The Laursonian Institute

First of all, this new wordpress is fantastic.  I was waiting to do this update until I was out of school just in case I mussed something up and had to spend a million hours fixing it. Instead, I’ve had unorthodox success on two updating fronts.  I’ve updated wordpress, and added new and exciting widgets (including the aforeposted twitter feed) and everything went as smooth as can be.  I can’t believe it!  But what’s more, I also upgraded Ubuntu today with only the tiniest of hiccups!  Had to swap out my network manager (but the standard one is crap anyway) and I still have not quite figured out why my outgoing mail isn’t working… but otherwise, total success.  Sound working, wireless is working, display working, even *suspend* is working!!   I love you, computer.  I love you, you wonderful old Ubuntu.  And I love you, lovely people at Za Reason!

This has been a muchly successful day.  Got up at my leisure, made breakfast (mm, cinnamon tortilla rollups and yogurt), and watched silly SNL videos.  I made split pea soup in the slow cookers, and baked a loaf of multigrain bread to go with it (graham flour + cornmeal + white) .  Got the tree trimmed, and Lewis set the train up around the bottom.  The track is really great this year – so long and curvy!  Lewis also did the laundry, so we’re all well set up for tomorrow.  Watched an episode of Ken Burns’ Jazz,  and did some internet window shopping, getting myself ready for maybe going actual-type Christmas shopping tomorrow.  I even read a little, and hung up the instruments mom brought up for the music room.  Yay!   It’s so fantastic to get to spend a day doing random stuff… I’m getting so much done, even though it’s all the little unimportant-type stuff that gets passed off while I’ve got real school-type work to do.

Also, it only got up to 45 degrees, and it rained all day.  We were going to put the Christmas lights up on the house, but it just was not very inviting outside.   Our rain meter says .43 inches for the day so far!   It is nice to have some decently wintry weather though, since it’s been so mild for so long.  Not that I’m getting actual snow, Seattle-style or anything, but you know.  I’ll take what I can get.

I should also mention that we had to parties in a row!  After classes finished up Friday, we had a we had a gathering of Linguistics folks over to watch William Shatner speak Esperanto.  It was much more well-attended and festive than I had anticipated, and I’m really pleased with the whole endeavor!  People stayed rather late (for academics coming off finals week anyway) and there was much good bonding and joking and such to be had.  Yay for our department.   We spent yesterday at another party, this time Nina’s engagement party, full of all our good ol’ work folks.  I really miss all those guys!  It was so wonderful to see Nina & Jimmy and Charlise, Scott, Christine, Julian, Raffaella, Chuck, Hope, and Kim!  Chidi and Stefano were both out of town, but perhaps we’ll get to see them soon.  We promised KE we would stop in for tea time if we’re going to be in the area doing Christmas shopping.  And I believe we will!  Lewis and I already have a Rattos and tea trip in mind.  Yum.

Ah, life is good, isn’t it?  I’m looking forward to my classes next quarter, and have found I really don’t even care what grades I got this quarter.  I do anticipate A’s in both, if I may be a judge of my own work and its quality, but I find that I don’t have nervous grade checking heart palpatations like I might have as an undergrad.  I just check every day like habit, and feel like the inevitable grades will show up sooner or later.  Probably more like later.

I don’t even know what to do with the rest of my night.  Snuggle up to Lewis and read?  Go to bed early?  Start an art project?  The possibilities are endless.  Endless!

December 14th, 2008 | Tags: baking, chores, cooking, friends, grades, linux, parties, school, twitter, updates, wordpress | Category: life, meta, school | Comments Off

I guess I have a twitter feed? Why not?

December 14th, 2008 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

The later I stay up, the more ridiculous my paper seems.  The more I fiddle with it, the more ridiculous it becomes.  I’d better be off to bed before I completely muss it up.

I’ll be done with all this in 12 hours!!

December 12th, 2008 | Tags: finals, paper | Category: school | Comments Off

Finals week, you beast!

It’s been a very eventful day, though considering my huge petering out this evening I don’t know if I can call it that successful.  I woke up all bleery-eyed and feeling completely exhausted, no doubt from the emotional (and stupidly, physical) exhaustion from proctoring the Lin 1 final.  I really could not get moving this morning.  Luckily Lewis needed to go to campus, and also needed to get his bike fixed, so when he got up we both whisked ourselves to campus and got some breakfast and got some bike turned in for tune-up-age.   I, too, need to get my biked tuned up at some point.

I got a fair amount of work done in my office this afternoon, punctuated by short lovely winter walks to move the car.  Picked up some groceries at the co-op on the way home, made a delicious quesadilla dinner, and got some, but not a lot, more work done.  I’m half done with my last paper, though I was hoping to be more like 3/4th done with it by tonight so I could have ample time to edit and revise tomorrow without being too exhausted from writing it.  I’m not sure that will happen, but it’s not due till noon on Friday, so I may still be able to get up early and work on it Friday morning.  You never know.

What I do know is that I’ve been doing sudoku and paying bills instead of working on my paper for the last hour or two, and I’m exhausted and only getting progressively more retarded.  And that’s the exact moment you know it’s time to go to bed and hope you wake up raring to go on what you have left.  The pull of winter break is strong… and I’m very much ready to just throw it all to the wind and Christmas shop like the dickens!  Turns out I only have two weeks till Christmas.  I have a whole heck of a lot of cheer to try and cram into just two weeks.  I haven’t even listening to Christmas music all day.  Sigh!  The things I sacrifice for graduate school.

December 10th, 2008 | Tags: bikes, christmas, coop, papers, repair | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Oh midnight, you’re not at all the best time to be posting to my blog.  I got all distracted by facebook.  Boo.

I guess all there is to say is that I got my first paper done!  Turned 260 in this morning.  And had a bunch of students drop by before their final exam, which we got done.  That’s right – I’m done with TA stuff for the quarter!  Phew!

Now, one excellent paper to write in the next few days…. and I’m actually, for-really done!

December 9th, 2008 | Tags: final, paper | Category: school | Comments Off

I’d be more tempted to blog I i hadn’t been sitting in the same chair working on the same essay for the last 13 hours.  My back is killing me.  My brain is numb.  And my fingers are getting clumsy.

And, I have finished the first draft of the first essay I’ve written in three and a half years.  When I put it that way, my day sounds almost triumphant!  Even if I didn’t manage to get a Christmas tree like I was hoping.

Also in the triumph news today, we put an application in for a dog from a rescue society!  I don’t know if said dog is still available, but it sounds like the perfect pet for our house.. medium sized, house broken, good with cats, easy to care for, mild tempered, friendly, and cute!  Hopefully they will contact us tomorrow to tell us what’s up.  Right after we put the application in they took several dogs off the website and listed them as adopted, so I’m not clear if that means our application put that dog in pseudo-adoptive status, or if someone else for-really adopted that dog earlier in the day and they just hadn’t updated yet.  It’s surprisingly hard to adopt a dog these days.  Just like everything like this on the internet – dogs, jobs, apartments, free stuff… anything with an “act now!” clause attached has already been acted upon and the transaction has been completed before your browser is even done loading.  Trolling the pound used to be the only way to go, and these days.. it’s still probably the most successful.

Wishing my tomorrow-self good luck with el perro, I’d better go get some sleep.  You never know how early these dog people might call!

December 7th, 2008 | Tags: dogs, drafts, essays, pain | Category: home, school | Comments Off

…by which I mean eternally droning on and on until the rocks of your attention break into tiny granuals and I wash away the continent of your comprehension.

I wrote essay (singular) and replied to emails (numerous) all day.  Emails were odd – some really downputting, like telling my professor I protested to some of the questions on our final, and telling some of the kids I TA for that they can’t do anything about their grades.  Some good though, since a few kids were studying today and needed help with some questions.  Those are uplifting.  All I can do is shake my head at the final though.  I really protest having questions on there we haven’t talked about in class.  It turns into a reading quiz where none of the material is discussed, tested, or mentioned, and you had several hundred pages of new technical material to get through in the last 5 weeks.  Then again, this is probably why we curve the tests.  Sigh.

Essay went pretty well.  I got the portions I wanted to get done written, and I’m well set up for tomorrow’s big push to get the first one finished.  From there onward it’s one big day of final administering, and one more big paper, and then I’m free!  Hopefully we can get a few other things done between here and there – like getting a christmas tree.  And maybe even a puppy!  Saw one online today that’s at the Yolo County shelter that we could potentially pick up Tuesday or Wednesday if it turns out that’s what we want to do.  I think Lewis and I are both waffling now that the time is getting near.  I just don’t know about these things.  And it’s so hard to make a clear decision while you’re exhausting yourself with school work and other responsibilities.

Which reminds me.  When my eyes unfocus and my sentences creep on, it’s time to go to bed.  It’s definitely that time.

December 6th, 2008 | Tags: icky, metaphor, papers, puppies, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Last day of classes!

I don’t have too much to say about it, actually, other than both Friday sections went really much better than I was anticipating.  The reviews went over well, and hopefully they know what to study up on and will do well on the final.  I had one group tell me that they learned more from section than from lecture, so that made me feel really nice.  My section section was more full than usual, and I got a couple good nods of confidence there too.  One girl brought me fudge and cookies she had made, and another student emailed me after class to thank me for being their TA.  It’s a lot more than I had even hoped the kids would say, so I’m really curious how the reviews are going to come back.  I do hope they have suggestions for stuff I could do better, since I don’t feel like I really nailed this TA thing right off the bat, but I do at least feel like they’re not going to be awful marks.

Watched “The Meaning of Life” this evening and had tasty soup I had put in the slow cooker and chilled out.  I was pretty pooped by the time I got home, and really needed the cathartic not-doing-anything evening I took.  It’s been great knowing there’s nothing more pressing this weekend than my own work, and even more so that the *only* work I have to do this weekend is to write one of my essays.  It’s crazy that a 15 page essay seems like a break, but given that I’ve been working all quarter getting the research done for it, preparing presentations on it, and doing background research for it… it’s really just like frosting a cake at this point.  I know what to say, and how to structure it, and I just need to make it sound nice.  Phew!  Not that it’s not going to be a fair amount of work.. but it’s so nice to be doing all this work for myself, for my own benefit.

And with that in mind, it’s time to go to bed before it gets too late.  I want to get up and get crackin’ tomorrow, so I can start putting away this stuff and moving ever closer towards doneness!   And a real, work-free vacation!!

December 5th, 2008 | Tags: essays, finality, fudge, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

Hi, blog.  It’s me.  I’m sorry I’m too dumb or surly or tired to write every day like I’m supposed to.  I do think about you when I’m off doing other more restful things.  And besides, you know I’ll always come back.

It’s the last week of the quarter.  More specifically, tomorrow is the last day of classes.  This is the one time I sincerely wish I didn’t have sections on Friday nights.  I’m not sure how many folks will actually come, though I have a hunch it should be about normal.  I’ll get a small bump from pre-finals freakouts, but a negative effect for being late on the last day, so all in all, no net change.  I’m hoping it goes alright… my lesson plan this week didn’t go off too well yesterday (good greif, was that only yesterday?) and I haven’t thought of what I should do to make it more fun.  Reviewing just isn’t that exciting.  And the other alternative is to talk about historical linguistics, which is also rather unexciting and I don’t want to bother the students too much with the specifics since they won’t need to know most of it.

As far as my own classes go, it really doesn’t feel like they’re over, though all I have left is to turn in the papers.  They’ve been consuming so much of my time, it’s incredible to me to think that I won’t be seeing any of those familiar faces or places, or be obsessing over any of those topics for the foreseeable future.  Not that I won’t run into people around the department.  I just have really cherished my theory class, and grown accustomed to needing to be constantly working on my 260 project.  Seems like certainly this must only be a temporary reprieve from work and when the holidays pass we’ll be back to the same-old.  Except instead, I’ll be learning about brain scans and semantics and Quechua.  Oh Linguistics, you’re a charmingly broad field.

I finished my book (Flaubert’s Sentimental Education) and I’m at that point in my reading cycle where I need to detox from my old book before I can dive into a new one.  This is awkward around now (bedtime) when I’m ready to turn off and go curl up in bed, but have no motivation to do so since I’ve not go anything to entertain myself to sleep with.  I’m also not sure what the next book should be.  I’ve got strong candidate in a new Louise Erdrich (new to me, anyway), and the newest W. S. Maugham we bought (Moon and SIxpence) as well as a Vietnam-era war book I picked up on the recommendation of my favorite old English teacher.   It’s nice to try and balance out the reading regime.  I’m rather fond of those naturalist/victorian-type writers (Zola, Trollope, Flaubert) but their writing is so absorbing and thourough I can’t just read them back-to-back.  I require something more modern, or at least with lighter prose to offset them with.

Last night I tried picking up a book someone gave us (The Time Traveller’s Wife).  I had been hesitant about this one (as about most books people give us) since my tastes aren’t very Oprahs-book-club-y and I do tend to prefer classics and my small set of more modern writers to the wider wilds of modern literature, but I wasn’t quite ready to commit to anything else.  I got through the prologue and first section, and I think I’m ready to put it back on the dust gathering shelf it came from.  There’s something which I’m sure is a natural direction for our modern novels to move in (and I’m certainly no Lit or English major, so what do I know?) but it really doesn’t satisfy my novelust to read books that sound like screenplays.  The overly chatty, dialogue-driven, sparingly (or conventionally) described just starts getting on my nerves.  Dan Brown’s novel was like that, and so is The Time Traveller’s Wife. Why did we go from 0-to-sexy-romp in just a few pages?  Did I need to be titilated to convince me this book is worth reading?  The premise sounds interesting, albeit somewhat cheesy-scifi-y, but the tone of the novel has completely thrown me off.  I understand that it’s supposed to be realistic and people have sex in real life, I just get annoyed at having to sexualize all the characters in a novel when I’d rather be reading something else.  Though this really does probably point out more than I’m some kind of moral conservative who wants people to keep their sexy stuff to themselves than it says about modern prose.  But why read something that doesn’t please you?

Alright, enough epistolating about literature.

December 4th, 2008 | Tags: books, class, reading, stuff, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off