together.  And it went really well.  I really, really like these two women, so I'm glad I was decently prepared and able to communicate my ideas effectively, and they seemed to really like what I had to say and were excited about my project ideas.  Things are rolling right along, friends.  I will be writing up a mini project proposal over the next two weeks, at which point it's time for Skype meeting #2.

This morning was my introductory R workshop, which I was feeling a little anxious about, just because I haven't had that much time to devote to it, and I didn't know who was going to attend my trial run, and whether they'd be way better at R than me!  (It sucks getting questions you don't know the answers to...)  Anyway, it's over now, and it went well, too, and now I'm excited about doing my workshop, too.  I still have to put together the second part of it, but the first part is now done, and I think people will get a lot out of it.

So now, I am going to sit on my chaise in my lovely apartment with the windows and door open wide (it's still 65 degrees here... sorry, Illinois) and do some dissertation-related reading.  And drink some yummy tea.  And maybe take a break to play the piano.  And probably get dinner with friends tonight.

Yay weekend.  Yay February.  :)