The Laursonian Institute

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

It was a good, thoughtful, and even somewhat relaxing day.  Thursdays are great.  Sandwiched between my scary-first-session Wednesdays and my exhausting two-session Fridays, Thursdays are an oasis of minimal effort and extra time.  I don’t even have the rest of the week looming over the horizon.  Just one push through Friday sessions and I’m home free!

One major bonus today was not only making it through classes, and a surprisingly satisfying paper this aftenroon, but that we company for dinner!  The Lawyer’s called right after I had declared that I wasn’t going to make dinner for a while offering to bring us tasty tasty Symposium pizza and salad, and check out some “landlordy” stuff.  It’s a little crazy what a relief it is to have something so simple as someone else providing dinner.  Things are going well for us, it’s just a matter of keeping on top of it all at the same time.

I should really start blogging midday.  It’s easy to remember to do as part of the bedtime routine, but I rarely feel up to blogging much more than the bare bones of what’s been going on.  Too tired to be introspective, I suppose.  Whole heart isn’t in it.  Yawn.

October 16th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Wednesdays are always sort of a litmus test for my week.  If sessions go well, it bodes well for Friday sessions.  Today’s only went so/so, and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it.  The material we’re going over is really technical and not particularly exciting, so I’m really just reviewing things that happened with the homeworks last week and how those went.  Sadly, I think the kids who come to session really do get the swing of things by the end, but when sessions are that boring and tedious no one really wants to come.  I only had maybe 15 kids today, instead of the usual 20-25, and even my most participation-happy girls were a little moribund.  I even had silly Samoan music to play to kick the start off, but everyone seemed so surly about the topic in general it didn’t help any.  I think the groupwork last week helped, but I’m just not sure how you do this stuff in groups.  Oh well.

Also put all my reading to get done for next week in my beloved Tasque (via my also very beloved Remember the Milk) and it’s looking a little dismal this week. Graduate school is great, and the other night I think I put it to Lewis pretty well. It’s all about it being 10:00 on a weekday, and you feeling exhausted in every cell of your body. And this exhaustion is itself somewhat uplifting, because you feel like you’ve faught a hard and worthy battle and given it all your best. It’s not the same exhausting as working the regular 9-to-5. So much of my day is self-determined, and there’s no real external repercussions for whether I perform well or not. I guess what it comes down to is that no one works myself harder than me, and when you pick the ways in which you work yourself, you don’t waste a lot of time doing stuff you don’t think it worthwhile.

I guess that should be a lesson to myself. I could work harder at this TA thing. I think I can figure out how to make it more entertaining while still being informative and practice-centric. And at the end of the day… it’s the working hard that matters between me and myself. Whew. This whole grad school thing is a little less like fun-fun going to school times, and more like an interminable endurance race. Keep hitting those mile markers, and this quarter will be over with some measure of success. And several thousand mile markers later, I come out somewhere with a PhD. Right?

October 15th, 2008 | Tags: endurance, exhaustion, inspiration, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Hey, it’s my 91st post!  This post-every-day thing seems to be taking hold.  And what an exciting three months it’s been in the life of me, too.  Yay.

Pretty decent day today.  Got through classes.  Lewis had a presentation to give in 260 which went well!  Mine is in two more weeks, but it doesn’t seem to be much of a big deal.  Only non-final presentation I’ve got to do this quarter, so I won’t complain.  It’s really a pretty work-free quarter, other than the mass of required reading for all my classes.  Wonder what I’ll be up to next quarter.   I think we register pretty soon, actually.  Egad!

So anyway, came home after classes and got my lesson plan for tomorrow hammered out.  I hope it goes alright.. we’re sort of just going over old homework questions, which isn’t super cool, but given how many of them got them wrong on the homework (ie, more than 90%) it looks really necessary to do.  I had Lewis get me a little up to speed on syntax, too, and did the homework trees the kids have to do for this Friday’s homework so I’ve got a grip on what the phrase structure rules this book is using are.  Had a few little syntax debates over stuff, and it was nice to hear that the stuff I found a little odd or non-intuitive about this classes trees were not me being dumb, but more that I wasn’t taught trees this way.  Woot.  Nice to know we’ll be through syntax in no time!

Had a tea and cribbage night with Ben afterwords and it was really nice.  It’s good to be forced to take some time off now and again, and it’s also nice to feel like I’m getting really natural-like comfortable with Lewis’ friends.  I even managed a 20-point hand!  Was feeling rather loopy after all the reading and thinking and planning I did this afternoon, so I hope I didn’t do anything too uncouth.  But whatever.  It’s Daily Show and bed time.

October 14th, 2008 | Tags: cribbage, syntax, taing, tea | Category: meta, school | Comments Off

I want to get my wireless keyboard fully functioning in the ol’ Linux.  This is apparently troublesome.  Something about USB, blah-blah whatever.  I got pretty close tonight, but I should really know better than to start futzing around with Linux stuff right before bedtime.  When I’m supposed to be reading a paper anyway!

Today was pretty bonus, as Lewis would say.  Got up early enough to do a little library research this morning from the comfort of my own desk.  (Non-non-heinous side note, saw a rat jump out of our grape vine from own-desk-adjacent window… eech.)  Got to campus with enough time to have lunch with my sweetie, then bust over to class.  Class was pretty good, though it’s a little freaky learning syntax in a non-binary branching way.  Lewis and I talked it over a bit this afternoon though, and I think the kids will be more into it this way.  Hit up the co-op on our way home (I love you, co-op!) where we ran into our next door neighbor who very nicely offered to drive some of our copious groceries home.  Managed to fit all our business in our own bike bags though, and came home with quite a bounty.  I like the bi-weekly mondo shopping trip, even if it’s rather expensive.  Takes a bit of money to feed two point five mouths, I guess.

Oo.. also called my grandmother – it’s her 75th birthday!  Yay!  Talked to her on the phone a bit, which was very nice.  Don’t know why I don’t call my grandmother, but I suspect none of us grandkids do… she’s very lovable but with a gruff demeanor that sometimes makes you feel like she’s got nothing to say to you.  That sounds more callous than I intend it, but these subtle family relations are hard to explain.  I think my grandma is a little lonely, and very much used to being someone… inconsequential.   She sounded so surprised that so many people would be calling her on her important birthday.  Like a whistle-stop town getting a presidential visit.  She’s very dear.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to put the cat box in the office (sadly, probably mine) but given the state of air quality in here at the moment, I think I had better go to bed instead of blathering on any longer.  Yuck.

… the tags on this post are delightful.

October 13th, 2008 | Tags: coop, grandma, kitty, linux, syntax | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Nothing sucks the brain matter right out your ear faster than grading homework.  It’s like trying to imagine what 75 different people all who only sort of understand what they’re talking about try and convince you that both their theoretical underpinnings (under + pin + ing + s) and execution are correct.  And when I say, “it’s like”, what I mean is “it is.”

I realized halfway through my day today that I feel like I’ve been sick all weekend without being sick.  I’m going to call that psychologically exhausted.  Intellectually exhausted.  Something involving exhaust.  ex + haust.  psych + o + log + ic + al + ly.  Look at all those morphemes!   Anyway.  I think I’m running on empty, effortally speaking.  I took two naps this weekend!  Both rather necessary.   Today’s was outside, in the fresh air and sunshine.  I woke up and my hand was asleep.  For all that I’ve been freezing all weekend (scary Davis is down in the 60s and 70s these days!) it was so warm and sunny outside, I had to ditch my scarf and slippers and everything.  Yummy sunshine. (yum+my sun+shine).  I also made our acorn squash.. stuff it with quinoa and raisins and walnuts and stuff.  It was so delicious.  I should have taken a picture!  My blog is so sad and texty lately.  (late + ly).

I failed to plant any bulbs this weekend though it was my secret project I’d been waiting to do all week.  I hate it when the weekend rolls around and all I’ve got time for is work, which is all I have time for any other day.  I guess what I’m trying to say is… I’m ready for a weekend.  A real, honest-to-goodness do-whatever-I-want-all-day day, if not a whole two days.  The deeper we get into this quarter, the less likely that seems to be.  I’ve got sociolinguistic interviews to conduct.  Papers to grade, homeworks to grade (sorry spell checker, homeworks is a count noun for me now), midterm to write… Sigh.  And at some crazy distant future… my own papers to write.  A literature review to lead.  And two presentations.  Before December 10th.  It’s both far away, and quickly approaching.  They don’t kid around with this quarters stuff in the ol’ graduate school.  (grad + u + ate school (monomorphemic)).

Serendipitously, my Monday meetings have been moved to Wednesdays, so I only my TA class to attend.  That’s 50-minutes of required work total on the Mondays.  That pretty much makes Monday part of the weekend, with the added bonus of also forcing me to go to campus and maybe get more work done.  Yep.  If I’m smart, I’ll go to campus early (as in, before class) and get the papers I need copied so that I can come home right after my class.  A whole afternoon off would be so nice.  And I don’t really have all that much to do tomorrow, anyway.  Work-wise.  By “not that much” what I’m trying to say is “the usual amount that will take me all day but at least nothing is late yet”.

On the double-plus side… it’s bed time.  Bed time is my favorite time of day.  If I’ve been good, and I almost always have, it means I can look at my clock, say, “no more work today!  it’s bed time!” and go to bed with a fairly clear conscious.  Or at least one that knows that sleep is more important than staying up late and getting ahead of schedule.  Yessiree.  Lets try and keep it that way.  Though the pull to be ahead of schedule is pretty strong.

Okay, I’ve only got two things left to say:  honk.  shoe.

October 12th, 2008 | Tags: exhausted, taing, weekend | Category: 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

Nothing spectactular happened today.  I got up early, somewhat hung over from last night’s celebratory escapade.  I did morning chores, my least favorite of all chores, though this set ending deliciously in a mango smoothie.

Tire went completely flat half way to campus, and there wasn’t really any fixing it at the time.  So I walked it to campus.  I was pretty late to class, but I think I handled it fairly well considering I’m normally freaking out about being on time.  Thank goodness for Lewis, both for being adoreable and supportive, as well as for busting it to class for me so I could feel like missing class wasn’t really “missing” it.  We were discussing a paper I didn’t really get and I was really interested to hear what was going on.  Turns out… I still don’t totally get it.  And I still think I might right my final paper using it.  Har.  Why do I do these things to myself?

Fixed tire after lunch, got some reading done and some librarying, and came home and crashed.  Been feeling really down ever since I got home, and I mostly think it’s just that I’m exhausted.  In fact, it’s just past nine.. but I think I’m headed off to bed anyway.  I just can’t deal with having any more day in my day.  But on the plus side, we got some evening chores done, like getting kitty new food and dropping crazy old film off to be developed… and I got the whole kitchen cleaned.  Woot.

For as tired as I am… I really wish tomorrow weren’t my big two-section TA day.  I guess this is why I wasn’t supposed to volunteer for Friday sessions.  Whatever.

October 9th, 2008 | Tags: bike, chores, library, malaise | Category: life | Comments Off

(Half) bottle of wine.  Too inebriated, or tired, to post for really.  Let me sum up my day:

I.  Freaking.  Rocked.  My.  Section!

They should pretty much hire me right now.  C’mon, linguists!  I’m ready to go!

Then I came home, celebrated with Lewis, and talked politics all night.  Why am I still awake?!

October 8th, 2008 | Tags: taing, wine | Category: life, school | Comments Off