The Laursonian Institute

Had our number crunching party tonight!  Went off very well – I think I got the info I needed for my paper, and it was neat to get to work through the program with my own data, having a clue about what various things mean and what would be unexpected, etc.  Good times.  I also made a lasagna for the crowd, and managed to stuff some of my leftover peanut butter pie down them as well.  All in all, quite a lovely night to cap off a lovely weekend.  Ooh, we got bulbs planted today as well!  Such productiveness.

November 30th, 2008 | Tags: cooking, data, fun, gardening, party | Category: home, school | Comments Off

So much good stuff going on these days, I wish I were blogging more regularly.  Oh blog, you’re such a demanding mistress.

Made it through classes Wednesday, and got a whole five kids in my section!  I brought them cookies and we had a short go at historical linguistics, which truth be told I’m rather glad I didn’t have to teach a full section of.  Maybe by spring quarter I’ll be up on historical linguistics and be less crap at explaining what’s going on.  Anyway, all I have left is this coming week which we’ll have to use for final review, and then we’re home free!

Seems like that means I should be panicking a bit more about my two final papers, but I’m feeling rather on top of it.  I finished coding my data today for the sociolinguistics project, and we’ve got a little party scheduled at our place tomorrow so some of our class can run through our stats analysis together.  I guess we’re officially grad school nerds!  Oh well!  The theory paper I’m writing came together really quickly last week while I was prepping for my presentation, so I’ve not got toomuch of the “hard” work left.  All I really need to do is the grunt work of sentence formation and junk, which I’m hoping I’m ready for!  I haven’t written an essay in a few years, but I feel like I got so much practice as an undergrad and I’ve had so much practice grading essays now…  I’m actually sort of looking forward to the challange!

So, lucky me, that means I’m not actually crazy busy over this holiday weekend.  My big task for the weekend was getting that sociolinguistics data ready, and I’ve had plenty of time to do other stuff besides that already!  We had a Thanksgiving party with Lewis’ family on Thursday night for which we made Cranberry Yummymuffins and had a good family time.  There was a Lawyer famliy friends post-Thanksgiving dinner last night which was a blast as well.  I always love seeing the Ladners and Coynes, and we stayed late and had a lovely chat with Lewis’ parents as well.  Yay.

Today I had set aside (besides work, of course) for holiday cheer!  I was feeling a little down, as I always do around the holidays because my family is so far away and things are so different now… so I spent the day making my own fun.  Started off by hitting up Ace to get Christmas lights for our ourdoors, and a wreath and wrapping paper and a present for our kitty!  We then got to go to the Co-op for the first time in literal weeks and got our pantry all stocked up.   I can’t explain how bolstering it is to get a few hundred dollars worth of groceries after weeks of living off the dregs in the cupboards.

Part of what we picked up today was stuff for a few of my weekend (it’s only Saturday!) cooking plans.  We got half a ham (6 pounds.. egad!) to bake for dinner tonight.  I made a glaze and baked it a la Cooks Illustrated, and it was sooooo incredibly good.  A little aggrivating without a proper meat thermometer (we have.. er had, one of those old school ones… which we broke while cooking tonight).  I made baking soda biscuits to go with it, and some mashed potatoes from Alice Waters’ vegetable cookbook.  So tasty!  I can’t believe how well it turned out!  We have enough ham for about 10 people at the moment… but I have at least a few plans for later in the week, including some tasty Navy Bean Soup.  Mm.   Tomorrow I’m going to make a lasagne for the folks coming over, and I’m holding out hopes for it!  I guess if it doesn’t work, there’s always ordering pizza as a backup.

Here’s to hoping we don’t need backup!  And to a fantastic and successful last week of my first quarter!

November 29th, 2008 | Tags: cooking, data, family, food, holidays, parties, shopping, thanksgiving | Category: home, school | Comments Off

I solved my one-unit problem today (as in, I had signed up for one fewer units than were required) by commiting to something fantastic.  I’m going to learn Quechua!  What have I gotten myself in to!  I do hope you expect a whole blog full of “Arggg semantics!” and “Arrggg Quechua!” next quarter, cause that’s all I’ll really have left to say.  At least I won’t be TAing that quarter.  Wooooot.

TAing actually went really well today, despite the sort of boring subject matter that is phonetics.  I think I got some kids to play with their mouths and discover their articulators and all that good stuff.  Phonology next week, which should be most righteous.  We just did contrastive and complimentary distribution in class today, so I think the next few lectures ought to be on phonological problems or processes.  Yaaay.

Also had a nice hang-out in the TA office (as always!) and secured the plan that I’m going to find a home for my big silly red rug!  Just gotta get the office swept up and vacuumed (and maybe have the floors washed?  We can apparently request this) and then the rug will be in action!  I’m so excited to finally have something to do with that thing.  Anyway, I got some good teaching tips from fellow-TA Heather, and we agreed to meet tomorrow evening for drinks and non-linguistic chatter at Sudwerk, a tasty brewpub nearby.  Lets give that a double yay for making friends and social events!

Only other piece of fantastic news today… I got some cleaning done!  I spent the morning not doing any (school) work and actually getting some much needed house tidying and cleaning done.  I got all the dishes washed, and swept and mopped the kitchen and entry way and bathrooms.  It’s still not very tidy in here, but it’s certainly a good start.  Those floors were looking pretty shoddy.  But Lewis did laundry yesterday, and the rest of the house isn’t actually that dirty, so maybe this weekend in between transcribing my interview, I can finish that up.  And finally plant our bulbs!  Egad we’ve been busy.

Life is so good!

November 7th, 2008 | Tags: decorating, drinking, friends, quechua, rug, socializing, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off

I’d be lying if I said that the world didn’t seem a little more bright today.  Everyone I talked to was saying the same thing – for the first time in our lives, us 20-somethings feel proud to be American, and hopeful of the days ahead.  I can’t believe what a difference a day makes, but there you have it.  I wish we could inaugurate him now and just go forward at break-neck locomotive speed.  But I suppose a few months to get the troops and the plans in order isn’t too much to ask.

Wasn’t much of a day today, as is true every Wednesday.  Got up really early (for a sleep-in day) and got the work I needed to do out of the way pretty quickly.  Class went alright, and I had two whole students come by my office hours!  Was able to help both out, I think.  We’re doing phonetics right now and a lot of learning your places and manners of articulation I think is just practice.  You need to become hyperaware of your tongue and what it’s doing to be able to figure out what sound, technically, you’re even making.  So sections went sort of crappily because we had to spend the whole time covering the chart and the nitty gritty details of terminology.  Didn’t even have time to play around at the end, and I ended up aborting a little fun exercise right in the middle.  I had no idea how much time we had eaten up… usually sessions sort of plod along at a reasonable pace, but all of the sudden my time was completely gone and I hadn’t looked once at my clock.  Geesh.

Came home and got some transcription done for my 260 project.  I’m really not sure what’s going on with my variables… I hope they’re varying properly!  It’s almost impossible to hear these things while simultaneously broadly transcribing your interview, but I have at least found a handful of neat syntactic and semantic variables I never could have thought to elicit.  I’m all primed for 2nd language speaker data for when we take that class!  Woot!  Other triumphs tonight… Lewis did the laundry, and made a roast!  It was so delicious!  And I got the ironing (from… three weeks ago?  four?  I don’t even remember!) finally done.

It’s been a good day.  Tomorrow… adult beverages with fellow TA to work our grading rubric and possible complaining session.  Yay!

November 5th, 2008 | Tags: laundry, obama, patriotism, phonetics, roast, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off

Recursivity.  It’s consuming my life.

What I mean to say is the students are learning about recursivity.  And TAing is taking over my life.  We just had the essays turned in today.  And we had our meeting to plan the midterm today as well.  All I can think about is that in the next 11 days I need to have 75 papers graded, 75 more homeworks graded, I need to write half the midterm, hold my this-week sessions, and hold study sessions next week.  On top of my actual school work.  What a whiner I am.

School work is actually going pretty good, I think.  I’m starting to get not-ahead (as opposed to way ahead, or actually behind) in my reading, which I don’t like.  I may be able to catch back up again at some point, but it’s certainly going to have to wait till this TA stuff has crested.  Oddly, after my midterm stuff, I think the real Laurie-doing-lots-of-work stuff hits the fan.  As in, I need to figure out what my final project for 200A is.  Though the bulk of my 260 work is going to get done in the next few weeks anyway… I lead discussion next week, and we should be gathering our data this weekend or next weekend or both.  Whoo.  I’m going to be glad to have October over for so many reasons.

Lawyer Hall Soup!!

In much more chipper news, I made soup tonight.  I’ve been thinking about replicating the fabled-and-delicious Clare Hall Soup which was for some reason a daunting undertaking.  (I can’t help but point out that the link above seems to suggest the soup is different every day. Unless something drastic has happened, this is categorically false. Clare Hall Soup is the same soup every day, which only slightly modulates in color.) I pulled out my trusty Constance Spry (I love that book!) and found the only recipe she had for pumpkin soup, banking on the idea that Clare Hall Soup was orange because it involved pumpkins.  I’m still not entirely sure that’s true, but that’s neither here nor there. At any rate, a surprisingly little amount of work went into the soup and as quickly as I could boil potatoes and then throw them in a blender… I had soup! And fairly Clare Hall-y soup at that! I’m really quite chuffed. Proud foody picture to prove it!

Anyway. It’s going to be a heck of a long week. And I’d better get some sleep if I’m going to manage to plow ahead tomorrow. Phew.

October 20th, 2008 | Tags: busy, recursive, soup, taing | Category: home, school | Comments Off

We had some.  In our grape vine!

So today was grapevine trimming day.  The Lawyers came over this morning and we cut down all the non-woody growth on the vine, which should be its natural wintering state anyway.  Found out that we didn’t have an infestation by any name, but definite evidence of prolonged hang-out-itude, so it’s good we were on top of it to dissuade any rodents from wintering with us.  We also took down the very poorly placed hackberry that was dangling threateningly over our neighbor’s yard.  It seems to be a volunteer from many years ago, but it was growing right against the fence and in between two obviously planted birch trees it seems to have been choking out.  Most (all?) the hackberries in Davis are unhealthy anyway, so it was sort of a matter of time before this one got all yucky and dripped sap and goo all over.  This is why our neighbor wanted it cut down!

Anyway, it does make us the tree-killin’ neighbors.  Our local busybody (and resident 8-year-old) was rather perturbed about the grape vine (though it’s in our back yard…) though hasn’t seemed to notice anything about the tree in the front the city cut down last week, nor the hackberry we took out.  He’s selectively protective, though I do have to allow the theory that since his best friends used to live in our house he has fond memories of the grapevine and/or palm tree.  It is a little suspect, I completely admit, that we moved in here two months ago and have lost three and a half (if you’re counting all the grapevine we took out) trees.  The city tree took everyone by surprise, though, since it turns out they didn’t tell anyone they were going to cut it down.  We just came home and it was gone!  Sounds like (from the Lawyers’ side) we’ll have some new trees in soon.  The city owes us one, too!

Other than that, it was papers, papers, papers today.  Finished the second section’s worth of homework from this week, and read the paper I set aside for myself today.  Should have perhaps done a little more with my evening, but I was feeling quite off post dinner and decided to take the night off.  Been spending a good amount of time getting Firefox all gussied up since I realized the new Ask doesn’t get along with Opera.  I was getting a bit tired of having to switch between the two for all my Flash based stuff as well… but I’m not sure how long the Firefox trial will go.  Just giving it a whirl for now.

Big small day tomorrow.  It’s Monday, my blessedly least intensive day, but it’s also the day the undergrads need to turn in their first essays!  Hopefully that won’t be too much chaos, but you never know.  I’ve already had a few last-minute panickers, but nothing too intense.  I’m more worried about the content of the essays and grading them than anything else.  Plus I have a lot of homework to do tomorrow… Lewis and I need to whip up an “interview schedule” for our socioling project, and I’ve got more exciting reading to do.  Egad!  It’s certainly never dull around here.

October 19th, 2008 | Tags: firefox, gardening, grading, neighbors, opera, trees | Category: home | Comments Off

Oh beloved Friday, you have come to bless me again.

Class was great today.  We started semantics and it was really bueno.  I haven’t done semantics formally before, so it’s great to get a little primer before I take semantics next quarter from the same professor.  I’m really looking forward to it!

Had a delightfully social day after that.  Dionne came by my office hours to chat about our plan for next week to see if we needed to prep anything this afternoon.  We didn’t – hurrah!  Lewis came by shortly thereafter, and then we met up with fellow grad student Ariel to chat a bit about how classes are going and set up a Friday drinks plan for one of the upcoming weeks.  She’s in our 260 class with us, so it was nice to comisserate about certain things together.  She also is TAing this semester, and we’ll be TAing together in the spring.  Woot.

Sessions actually did pretty well!  Much better than Wednesday, despite feeling like it was going to be a flop.  Seems like maybe the Friday kids are whittling down to just the few who want to participate whereas maybe the Wednesday session still attracts those who feel like they should attend but don’t really want to.  Not sure.  Anyway, it’s always relieving to have another week behind us, and moving on towards the weekend.  Next week in sessions we’re talking about semntics, so that’ll be a bit of trouble, but after blazing through syntax today and for once feeling like I know what I’m doing, I’m read to tackle semantics for sure.

Came home and had some vino with Lewis while watching out most recently netflixed movie, Buster Keaton’s “The General”.  How much do I love Buster Keaton?  A lot!  I laugh so much more in his silent movies than I do most of the contemporary “comedies”.  It’s really amazing how much he can do with his face, and how acrobatic he is!  Good times had by all, for sure.  I’m hoping to get a few household-type projects done this weekend in addition to the regular work load.  I think I worked too hard last weekend and it really burned me out this week.  So I’m going to make cider this weekend, and attempt Clare Hall Soup #1.  Really not sure what I’m doing there, but it’s always worth a go.  Maybe some day I’ll figure out their secret daily-changing-but-always-sort-of-the-same recipe!  Also have a little home maintenance to do with the landlord/inlaws, and maybe my first sewing fix-it project.  Oo – and if we can borrow a car — to the you-pick pumpkin patch!!

What good stuff I have in store!  Yay!

October 17th, 2008 | Tags: class, crafts, movies, pumpkins, semantics, syntax, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off

Didn’t blog yesterday… got home from doing my two friday sections and pretty much crashed.  Sessions went well, but not as well as my Wednesday one.   I think there are some things I can work on to fix that this week, but it’s more of a problem with timing, I think, than anything else, since they turn their homeworks on Fridays just prior to coming to class.  But whatever.  This will change in a couple of weeks anyway when homework switches to Mondays.  Yay.

Spent a few hours last night, and most of all day today grading homeworks.  I was supposed to get some reading done for my own classes but alas, it wasn’t to be.  This has really been another one of those slogged-through-the-day sort of days where there’s nothing I feel like I’m ready to blog about.  Though we did manage to hange a few pictures today, and tidied up most the house.  But really, when that’s your day’s big notable accomplishment… nada mucho to say.  Doubley so when it’s uncooth to talk about the silly things my students are doing in their work!  Much enjoyment on that front!

Well, here’s to sleeping in clean sheets, and for tomorrow being a new day.  The weather is decidedly fall-like, I’m excited about autumn, and my classes, and my life.  And when your days are all the same, those are the important things to keep in mind.  Look at how optomistic I’m feeling!  Great success.

October 11th, 2008 | Tags: autumn, chores, grading, same old, school, taing | Category: home, school | Comments Off

I made roast beef tonight.  i did not realize this was possible until I had already done it.  I can’t wait to make myself some juicy sandwich action this week!

Other triumps today include (but are not limited to) attending a friend’s tea/bithday party, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, and paying some bills.  Of the nontriumphant, I’ll only mention that the Boo got in a fight with a cat the neighbor (in whose yard said fight broke out) says fights with everybody.  He got a little scratch on his nose.  But tomorrow, Lewis will take him to the vet and get him the vaccines he should have to be an outdoor kitty.  Woot.

I’m not feeling very ready for Monday.  Let this be a lesson that my weekends need to be more restorative and less intense.  Word.

October 5th, 2008 | Tags: chores, cooking, fight, kitty | Category: home, life | Comments Off