Today

Things I have already done today:

- Took the dogs for a walk. A really nice guy in his front yard had some treats in his pocket and he gave them some.

- Went through several hundred examples of the word 'head' in French. Don't ask.

- Couldn't take it anymore and decided to bake some madeleines. Ate madeleines and drank more coffee.

- Wasted time on Facebook and now on my blog.

Things I really need to do today:

- Stop eating madeleines and drinking coffee.

- Go back to sifting through examples of 'head' in French. I only have 200 more years' worth to go! I'll be so happy when this paper is written and turned in.

- Work on and hopefully finish my final data analysis problem for my stats class. Hopefully it will go off without a hitch.

- Walk the dogs again, enjoy some sunshine, and get some sleep so I can write my historical linguistics paper all day tomorrow!

Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d'un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée du thé où j'avais laissé s'amollir un morceau de madeleine. Mais à l'instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d'extraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir délicieux m'avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause...

Ouf.

It's a French sound effect, that. Somewhere between ouch and oh man. I'm so tired of writing papers! So I'm writing in my blog instead!

I have two more papers to write for Monday. They really won't be so terribly bad, but it's so nice and sunny out, and I'm so tired of writing papers!!

Here is some news. We decided we're moving. Did I already mention this? I think we're going to move to El Cerrito. It's about a mile north of here, a very cute little town (hometown of John Fogerty, might I add), a little more spread out than Berkeley, and we should be able to get a perfectly nice house with a bigger yard, close enough to BART so that Roger can just walk there to go to work, for considerably cheaper. So there's really no reason for us not to move.

Especially since our neighbors here are so darned snooty! I'm not holding my breath for friendlier neighbors if we move to El Cerrito, but rents are move expensive in Berkeley for a reason. It's because all the snooty people want to be able to say they live in Berkeley or something. I dunno, but our neighbor across the street stopped Roger when he was walking the dogs this afternoon and told him he really needed to cut the grass immediately. Seriously? Who does that? And I assure you, our front "lawn" does not look that bad. (I saw "lawn" in quotes because it's like a 10'x10' patch of crappy plants anyway.) It's a little overgrown, yes, a little Urbana-ed out, if you will, but certainly no-friggin'-where near unsightly. Might I add that this woman is married to a man who watched us struggle to get our broken Jeep off a U-haul trailer from inside his house and then had the nerve to bring it up in conversation.

Did I tell you that story? So we get here with our poor broken Jeep, and we have to get it pushed up into our driveway so we can return the U-haul trailer. Thankfully two of my friends came over and helped us, but it was hard! We were all heaving and working really hard, and had no idea this douchebag was watching us from inside his house. So the next day, he sees Roger outside and casually says, "So I saw you had some trouble getting your Jeep into your driveway." What would possess someone to 1) watch us struggle from inside his house without so much as offering to help and 2) spontaneously bring it up in conversation the next day that he did so is utterly beyond my comprehension.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to moving on many levels. I really do like our house, and it's been great and honestly the best we could do for this year, but now that we have time to look, I think it's time to look for a better deal so we can get some more bang for our buck. We're making it okay, but it'd be nice to be able to save some money, and to be closer to BART so it doesn't take so dang long for Roger to get to work. He just told me this week that his company probably isn't moving until October (instead of July, as they had originally thought), so he'll still have quite a few more months of long commuting.

On the bright side, he's still loving his job. I love that he loves his job, it makes me so happy that he's in a good mood when he gets home every day. He's so funny - he came inside all flustered from talking to that snooty lady from across the street, then went out and bought a lawn mower. So now he's mowing the back yard like a cute little husband. Oh, I should also mention that our fence is completely falling apart. I know our landlords would fix it if we asked, but I kind of don't want to deal with it. They'll have to have people come and rip the whole thing out and re-dig it, probably, and I kind of just don't want to bother and just move instead.

Also, I think I'm going to try to sell the Jeep (finally) once I'm done with school next week. It'll be nice to have it out of the driveway, and whatever money we can get for it will be a little bonus.

Speaking of bonuses, I'm excited for my raise in August! Another up side of getting a Javits fellowship is that it pays more than the University of California ever possibly could. The only bad part is that I'm going to get paid one lump sum for June and July, and it comes out to less than I normally get per month, so we might be stretching by the time I get paid again in August! It's okay, I like cereal....

Well, I think I'm going to put a t-shirt and shorts on instead of this dress and take my toasty shoulders outside for another walk in the sunshine with the dogs. I'll be locked inside until Monday night writing papers, so I feel like I should enjoy the light of day while I can.

Love to all!

Big Sur Race Report

Time is really flying. Really really flying. But I owe you an update, so here we go!

The race last weekend was really great. Sara and I both had a wonderful time, and she did an amazing job. I can't imagine running that course for my first marathon! It was SO HARD! I was really glad I only did the 21-miler, because I was hurting by the end and ready to be done, so it was great when I could just stop! I've been telling people I'm doing "21 miles of the Big Sur Marathon", and they invariably say, "Why not do the whole thing? What's 5 more miles?" And I was tempted to convince myself of that too, and just sign up for the whole thing. But really, let me tell you: the last 5 miles matter. Right around 20-21 miles is when it starts to hurt, and it was so great to just stop at that point instead of having to slog through 5 more! So here's the play-by-play, in case you're interested:

We drove down Saturday morning, and it was so fantastic to get out of the Bay Area for a while. Don't get me wrong, I really like it here, but I'm just a country girl at heart. I need those wide open spaces and tracts of farm land - it just calms me right down to my soul. The countryside is so beautiful in this part of the country, too; rolling, green hills with views of the ocean and gently winding roads all the way down to Monterey, which is this cute little seaside town about 2 hours south of here, smushed right up against the rocky edge of the Pacific Ocean.

We got to our hotel around noon on Saturday, checked in, walked around for a while, got some lunch at a cute little seafood restaurant. Went back to the hotel and hung out in the hot tub for just a little while - we didn't want to get our legs too inflamed before the race (and we couldn't indulge in more hot tub time after the race for the same reason; you're supposed to take ice baths after marathons, not go hot tubbing!). Then we went to dinner with Sara's family, who were able to make it down for the race after all. They were very, very sweet, and I got to meet her daughter Charlie, who was just plum adorable. Luckily the ocean breeze and the walking had tired us out, so we went to bed at 8:00 and crashed!

Good thing, because we had to get up at 3:00 on Sunday morning. (Yes, I do realize that it takes a special kind of crazy to put myself through a weekend like this for fun.) We walked about a mile to downtown Monterey and boarded our buses to the start line. The race itself starts about 30 miles south of Monterey, at Big Sur, in a somewhat remote state park, and it takes about an hour to get there on all the winding roads in the dark.

At the 21-miler start, there weren't enough porta potties, so I waited until the race started to use one. I didn't actually get into one until after the race had started and everyone left, but that was okay because it was chip-timed, meaning my time didn't actually start until I crossed the start line. So I went potty and dropped of my sweat clothes at the truck, which was supposed to meet us at the finish line with our warm clothes (more on that in a minute). I didn't realize ahead of time that the 21-miler is traditionally a walking event, meaning that most of the people "running" it were actually walking the whole damn thing. Do not ask me why someone would want to walk 21 miles starting at 6:30 in the morning. That takes hours and hours and hours in the cold. Yes, I realize that running 21 miles at 6:30 in the morning sounds just as crazy to some, but at least it's over soon! And you get to push your body to the limit and see what it can do! It's painful and exhilarating and a challenge and it's all about mind over matter and psychological drama and going fast. Walking 21 miles is just... silly.

Anyway, because of the porta potty thing and the fact that these walking weirdos all got started before me, I had a heck of a time passing people for the first two miles. There just wasn't enough room on the road, and they didn't really want to get out of my way. After I cleared all of the walkers, though, I settled into my pace and the race started to get harder. Big Sur is all about the hills. The first half of the race is punctuated by one massive climb. It's not even really a hill, because it's so long. It's just like this never ending incline up to Hurricane Point. So from mile 5 to mile 7 (mile 10 to 12 for the marathoners) you're just slogging up this ridiculous hill (600 feet of elevation gain), although at the base of it there's this big Taiko drumming squad pounding out this really primitive-tribal-samurai rhythm and it just makes you like YEAH, hill, BRING it. For at least the first half mile, anyway.

Then you get to Hurricane Point and realize why it's called that. There are like 40 mph gusts of wind (not exaggerating), and it was about 40 degrees at this point, and I literally almost got knocked off my feet. You're standing overlooking the Pacific Ocean, having just dragged yourself up this ridiculous hill, and the gusts of wind just cut right through you. It was pure insanity, to tell you the truth. Thankfully, the wind was somewhat blocked for the 2 mile descent, so there was some recovery time in there, but going downhill is harder on your body than going up, in some ways, because all of your joints are getting pounded on from the impact.

After the big climb and descent, it was somewhat flat for a while, but I was trying to conserve energy because I've heard the rolling hills at the end will do you in. And they do. Starting around mile 15 or so, there are these little .25 to .5 mile inclines that are nothing compared to Hurricane Point, but there's a lot of them, and they start to wear on you. They also decided it would be a really good idea to make the last .5 mile of the course a big incline, which is downright cruel. That one definitely hurt the most, so I was glad I had run conservatively.

The whole thing for me was that I wasn't trying to run it fast, I just wanted to see what all the hubbub about Big Sur was and use it as a good hard training run for San Francisco in July. So I finally finished (in 3:27) and was pretty tired at first, but not at all spent. I felt like I put out a good effort without killing myself; I was still fine walking around and was even able to run up and down stairs the next day.

Ok, angry section: the main thing was that they lost our sweats. Or rather, didn't lose them, but didn't get them to the finishing area until about two hours after I had finished. So as soon as I stopped running, of course I was freezing, because I was wearing short sleeves and shorts, it was 45 degrees out and I was all sweaty, and I had just, um, exerted myself just a tad. So I hobble over to get my sweats (which were positioned pretty far from the finish line, if you ask me) and they're not there!! "Oh," says the lady. "The truck got caught in traffic. They should be here by 2:00, for sure." This was at 10:00 a.m.! I'm shivering and clearly going to get hypothermia if I don't get warm dry clothes pretty soon. So she tells me to wait in the medical tent. This would've been okay, and most of the people in the medical tent were great, but this one really mean nurse kept trying to kick me out!! I was outraged. There was practically no one in there, I wasn't bothering anyone by standing huddled in the corner with a blanket, and if I had allowed her to kick me out, I really would've gotten hypothermic, and then she would've had a real medical emergency to deal with. Stupid, stupid woman!

Harrumph. So anyway, I eventually got my sweats and met up with Sara, who was hurting pretty bad but did a fantastic job and finished in around 4:15. That is really good for a first marathon, especially given the really rough conditions on such a difficult course! We eventually headed back to the hotel and got cleaned up, then walked very slowly back to Cannery Row (where all the shops are) and pigged out. Then we laid around in bed in the hotel and watched movies the rest of the day, and came home on Monday.

And that was my race! Like I said, I was glad I didn't go all out and glad I didn't do the full marathon, because I was totally recovered by Tuesday. I took Wednesday off of running too, just to make sure I got all those muscles repaired, but Thursday morning I did a good 7 miler with the dogs and right now I can't believe the race was only a week ago today. It feels so long ago! I guess because the whole thing was so surreal and my recovery was so fast.

So the verdict on Big Sur? Meh. It was beautiful, for sure. But it was also just 21 miles of the same beautifulness. The whole thing is literally right along the ocean, so while it's gorgeous, the scenery never really changes. It looked like what I think Ireland must look like; very green, rocky, and somewhat bleak and unforgiving. And I'm glad I did it. But maybe there's just too much hype surrounding it or the experience with my lost sweats soured it or something, but I don't feel the need to ever do it again. I'm glad I did it once, but once was enough.

I've been typing forever! I'll try to update with more non-race info this week. It's my last week of classes, and then I have to get all of my papers turned in, so it might be a bit crazy, but I'll try to talk to y'all soon.

Long Overdue

Holy moly, this post is way overdue! I can't believe it's been almost a month since I updated. Time is really flying.

Well. First and foremost, I promised Jimmy I would share these pictures with him, and they came out really good, so I'd like to share them with you, too. So last weekend, very impromptu, I went to Las Vegas to visit Jimmy. I was there from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, and we had a really good time! (Well, I did, at least. I hope he did too!) On Saturday, we drove out to Red Rock Canyon and I took these pictures. It was really beautiful and awesome and impressive.

It's such a foreign landscape to me, but just undeniably beautiful. It has that open, unending feel of central Illinois, but it's a touch more desolate and less welcoming, and the color palette is obviously quite different. A very, very cool experience that I highly recommend to anyone who visits Vegas - it's just outside the city!

After our drive, we went shopping and Jimmy bought me some new clothes! (He got himself a new case/cover for his iPhone, too, so it wasn't just about spoiling me.) I got some shorts, a really great skirt, two shirts, and a jacket! Did I mention how fantastic my brother is? We went out to a very nice dinner that night, then both slept in in the morning and I headed home on Sunday afternoon. It was really great to see him, even if just for a little while. I wish we could do it more often!

I didn't get any work done over the weekend (which was partially my own fault, since I could've tried a little harder to get some stuff done in the airport), so I've been pretty busy this week. It's also getting to that point in the semester where I need to start getting my final projects together... blah, I don't want to talk about this.

I am MUCH more excited about these things:

1) Big Sur Marathon in less than 10 days!!!

2) Waiting to hear back from two grants I applied for. One is from the Berkeley Center for Race and Gender to fund a project I want to do about how people perceive race and gender in speech. The other is a 3-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation that I probably won't get, but still might. Fingers crossed!

3) Running a pilot study for my cognitive linguistics class in the next two weeks.

4) Signing up for classes for next semester, and for classes at the Linguistics Institute being held at Berkeley this summer. This fall, I'm planning to take Field Methods (where we have a speaker of a weird language come in and we have to basically learn it from scratch), Advanced Cognitive Linguistics, and Cognitive Neuroscience. And if my Race and Gender grant comes through, I'll be taking an "independent study" with my adviser so I'll have time to work on that project. Fingers double-triple-quadruple crossed!

5) We found out today that we have 11 incoming first-years for the fall! (This post is a little heavy on the exclamation points, isn't it? !!?) My year is only 6 people, so it will be a little weird to have so many newbies running around, but I really liked the people I met at the prospective student visit, and it'll be very cool to have some new faces and personalities in the department.

I think that's all for now. Rye is barking his head off and I need to figure out a way to make him be quiet.

An Adventure

The older I get, the more I relish a good adventure. I used to be kind of timid and hesitant to really break out of my comfort zone, but these days I really get a charge out of it. I like doing slightly crazy things, just to keep people guessing and to keep myself feeling alive. There's something very invigorating about doing something you've never done before.

I've been mulling this over for a while, and today I took the plunge. It all happened faster than I thought it would, but it was quite the adventure, and I even took my camera along so I could show you a little bit of what I saw today. Come with me on my adventure and see if you can guess what I did before you get to the end!

* * * * *

I left the house at 9:00 this morning, even though I've been fighting a little cold and going to bed around 8:30 the past few days. I went by the ATM and took out several hundred dollars, then I got on the bus and went to downtown Berkeley. I was kind of nervous with all that money in my pocket!

In downtown Berkeley, I got on BART and took it across the Bay to San Francisco.

Once in San Francisco, I walked down from the BART station and picked up this awesome little car from City Car Share. It's a Scion xD - I really loved driving it! It has quite a bit of pep and is a great size. Maybe if we get a car I can convince Roger it's a good one... plenty of room for doggies in the back!


I drove all the way through the city. (That was an adventure in itself.) Here I am on Broadway Ave, if I remember correctly.


Once I got to the northwest edge of the city, it was time to get on Highway 101. That is - the Golden Gate Bridge! You can't see it too great from here, since I was being a not-entirely-unsafe driver and wasn't actually looking through the camera when I took the picture. I just turned it on and blindly took a shot out the window.


Just in case you didn't believe me, here I am driving across the honest-to-goodness Golden Gate Bridge. It was amazing.


I don't have any pictures of Marin, but you'll just have to believe me that I drove up into Marin county, where I got lost. My Google Maps directions were wrong, and I had to wind around in the hills for about an hour before I arrived at some very nice people's house. We chatted for a long while, they gave me some tea, and eventually I got back in the car and was on my way home.

I got stuck in traffic in the city, but it really wasn't so bad on a day like today.


I was waaaay late bringing the car back. Between the hour of being lost, the nice nice people in Marin, traffic, and then having to stop for gas and getting kind of lost again (this time in the city), I was an hour and a half late. I called City Car Share three times to try to extend my reservation, but their system was down every time. I did find out no one needed the car until 1:30, which is when I got it back, so I didn't feel bad, at least. I just hope I can talk them out of charging me a bajillion dollars because I was so late.

After I dropped the car off, I headed back to BART. A really cute French guy stopped me and asked me where Chinatown was. I could tell he was French by his accent, so I started talking to him in French. He thought I was French too!! I totally still got it. That made me feel even happier.

I finally made it back to BART and headed back into the East Bay.


Then I made it home, cargo intact, around 2:30, I think. Huck and Rye were playing it all cool, but I know they missed me.


I took a look at our living room and noticed how asymmetrical the area by the door looked. I was glad I went to retrieve my cargo, because now our living room will be just about complete.


Did you guess what it is yet??

Ok, here, look what I got from those nice people in Marin:


Pure awesomeness is what. This baby goes for almost a thousand dollars new, and I got it for waaaay less than that because their 13-year-old son had outgrown it and he just wanted to get a reasonable amount of money for it to offset the cost of his new one.

I am a speed demon, baby. I'm going to ride this thing all over the Bay Area. It is so fast and light and totally worth however much City Car Share charges me for bringing their car back so late!

Did you like my story??

Big Sur, Here I Come!

I signed up for the Big Sur 21-miler last night! I'll be driving down with my new running buddy, Sara, to run the race on April 26th. I am SO excited. Do you see that picture? Lordy, lordy.

Also, a public service announcement before I do some homework: the inaugural Illinois Marathon (in C-U!) needs more volunteers!! If they don't get enough by April 1st, they'll have to cancel the race!! I'm looking at you, central IL folks - help out all those runners and spend part of your Sunday morning cheering them on!

Even Quicker Update

Static palatography pics from phonetics today. You paint a mixture of charcoal and olive oil on someone's tongue, they say a word, then you take a picture of the roof of their mouth to see where the charcoal rubbed off, i.e. where their tongue touched the roof of their mouth when they said the word. How awesome is that?

Quick, Quick, Quick Update

I really shouldn't be writing this - I have homework to catch up on - but I realized I haven't updated in 10 days, and that seems like a long time, so here we go.

Our prospective students for next year were visiting over the past few days! I liked them, and I think we'll have a good crop for next year. It was weird to be on the other side of it, though (extolling the virtues of Berkeley rather than worrying about whether they can fund me if I come here). Hanging out with the department over the past few days just reinforced how much I really like our department, though. We have some great folks here (professors and grad students) and all the great recommendations I made about this place were 100% true. So hooray for that!

My left exterior shin muscle was pretty sore by Monday night after my 16-miler, so I decided to stick with the original plan and not sign up for Big Sur. But I'm definitely signing up for San Francisco once I get paid. (Especially after I looked at these videos.) Hooray for that!

I'm getting really excited about my research projects, and I would love to tell you about them, but now is not the time. Maybe next time.

I'll leave you with this lovely quote that really hit home tonight. I was talking to George, reminiscing about old times a Paris and how we're both sad we don't have anyone to cook with anymore. Then I checked this blog I really like to read, and I saw this, which was so perfectly appropriate. (I'm also going to make that bread recipe tomorrow.)

We’re never truly alone in the kitchen even as we may slice a squash in quiet solitude to saute in olive oil and basil. Almost every single thing I cook reminds me of a place or of someone I miss. This could be a reason why those of us who love to cook are so drawn to it (and, conversely, perhaps a reason those who don’t enjoy it abstain). As I punched down the dough and kneaded it into a silky, elastic ribbon in my own small San Francisco kitchen I was, for a little while, back in that tiny, cluttered kitchen along the New England coast. I thought about how nice it would be if we’d all been cooking together: me patting down the bread to tuck into a warm corner for its second rise, Emily pulling a pan of roasted potatoes out of the oven, Kurt cooking down some greens on the stove. We’d probably be nibbling from a cheese plate and sipping a glass of wine or two …

Good night, and love to all.

Hooray/Ugh

Hooray, my 16-miler was great! I really like Sara! I'm not even that tired! We're doing 17 miles in Golden Gate Park in two weeks!!

Ugh, I really shouldn't do Big Sur, though... right?

Right?

Approaching Normalcy

I am having a great weekend! Here is why:

- I sold my bike. A very cute girl came to pick it up yesterday, and she gave me $275 for it. I was pretty sad to see it go, but I decided to sell it for a few reasons. It was taking up so much space just sitting in our living room, and it was too heavy and cumbersomely shaped to hang it from the ceiling, like we did with Roger's. So it's just been sitting there, and our living room has been so cluttery, and the reason I haven't been riding it is that since I took Roger's awesome, incredibly lightweight, super fast road bike for a very short spin, I've been jonesing for an awesome road bike of my own. They're so expensive though, so I hadn't really thought about buying one yet... but I just realized last week that since we kind of have some money now, if I sold my bike, I could actually get an awesome new one in the near future. And what I really want to do is go for long, long rides up to Marin county with Roger on Saturdays. That would be a really fun thing for us to do together. So, up on Craigslist it went, and this girl contacted me. She was completely in love with it, and so so happy to come pick it up yesterday, so I'm glad it went to a good home, and to someone who will appreciate more than I have been lately.

- So yesterday, there I'm sitting with $275 burning a hole in my pocket... and just having got my City Car Share key a few days before... clearly time to go buy some stuff at Ikea. So I reserved a Prius and drove out to Ikea and got us some actual furniture for our house. I spent all the money... but our house is becoming a real people's house now! Here's the stuff I got:

(Office chair and desk for Roger.)


(Dining table and coat rack for the living room/entryway.)

*I'm* the most excited about the dining table, I think. That's not the exact one we got - ours has slightly darker wood, so it looks a little nicer - but it's just this cute little thing that'll fit perfect in the spot where my bike used to be!

That's not the exact desk I got Roger, either - his is dark brown/black on top, but just has four silver legs on bottom instead of the drawers. He made me laugh (to myself) yesterday. His "desk" thus far has been an ironing board in the living room. He's been sitting in our Ikea chair we got for $25 when we first moved in (it's like a cross between a lazy boy and a folding chair) with an ironing board next to him with his computer on it. At first it made me a little sad that he had an ironing board for a desk, but y'know, you do whatcha gotta do. We would make jokes about it at first like, "Rye, get out of Roger's office!" Anyway, I've been saying how I couldn't wait to get him a real desk and get the extra bedroom set up as an office for him, and he's been saying "no no, I'm totally fine like this! I even like it! it's more comfortable!" Well, yesterday when I dropped off the stuff at home, Roger wasn't here. But by the time I got home 20 minutes later, Roger had gotten back from the store, busted open the boxes, cleared a space in the extra room, and almost finished putting together the desk. Partially just because he's such a good little husband, but partially because I think he wanted a real person desk too.

So we put together everything but the dining room table and chairs last night, and our house is starting to look like a real house! It's very exciting. Once we make it the rest of the way there (i.e. straighten up the living room, get the table up, and get Roger all moved in to his new office), I will be un-embarrassed enough of our house to take pictures of it in its current state. :)

- Ok. I wanted to say one more reason why this weekend is good, and that is because I found a marathon training partner, and I'm meeting her for the first time today! I've been trolling Craigslist for a new running partner for almost two months now, and I saw this girl's ad, emailed her, and she emailed me right back with her phone number, so I called her, and we talked for like 10 minutes! It was so fun - I really like her, even though I haven't met her yet, and I'm meeting her for a run today.

Should I tell you the details of the run? ...I'll tell you the details of the run.

As you may know, I've been thinking about/wanting to train for the San Francisco Marathon this summer. The race is in very late July, so I haven't started ramping up my long runs quite yet. I did 13 miles about two weeks ago, and it was great, but that's the longest I've been since we moved here.

I saw this girl's ad, and she's training for her first marathon in April. She's running Big Sur, which is amazingly gorgeous. Here, you've got to see this: Big Sur homepage.

I definitely want to run this before we leave California, but I wasn't planning on doing it this year. Anyway, this girl is farther along in her training than I am, since the race is in April, so she's scheduled for 16 miles today. So... I'm gonna give it a shot. I think I can do it, and if I can't, I can always stop and walk. She said she's on the slow side, so I'll just take it easy and see how far I can make it. (I should be able to make it!) It's such an exciting day, though, because I'm taking BART to meet her in this little town I've never been to before. She's a florist in Walnut Creek, which is on the other side of the hills, away from the Bay, and she's doing a wedding there today, so I'm taking the train to meet her, and we're going to this trail I've never even heard of before. So much new stuff! So much adventure! I can't wait!

I think that's pretty much everything I wanted to say. Wait, no, we might be hosting a prospective grad student starting a week from today, and that's exciting too! I hope we get good new grad students for next year...

Ok, that's all. Maybe I'll have pictures of our house for you soon?

Happy March! Happy spring!