The Laursonian Institute

I have not adjusted to this time change.  It’s 10:00 and here I am, completely exhausted again.

It was a pretty darn good day, though.  It’s always encouraging to start off the last week of school!  And as a bonus, we had a Quechua linguist-guy visiting our class this morning.  He was only going to sit in for an hour or so and watch us work, but in fact he gave us a very interesting 2-hour lecture and used up all our time!  So we didn’t have to do our dialogs, and didn’t even correct or turn in our homeworks.  Thus, we also didn’t get any more work assigned!  Best class yet.   Neuroimaging was good and short today (as it is every Monday), so it was a real smooth day.

I did also go to see the doctor (nurse practicioner, it turns out) about these migraines though.  I was looking forward to having that taken care of.  So there isn’t actually any real news from the visit.  My nurse is great.  She thinks the headaches are some combo of hormones and stress, and that I don’t have to do anything about them unless they really get in my way.  We can try messing with my birth control perscription, or they could perscribe me migraine medicine or something that has the effect of migraine mitigation (anti-depressants, blood pressure medicine) if I wanted… but one crap day a month sounds a hair less bad to me then being on medicine every day I don’t really need.  So for now, no change.  But good to know that it’s non-life-threatening and that I’ve got escape plans if I need them.  Nurse said I could even see the neurologist if I wanted… ooo.  Anyway, sort of a relief to know the headaches are not a huge deal, just another minor annoyance to deal with in life.

So I triumphantly rode home, got all my work done, baked cookies, and concocted dinner.  I’ve discovered that one of my best cooking resources is some innate ability to conjure up a version “KC’s Rice Surprise”, my Dad’s magical never-the-same-twice refridgerator meal.  Boy, Laurie’s Rice Surprise was sure good tonight.  Verrry spicy, and full of kale and collard greens and rice and red beans and ground beef.  Mmm.  It did have the odd effect of making my fridge as seemingly full as when I started though, since I somehow managed to create twice as much rice surprise as the rice I was attempting to use up.  Ended up going right back in the same tupperware it came out of!  Oh well!  It’s at least a little tastier now.

March 9th, 2009 | Tags: cooking, doctor, migraine, quechua, time change | Category: life, school | Comments Off

What a great day I had!

I only have an hour of classes on Thursdays, so they’re basically my best day.  But today was especially great.  We’re doing student presentations in semantics, so all I had to do was hang out and listen to some folks chat.  Went and had lunch out in the sunshine with Lewis, and hung out a bit in the library.  Picked up a book I needed, and also a Dickens book I think I’ll read.  I’ve never read any Dickens, but I’ve been rather into the Victorian-esque stuff for the last few years, and it seems like this isn’t far off that mark.  Though truthfully, seeing Masterpiece Theatre’s “Oliver Twist” was the real inspiration.

Came home and had a very nice lazy afternoon getting some small work done.  Decided I wanted to do something exciting with my evening that involved more than television, though… so I made pizza!   From scratch!  It was so fantastically exciting, I don’t think I can really capture that in the old blog.  I really should have taken pictures… but anyway.  The dough making was really, really easy (much easier than making bread!) and it only necessitated that Lewis and I walk to the store to pick up our topping ingredients while it rose.  I love it when your dough rises just exactly like it’s supposed to!  By the time we had shopped and walked back home and cleaned up a bit, it was all ready to go!  So we made half a sausage/veggie combo, and half a barbeque chicken.  Good gravy was it good.  If for some reason I had mozzarella around regularly, we’d be completely doomed.

And in the meantime, Lewis tried his first go at making Tabasco-style hot sauce!  Turned out pretty darn good.  It’s just got jalapenos and habeneros and vinegar… but it’s really sweet and nicely spicy.  Put it on the pizza and it was great.  Looking forward to maybe making eggs or potatoes or something with it for breakfast.  Seems like the perfect topping for some breakfast spicyness.  Mmm.  We’re spoiled people.  Full of our own handiwork.

Ooh, and we watched Bill & Ted over pizza.  Can you really top that?  I don’t think so!

February 26th, 2009 | Tags: baking, cooking, hot sauce, movie, pizza, triumph | Category: home | Comments Off

A lot of things happened today, but I only want to talk about the food parts!  Lewis and I mustered up the gumption to hit up the Co-op in the now regular bi-monthly real-food-buying extravaganza.  We used to shop more often, but lately it’s been one of those things where we only make it to the store in times of dire necessity, and it was one of those days.  I managed to make breakfast this morning, but only just, as we were out of milk, all bread products, and yogurt… thank goodness for a squirreled away container of rolled oats, and a cupboard hiding some soy milk.  The weather was really beautiful today, so it was a wonderful day for riding around town.  The Co-op is really great on weekday afternoons when it’s calm and the cashiers aren’t busy or rushed (not that it’s really any less friendly in there when it’s busy, I just get nervous in a crowd).  We bought a million tasty things, baaaarely managed to fit everything on the bikes, made it home, and had teeny ice cream sandwiches!  Spent the rest of the evening doing laundry and finishing my Quechua and semantics homework for the week, and then made dinner.  We picked up a whole trout (not rainbow, but “golden”… I think it was localish?) and cooked it up in some parchment with some veggies for dinner.  Also made really delicious Indian-style fried potatoes to go with it.  Oh!  And we finally got to use Lewis’ bun warmer!  It worked very well, to our mutual delight.  Rolls were kept butter-meltingly toasty without getting too hot or crispy.  Yay!

February 19th, 2009 | Tags: co-op, cooking, dinner, fish, shopping | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Blog!

Valentines Day was yesterday, and it was very excellent!  It felt so nice to take a whole day off and not worry about getting any work done or anything.  Double nice since it’s a three day weekend – woot!  Anyway, we had a wonderful day yesterday.  I sorta surprised (as much as possible, anyway) Lewis with a blueberry-cornbread breakfast (with heart-shaped eggs!), and we had a really lovely slow morning.  Took an excellent drive around for the afternoon, so Lewis could show me Capay valley.  Actually we hit up the Putah Creek Cafe in Winters first, which is such a wonderful spot.  I love me a good diner!  Not to mention, someone cute gave me an adoreable little pocket duck I named Percival.   Anyway, after waiting for a squall to pass, we eventually did go get our drive.  We got some great vistas of the stormy cloudscape, but got rained on only infrequently.  Came home and watched some cheesy movies to top it off, and altogether had a great Valentine’s Day.

Today was a work day, but very pleasant.  Work went well, got all the reading and grading I wanted out of the way, and even had time to watch a movie!   Saw Frida, and it was excellent… much better than I had anticipated even, and really great cinematography.  Also made some squash chili,  which was good as ever.   It’s been so surprisingly difficult to make anything with vegetables lately, it’s great to get a little nutrient in my dinner.  Hurrah for cooking!

February 15th, 2009 | Tags: cooking, diner, movies, valentines | Category: life | Comments Off

I can’t remember the last time I spent a whole afternoon making optimality theory tableaux.  I think it was 2004.  And I think they were on syllabification in Nuxalk.  The next summer I found a Nuxalk dictionary in a speciality bookshop near MIT while Lewis and I were hanging out at the 2005 LSA summer institute.  I don’t know if I’ll ever really have use for a Nuxalk dictionary, but it’s one of my more cherished silly books.  Doing OT is amusing, though much of the time spent doing the work is making the tableaux, which is just asking for everything that could possibly go wrong with word processing software to do so.  Turns out I have two Linux-related OT problems:  a) OpenOffice doesn’t permit dashed lines in tables (!) so I can’t show my unranked constraints properly, and b) the bomb symbol isn’t in unicode!  At least I finally found my pointing hand.  For a minute there, it felt like OT was going to demand Microsoft Word, and that just seems like a ridiculous presupposition for a phonological theory.

But speaking of the LSA… what am I going to do this year?  In more prosperous times (read: no rent to pay) I would have been there in a flash.  The institute is at Berkeley this year, commutable from home, which makes it seem a bit like an opportunity I couldn’t possibly pass up.  On the other hand, committing 6 weeks of my 12 week summer to commuting to Berkeley every day and not having a job seems like a pretty poor idea.  Coupled with the fact that I could only go if I got a fellowship to cover tuition (admittedly a not-unlikely prospect) and that students with fellowships are required to attend all six weeks instead of one of the two three-week sessions generally open to the linguisty public and furthermore that there aren’t really 8 classes I want to take… makes me wonder if it’s worth going.  I need letters of rec and transcripts as well as a personal statement to apply for the fellowship before next week, and I’m really feeling uninspired and unsure about my summer.  My graduate advisor reaaaally wants me to go (and wants to write one of my letters of rec)… but meh.  Money is a pain in the ass.  On the other hand, infinite time and means seems like a bit much to ask.

I made saurkraut-y cabbage tonight.  It wasn’t intended to be kraut-esque; I used the Chez Panisse recipe for warm cabbage, apple, and onion salad.  But it sure was good, at any rate.  Had dinner over one of my favorite new public television related activities – watching Huell Howser.  When I was in LA, he really used to get under my skin.  Though Pinks did have a hotdog named after him, which should have been a tip-off of his potential greatness.  Anyway, for some reason his boundless enthusiasm and child-like irrepressability warms my heart at the end of a long day.  Who couldn’t use a few more handy facts about out-of-the-way California towns?  Today we learned about Smallsville and Timbuctoo.  High quality.

February 10th, 2009 | Tags: cabbage, cooking, dictionary, huell howser, linux, LSA, money, nuxalk, openoffice, OT | Category: life, school | Comments Off

It’s been a sort of deflated day after I had such a great one yesterday.

Lots of things happened yesterday, but they all feel fairly trumped by the lightening strike of inspiration I had in the middle of my neuroimaging class.  I don’t want to get into any of the details, though I’m sure they’ll divulge themselves soon enough on the old blog.  Suffice it to say I feel like I put together a bunch of clues I felt like my own brain was leaving me, and I think I’ve picked the direction I want to go for my thesis (as in, the big one, not the QPs).  My professor was up lecturing and I really couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying because I’d keep thinking of more imporatnt stuff I wanted to remember about my plan.  I scribbled it all down in a notebook I had with me, so all is safe.  It’s odd, I feel like the sky opened up and I was handed a purpose.  Neat!

Anyway, besides being completely preoccupied by my own plans, I had lunch at the Delta with Lewis and his friend Rebecca, Emily, and Andrew.  The Delta is such a lovely place to hang out on a nice toasty afternoon.  Came home, got a bunch of work done, and then went out to dinner with the Lawyers and the Coupins (Symposium!).  Went back to Casa de Lawyer after dinner and watched cute old family videos and played Chinese checkers.  Never played Chinese checkers before, but it was a lot of fun!

Today was a little more of a struggle.  Got all my work done, which is always bonus, but I felt like my brain never really woke up.  Probably my fault for starting my work day with my semantics homework.  I only got one problem done but it took me hours and doing truth tables is really draining.  Did make it to the store to get some basic supplies and pick up the fixins for superbowl business tomorrow!  I wasn’t really intending to watch or cook for the superbowl until yesterday, but heck.. why not.  It’s always a good time.  And I’m always ready to make ridiculous nacho-based foods!

Durp.  This feels like one of those entries that plodded along because I’m completely unable to concentrate.  Murg.

February 1st, 2009 | Tags: cooking, durp, family, super bowl, thesis | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I just got back from a trip to the Sacramento Rail Museum, and my house smells like stew.  Technically it’s vegetarian (squash) chili, but nevermind that.  It smells like stew.

I’ve been getting really worried about starting this new quarter, in a latent way.  I know there’s nothing beyond my capacities coming up, and that all I have is another three months of hard work before the next rest.  I think I put perhaps too much hope into how much I was going to get done in this break, and how settled and relaxed I was going to feel by the time it was over.  It’s less than a week before I head back, and I feel like I’m just now able to relax and take stock of what’s going on in my life.  There’s so much I want to do, and so little time left, and that alone is enough to stress me out and make it so I don’t get anything done.

I keep having these visions of the one tiny adjustment I need to make before my house will be perfect and settled.  Of course that means that there are a million tiny adjustments to be done, and that my house will never feel really “done”, but my mind seems to fixate on a few really silly things.  I was vacuuming today and thinking that maybe what the house was missing is something that smells nice to put in the bathroom.  Like a scented candle.  Yesterday I thought maybe it was (also nice smelling) pine or lavender satchets to go in the linen drawers.   The idea of simple pleasures derived from small, decadent items seems to be the theme.  I think I want to be able to focus all my restless energy on a totem of some kind that I feel like I can channel into and tell myself that everything is calm and settled because my house smells nice.  The mind works in mysterious ways.

There are two self-pampering things I wanted to do before the break was over, and I’m not sure I’ll get around to either.  First, I really need a haircut.  My hair as it is needed to be trimmed months ago.  It’s manageable, but it does make me wonder if I’ll ever get it together.  I wanted to go to see Melody (who is so awesome) in Berkeley, but she never got back to my email and I’ve been completely lax in following up, and incapable of finding a Davis alternative.  It’s almost like finding a new doctor – you don’t want to end up having something ridiculous happen by going to someone surly or sub-par.  And Berkeley isn’t a place that’s so hard to get to I couldn’t manage it once a quarter.  But as it is, I’m at a complete impass.   The other thing I had thought of doing was getting a massage.  My neck and back muscles have been as tights as ropes since about half way through last quarter, and I had sort of assumed they would loosen themselves when I wasn’t at the computer all day and studying so much, but that’s not at all what has happened.  A massage is probably fairly good for you, physiologically speaking, and I’m trying to focus a little this quarter on taking better care of myself.

This is one of those loops I’ve been on seemingly forever.  It’s nearly impossible to rise above the status quo and do all the things you know you ought or intend to do.  Last quarter I even went so far as to block out a few hours a few days a week to go to the gym on campus, and haven’t even been once.  I don’t even really know where the building is.  But here I am, a few days before the next quarter, having the same conversation with myself about going to the gym a few days a week just because it’s good for you.  I don’t have any plan or goal in mind, just the simple wanting to spend a few hours of my day doing something, other than reading, that will be good for me.  I don’t know if the problem is lack of specificity of goals, or that I don’t really want to do these things I tell myself I do, or nervousness about trying something new, but whatever it is, I’m really easily defeated in this category despite the best of intentions.

Oddly, I feel exactly the same way about the gym as I do about getting chores done and cooking up the vegetables in my fridge.  We get vegetables delivered biweekly from Farm Fresh to You and they’ve been piling up in the fridge since finals week.  Normally I feel like I have a pretty good grip on seeing what we have and knowing what to do with it, but the last month or so has been completely uninspired.  Part of it really has to do with going out too often – we went out more than usual while finals were happening, and we’ve been treating ourselves lavishly (well, for grad students anyway) over the break, and even eating at parties and the Lawyers’ and such, so not so much cooking has been going on around here.  Instead of rectifying the problem my brain just spins on how I don’t have any great ideas though, and that really gets me nowhere but closer to our next vegetable delivery.

Perhaps what this whole thing amounts to is this:  school is almost starting, and I need my routine back.  Rising above the status quo is something that only sounds good when you’re disatisfied with what’s going on, and I never have enough time to be bothered when I’m in the middle of studying.  Whether having failed to do most of what I intended over break is a real failure to improve my quality of life, or is just a symptom of having a more relaxing and not hyper-productive break, I don’t know.  Makes me wonder what setting up all these plans was really about in the first place.

December 30th, 2008 | Tags: break, chores, cooking, musing, time | Category: life | Comments Off

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

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