Henry W. Coe State Park

It's Spring Break!  Jevon and I had been talking for a while about going camping over Spring Break, but there's still snow in Yosemite, and we didn't want to be gone for too too long anyway, so we opted to explore a park in our own backyard: we packed up the tent on Sunday morning and drove down to Henry W. Coe State Park, which is around 90 minutes southeast of here.  I had no idea what to expect going in, but it was really beautiful, and we had a great time.  We went for a long-ish hike after we arrived yesterday afternoon, ate a camp food dinner (apples, peanut butter, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and a few hunks of bread), and then read until the sun went down, at which point we promptly crashed.

Then we woke up this morning, ate more camp food, and went for another short hike before packing up and driving back.  It was a great little trip!

There's our little orange tent, on the left.  What a campsite!

The barn by the Visitors' Center.

Looking down the Visitors' Center steps on the fog this morning.

More morning fog.

California poppies on our hike.

Cool tree!

Beautiful weather yesterday.

Look at this huge turkey!!

Parked at the campsite.

Morning fog, and Jevon sitting at the picnic table.

The fact that I'm leaving California soon makes it all the easier to appreciate trips like this.  This is a beautiful state, and I am so happy to have called it home for a time.

But it's time to see my other (real) home soon - I'm leaving for Illinois on Wednesday, and I hear a small mountain of snow awaits me!  See you all soon, my Illinois loves!

Correction: sunny and crisp, but still a little weird

I accidentally just ran 9 miles.  It turns out there are only so many bridges that cross the Charles River, so if you miss one, your run might end up longer than expected... but that's great!  I planned a route of about 8 miles, apparently missed a bridge somewhere, and instead wound up with 9 miles, which was just about perfect.  Napa Valley is coming up in exactly 4 months, so I'm feeling good about the fact that I can still do 9 miles perfectly comfortably.  There are some things I had kind of forgotten about marathon training though...

1) Running in the cold.  The first 1-2 miles are a little uncomfortable, but then you get nice and warmed up, and it feels fantastic.  45 degrees is perfect weather for shorts and a t-shirt, if you can believe it. ;)  After 5 or so more miles, though, it's like my body finds a new equilibrium and remembers that it's 45 degrees out.  So then I usually alternate between feeling perfect and being a little chilly for the last few miles.  If I'm going longer than 10 miles in the cold (which hasn't happened in several years, so I had forgotten this), I really have to wear running tights and/or a long sleeve shirt, though.  10 is about my limit in shorts and a t-shirt once the temperature starts dropping.

2) Chafing.  Ok, I didn't forget that chafing happens, but I sort of forgot the reality of chafing.  When you're starting to get a little tired and feeling like you'd like to be done running now, please, it's not much fun when some part of your body is getting raw from rubbing against some piece of clothing.  A reminder that Body Glide is your friend.

3) Getting ready for a marathon is all about training your legs to deal with the stress.  I never, ever have cardiovascular difficulties during longer runs; it's always my legs that do the complaining.  Today it was my left hamstring a little bit (because I ran a 5K in San Diego this week, and am still a little bit sore, embarrassingly) and then my right calf a tiny bit (probably because I was a little dehydrated).  Things I have learned about my musculature from running so much is that my hamstrings are perpetually tight, they only get more so unless I stretch a little bit, and if I don't stretch an adequate amount, I end up with a back spasm at some point.  I have also learned that my calves threaten to cramp up if I'm not hydrated enough.  And if I get really dehydrated, they do cramp, and that is mi-se-ra-ble.

Enough running talk.  You know, Boston is very nice.  I did my 9 miles up and down the Charles River, and it was quite pretty.  It still feels somewhat weird and foreign, and I can't really imagine living here, but the sun was shining and it was such a quintessentially fall day today that I found myself scooting along with a grin on my face.  The fall leaves are gorgeous, and the buildings are all red and brown brick, and I really like cities that have a river winding through them.  It's very Old World, in a very nice way.

Well.  I'm going to try to get some grading done before the plenary talk at 5:45, and I am going to sleep so well tonight.  (I slept great last night, too.  Now that I'm adjusted to the 3 hour difference, it's time to go back to the west coast.  At least I'll have the end of Daylight Saving Time helping me out on the way back.)  Tomorrow I've got a full morning of talks again, until 12:30.  Then I think I'll walk around Boston a bit and take some pictures before I catch my flight around 6:00 tomorrow night.  And the magic of time zones is such that I'll get back to San Francisco at 9:40 after a 6.5 hour flight.

And so I bid you adieu, until tomorrow when I'm killing time in an airport, most likely.

Boston is dark and cold and weird.

Ok, that's not fair at all.  I've only been here since it's been dark, and it's only cold because I'm staying in some lady's house and I don't want to turn the thermostat up too high.  I found this bed and breakfast on AirBnB, which I highly recommend if you're traveling somewhere and want to find a nice, homey place in your price range, but it turns out the place I'm staying has no one here until Saturday night.  The lady was super nice - she left me a key in a lockbox, the code for the internet, bagels and cream cheese and coffee for breakfast - but she also left her thermostat at 65 degrees and I'm not sure whether that's because she's been out of town for a while or she wants to save money.  But 65 degrees is kinda chilly in a drafty house in Boston.  So I just turned it up to 68 and I hope I don't cost her a fortune or anything.  I guess I'm paying to stay here, so I should be able to turn up the heat a little bit...?  (And isn't it a little weird that she just trusts people to come into her house and hang out while she's gone?  She seems really nice and normal, and I guess I probably seem nice and normal, but I don't think I would let strangers into my house when I'm not there.)

Anyway, another weird thing about Boston so far is that when we were flying in, the sun was setting over the land instead of the ocean, and that made me realize I've been living in California for long enough that it's weird to me when the sun sets on the opposite side of the horizon as the ocean.  Funny how new little normalcies creep into your life without you realizing it.

Another weird thing is that the people look different here.  It's subtle enough that it's not particularly alarming or anything (the majority of people look approximately the same in most places in the U.S., probably), but the predominant style is clearly somewhat different.  Far fewer hipsters, for one thing.  Much less plaid. A lot more tweed, and shoes that have actually been shined.  (Shoes that are actually shineable, in fact.)  More people who get their hair cut regularly.  Fewer tattoos.  I forgot that the "preppy" look existed, to tell you the truth.

So I'm not judging you yet, Boston, since I've only known you for about 5 hours, and pretty much all of that time was spent in the dark, on public transit, but I don't think I like you as much as the west coast, I gotta say.  I don't do well with uptight.

Speaking of uptight, I should probably get back to practicing my conference presentation.  It's at 11:30 in the morning and I want it to be over so I can enjoy the rest of this conference.  I also want to go for a long, long run, either on Saturday or Sunday morning, to work out some anxiety.  What a weird week!  I sit for a while, and then suddenly I'm in San Diego.  And then I sit for a while longer, and suddenly I'm on the exact opposite side of this huge country, on the east coast, where it actually looks and feels like November, which is simultaneously comforting and off-putting.  It's like, "oh right, seasons", but at the same time, it's like coming out of a time warp where you've been trapped in la-la land fog-and-sunshine cycles for some indeterminate amount of time.  And I also lost 3 hours today with the time change, so I keep looking at the clock and going, "what??" because I'm not even remotely tired.  I have no idea how I'm going to get to sleep.

Weirdness abounds, friends, weirdness abounds.

things that are funny in airports at 6:00 am

The best sign I have ever seen in an airport:

"SECURITY CHECK

NO JOKES, PLEASE"

Silly things have been making me giggle the past few days.  During one of the presentations I saw, this guy said, "I don't want to throw out the bathwater with the baby..." and it just struck me as really funny.  Something about the idea of wanting to chuck a baby, but definitely not wanting to lose the bathwater...

Anyway.  Not as funny: paying $8 for some yogurt and a house coffee.  It's not even a floofy espresso drink.  Or good yogurt.  :(

Well, that's that for the ASA, I guess!  I never did get to check out San Diego any more.  I went to talks on Tuesday morning, did reading and work on Tuesday afternoon, went to dinner with some people I don't know very well (but it was very nice), and hit the hotel hot tub before bed.  Wednesday, we had our poster presentation starting at 10:00, but people were already coming by and seeming interested at 8:30, so we just set up shop early and talked and talked and talked about it for 3 hours.  Everyone had nice things to say, for the most part, so that's always a good sign, I think.  I really like poster sessions, and the ASA is still my favorite conference so far.

Here's what this poster looked like, just for fun:

They're getting better with practice, I think.  (Do you see how we made our graphs look like little French flags??)

Then Wednesday afternoon I had a long lunch with some friends from Stanford and some other phonetician friends I've picked up along the way.  It was really fun in that supremely nerdy way that only other people who have something as ridiculous as phonetics as their chosen profession probably understand.  I intended to go to more talks Wednesday afternoon, but we missed the start of them because we were fleshing out our business model for a mall store that offers individualized napping space ($5 for the first 15 minutes, extra fee for someone who will wake you up forcefully; then it's $10/5 minutes after that).

So instead of seeing more talks (which I actually wanted to see!), I worked on my bibliography and tried to get more reading done, but it was one of those days where it takes you 2 hours to get through 18 pages.  Finally an old friend/acquaintance of mine called and we went and tossed a frisbee around for just a few minutes until it got dark.  I went back to the hotel and had dinner with someone I knew from the ASA meeting in Seattle last spring, then I did some more reading, spent too much time on Facebook, and hit the hot tub again.

I could seriously get used to having a hot tub around.  What a great way to wind down before bed.

And now it's 7:00 and I'm at the San Diego airport waiting to go to Newark.  I had completely forgotten that I have a connection in Newark, which means I'll be on my first flight from 8:00 PST to 4:30 EST, change planes in Newark, and then eventually get in to Boston at 6:15 tonight.  And somewhere in there I need to clean up my talk for tomorrow (yikes!) and it would be soooo nice if I could finish this bibliography.  I'm not really holding out for that, though.

I'm a little worried that I'm going to freeze in Boston.  The highs are in the 50s this weekend, but I've been living in California for long enough that I worry I've become soft.

Well, back to reading.  Much love to all, and you'll hear from me again in Boston!

San Diego (day 1)

I do this thing where I dread, dread, dread something, and then inevitably, once I sit down to actually do it, it's not nearly as bad as some silly part of me thought it would be.

(I planned out everything I have to get done on my dissertation prospectus bibliography this week, so now I'm allowed to show you some pictures of downtown San Diego.)

There are palm trees everywhere.  It's a little weird, but definitely less weird to me now than it would have been a few years ago, before I started living in Berkeley.

There was something really nifty about the light in the city today, and I'm not sure this picture gets it across.  The leaves are just starting to turn colors, and when the sunlight shines through them, with the backdrop of the bright blue sky, it's pretty magical.

"Welcome Acoustical Society of America".  That's my conference.  :)

One thing I really like about taking walks with my camera is that it automatically makes me tune in to the beauty in the world.  When you're scanning for a good shot, you see things in a different way.  And even if I don't always end up with lots of good shots, focusing my attention in that intensely visual way makes me appreciate the way the light reflects off of the buildings, the street, and the foliage, the banking of the sidewalk, the width of the street, the colors of the signs and storefronts, the way the whole scene looks totally different when there's a woman with sleeve tattoos playing with her toddler, or a delivery man balancing a dolly while he rings the bell, or an old couple walking their little dog.  I didn't get pictures of any of those things, but I saw them.  And I saw them, if you see what I mean.

I realized (or perhaps re-realized) today that one of my favorite things in the world is getting on a bus with an unknown destination.  And I mean that both very literally and as a metaphor for my life.  The lady at the front desk told me one way to get where I wanted to go, and it involved taking the #20 bus and transferring to the trolley at the transit plaza.  I waited for several minutes, and finally the #120 bus showed up.  I asked the driver if it would take me to the transit plaza, and he said no, but he could drop me off downtown.  So I got on, sat down, and waited to see where I would end up.  And I love that feeling.  I really live for the rush of excitement that comes from taking a plunge into the slightly-unknown.  It was so exhilarating to be heading somewhere but not really knowing where I was going or how I would get back, but that really, I would be fine.  I hopped off somewhere downtown and wandered around for a while, finally found the "historic gaslamp district", which was cute enough, and then eventually got hungry and ate an Aloha Dog from a hot dog stand, which is apparently a hot dog with pineapple, onion, and teriyaki sauce.  Then I came back to the hotel and planned out what I'm going to read and write this week, and here I am.

Unfortunately I never made it down by the water, so I don't have any pictures of the waterfront, but I might be able to get some in the coming days.  I'm here until Thursday morning, when I leave for Boston, and the landscape changes dramatically!

For now, though: reading and a snack and then another dip in the hot tub before I hit the hay.

giving myself permission

I am in beautiful, sunny, beautiful San Diego.  (I know I just described it as beautiful twice in the same sentence.)  I got in last night, went for a dip in the hotel hot tub, then went to sleep nice and early.  Woke up around 8:00 this morning, lazed around for a bit, got some breakfast at Starbucks, took a shower, and decided that I am not going to do any work right now.  I was going to start right in on editing my conference talk for Friday and working on my dissertation prospectus, but you know what?  It's beautiful here.  (Did I mention that?)  And I don't have any conference activities I absolutely have to attend today, so I'm going to go walk around San Diego with my camera.

Then I can come back early this evening, buckle down, and put my nose back to the grindstone.  But it's sunny and 70 degrees, and I finally got a good night's sleep, and I am giving myself permission to go wander around for a few hours.

I'll be back later, with pictures. :)

I'm only 27.

And yet I've apparently turned into one of those old people who wakes up at 4:00 am after about 5 hours of sleep.

I did not intend to get back on a schedule that includes waking up at 4:00 am every morning, but that seems to be the inevitable result of not being able to force myself to get work done after 6:00 pm.  I worked on stuff for nearly 14 hours straight yesterday (ok, maybe only 4:30 am to 6:00 pm), and then partially against my better judgment went out to my favorite bar in Berkeley and played Boggle.

And then I woke up at exactly 4:00 this morning (without setting an alarm for then, mind you) and laid in bed for 2.5 hours thinking about stuff.  And then I remembered that I had leftover pancake batter in the fridge and a Portuguese test today, and I obviously wasn't sleeping any more anyway, so here I am.  Pancakes and blogging at dawn, which is only 7:00 am these days.  (The end of Daylight Saving Time will be nice in that respect.)

I'm going to see the San Francisco Orchestra tonight, and I hope I can get a nap in before then.  If not, then I should be able to sleep in tomorrow and/or Sunday before I head to San Diego for a few days.

San Diego!  And Boston!  In 2 days!  Ooh, I should remember to pack my camera.

Here comes the sun, and I say, it's all right.  Time to start my day for real.

2 out of 3 ain't bad

I got accepted to present a paper at the Boston University Conference on Language Development in early November!  In my acceptance email, they included the comments from the people who reviewed my abstract.

Anonymous Reviewer #1: "Very hard to understand results as they are reported.  Much more clarity needed."

Anonymous Reviewer #2: "Very clear."

Anonymous Reviewer #3: "Clear purpose, interesting result."

Weh-hell, I guess somebody got overruled.

Whoa.

I am suddenly leaving for France in the morning.  In like, 5 hours.

I knew this was coming, obviously, but these things always sneak up on me somehow, even if I've been thinking about them for a long time.

I've decided to mostly not sleep tonight.  I went out for coffee with a friend around 6:00 tonight, on purpose, because this way I think I can stay awake until I have to leave the house a little after 4:00 am.  (I still need to do laundry and pack, too.  Oops.)  Then I'll take BART to the airport and get on a 7:25 flight for Charlotte, maybe nap a little bit, change planes in Charlotte, and hopefully sleep most of the way to Paris.  Then I'll wake up in Paris around 6:30 am on Thursday, find my friends that I'm staying with, find our apartment, get some coffee and breakfast, and holy cow be in Paris.  I'll be having coffee and breakfast in Paris in about 24 hours.

And then we're going to put flyers up all over the place, looking for subjects for our experiments.  And then at some point, I'll get a good night's sleep.  ;)

Here we go!  Wheeeeeee...

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!!)