The Laursonian Institute

Well, Laurie, it’s Monday.  Night.  You made it!

Sadly, Mondays are my easiest day.  I only have TA stuff to do today, no sections, and no classes.  But for all that, I got a heck of a lot done.  Woke up early-ish, and got a paper read.  Made a reaaaaally good roast beef sandwich and got myself to campus.  Class went well, and I got a chance to finish grading the homeworks this afternoon.  Had our weekly TAs meeting, which at least left me feeling like I’ve got a bit of an idea what to do in sections this week.  We’re moving our meetings to Wednesdays, actually, which makes me a little worried about getting instructions for that weeks section right before we meet… but I think we’ll be fine.

Came home just in time to go with Lewis to take the Boo to the vet.  We were going to get him all vaccinated for his outdoor activities these days.  Got a little distracted by the vet, though, who confirmed my suspicions that Mr. Boo shouldn’t be an outdoor kitty without claws.  So Lewis and I hemmed and hawed for a while and finally decided it was time to curtail his outdoor activities, mostly for his own safety, but a bit (I must admit) for our pocket book as well.  Can’t afford much in the way of expensive vet visits or vaccine regimes… but I think it’ll all be okay.  Boo wasn’t “utilizing” the outdoors much when we weren’t out there already, and what little he did outside of our yard has so far been getting in trouble and getting into fights.  No es bueno.  Compound this with the worry I was having about him being an outdoor kitty and Lewis’ mom’s cat Myles just having been diagnosed with FIV… I’m feeling okay about this decisions.  It is going to be a little heart breaking trying to get Boo to understand he can’t go outside any more.  He was awfully cute prowling around out there.

Post-vet, I made dinner and chatted up Lewis about Trubetzkoi.  Got our laundry folded (we’re going to be all wrinkly this week… oh well).  I also made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies!  They’re rather tasty.  All cakey and chocolatey.  Got the grades uploaded into the gradebook, Lewis finished our draft of the homework for tomorrow, and all I have left to do is print that out, and get myself to bed.  And lo, it’s sounding pretty great right about now.

October 6th, 2008 | Tags: baking, class, kitty, vet | Category: life | 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

durp

durp

durp

nuugh

splurg

October 5th, 2008 | Tags: durp | Category: meta | Comments Off

I have two things to confess.

First, I waited, again, until midnight to start blogging. This makes me loopy.

And second, I say “nu-cu-lur”.  I know it’s spelled like it’s “supposed to” be pronounced.  Nuclear.  I also know I’m in graduate school and I shouldn’t be harboring all these uneducated colloquialisms in my lexicon.  But I trump both points.  For I am also a linguist!  I celebrate my sub-standard form!  I grew up saying it, and now, with my tiny set of linguistic oddities I like to pretend are my “Seattle accent”, I must embrace my nuclear.  I’m also keeping my short /uh/ “roof”.  And my short /e/ “Vegas”.  And I’m also too tired to try and figure out how to put any of this in IPA tonight.  Oh well.

Half of that aversion is that I spent all afternoon making notes on Trubetzkoi and thus arm wrestling IPA into my wiki program.  Tried to find a more wonderful way to get Linux and IPA together, but it looked like more installing and futzing than I could do at that moment right in the middle of my reading.  That didn’t stop me from installing all the rest of the language packages though!  Got most my non-Latin scripts up and running.

Other things that happened today:  I finished grading two sections worth of homework!  Also, the Lawyers had us over for delicious dinner and we checked out their Hawaii photos and caught up on news.  I got my Trubetzkoi done (though after typing his name all day I’ve really taken to wanting to call him “Trubz”) which was my set goal du jour.  Also the kitty wasn’t feeling well this morning, but I think he’s gotten over it.  Seems to be doing decently this evening, though I’ll keep an ojo on him.  Oh, and reading Trubz gave me an idea for my 260 fieldwork as well… gotta see if I can follow up on that tomorrow.  Decently successful!

October 4th, 2008 | Tags: kitty, linguistics, linux | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Pretty successful day, for sure, but busy as heck.  Feeling a little too disparate to blog successfully.  It’s rather late.

Went to class, collected our first round of homeworks from the undergrads.  Most everyone turned them in!  Much success.  Class went well and everyone seemed to be into the morphology thing.  Chatted with some kids after class, and busted over to office hours.  Spent most of office hours talking to my co-TA and other TAs in the office about Warcraft and other slightly-more-relevant topics.  Good times!  I do really like the grad students in our department.  We’re good folks.  Anyway, had my last two sections this week and they both went really well!  I think I learned from my Wednesday mistakes and moved forward.  Guess we’ll see how the content shapes up this week, when I’ve really got to do the “teaching” part of the ol’ job.  Linguistics Graduate Group party after that, which was fun!  Went over with another one of the 1st years, who I really like, and chatted with many of the rest of the 1st years.  Again.. what a great group!  Students and faculty alike.  Yay.  Came home and graded homeworks and watched crap TV while Lewis was out celebrating his friend’s birthday.   These homeworks are gold, but truthfully I’m really glad to see how well all the kids are getting the material.  And those that aren’t… pure gold.  And lots of material for next week’s discussion sections!

Weekend.  Tomorrow.  That’s all I really have the steam left to say.  Yay!

October 3rd, 2008 | Tags: homework, party, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

Boo goes colloquially by Jingles around these parts some times.  Sometimes I also feel like those jingles are the perfect pick-me-up to a tanking day.  It’s funny how endearing the tinyness of Boo’s existence can be.  But I guess sometimes you just need something that simple to pluck you from the theoretical storm cloud brewing in your head.

It’s silly that my days feel like they’re tanking lately.  Classes are going pretty well.  I’m really worried about Sociolinguistics, but the material is interesting and the challenge, though great, seems surmountable in my moments of optimism.  Bed time is never a moment of optimism.  This is the time of night this stuff sinks in.   I look at my day tomorrow and all I see is myself one moment closer to what must be inevitable TAing mediocrity, and one day closer to the deadline of my Socioling initial research proposal which I am completely floundering about.  This is a little over-dramatic.  After reading all day, this is what happens.  It’s ridiculous to say I’m working too hard when it feels like all I’m going is leisurely reading research papers about subjects I like.  It’s not even hard reading.  And all it is is reading.  But when I crash right about 9:00, like I do most nights, it seems, I wonder if I work too hard.

It’s true I got up at 6, and was busy getting us ready to go to school.  I had class till 11:30 and did a little of what I’m going to call “grad student stuff” for a bit.  Had lunch with Lewis, which is definitely quantifiable as a break, though we were talking about class.  Was home by 1, went straight to TA work and reading.  Read till 5.  Helped Lewis study for Latin test tomorrow.  Turned on the debate at 6, and watched it while simultaneously skim-reading another paper.  Had a brain storming conversation about research proposals with Lewis again.  Finished said paper after debate ended.  Eyes glazed over, doom descended, and a general aversion to bed set in.  I blogged.

And now here we are.  Blogging and dreading again.  But the somewhat meta-frustrating reality of it is that tomorrow I’ll wake up, it will only seem 3/4th as hard, I’ll go through the motions, getting up, making breakfast, studying, class, studying, class… and by 6:00 my weekend will be upon me.  My day will culminate in drinking and festivities with the grad students in the department.  And that’ll be it.  I’ll have fun, some things will go well, some things will discourage me, and I’ll start it all over again.  And with this washing-machine-like emotional cycle in mind, I’ll say one thing definitively that I stupidly had never bothered to anticipate:  grad school is hard.  Now, to sleep on it.

October 2nd, 2008 | Tags: dread, kitty, pensiveness | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Waaaaaaay too tired to blog tonight, so here’s my day in (very) brief:

• woke up, made starter for pumpkin ice cream; made lewis an egg-white frittata
• got some reading done
• went to TA-class
• hung out at my office hours, got some reading done
• Lewis came by office hours, chatting with Lewis + fellow graduate types in the TA office
• went to 1st section… did okay.  neither bad nor good.  made some dumb mistakes.
• came home, vented to Lewis about section and my failings
• read a tiny bit
• talked to Lewis about possibilities for socioling project, examined our “extended social network” and discovered we know lots of interesting people who might be able to hook us up with people to research
• made pumpkin ice cream.  it’s crazy good.
• brainstormed a million socioling ideas
• read a lot more
• blogged… how meta.

I don’t even want to talk about TAing today, though it’s the major portion of my mental space today.  I’ve got some stuff to improve for Friday, for sure.

But first on my list is a whole lotta sleep.

October 1st, 2008 | Tags: list, reading, school, taing | Category: meta, school | Comments Off

Pumpkin sage goodness

My sources tell me tomorrow it’s October.  Incredible!

So we got a pumpkin from our vegetable box guys a few day back, and I’ve been looking forward to chopping it up and getting to all the tasty innerds.  But first maybe I should talk about class.

Had my first real day of classes today, since I finally made it to 260.  That class is turning out much more interesting than I had hoped, and much less scary than I had feared.  I’m looking forward to both my classes a lot, actually.  I do think the field work portion of 260 is going to be pretty difficult… but I’m blissfully ignorant / confident at the moment.  And it’s going to stay that way at least for a few more days, until I have to turn in my research proposal next week.  Yoikes.  Discussions in both classes went really well, and I’m ready to swear by the wiki note taking methods.  Hopefully I just don’t end up taking so many notes I can’t keep them straight in my head and thus invalidate the method…. but for now, it lead to one of my most productive, constructive lecture days probably ever.  And that was even with Saussure in the picture!  I feel like if I can do that, I can do anything.  I’ve been feeling very mighty lately.

So maybe that should bring me back to my pumpkin.  I mapped out my papers for the week and I’ve got one a day to do.  So I came home, blasted through my paper (and notes!), and then spent the rest of my evening cooking.  Made pumpkin risotto to start with, which was really bueno.  I put a picture up on the left there; I always find risotto to be very picturesque.  After that I baked the remaining pumpkin so it would be puree-able, for tomorrow I shall make pumpkin ice cream!  Actually I have a bit more pumpkin left over besides that, and I need to figure out what to do with it.  Yay.

Sadly, it’s not yet 9:30 and I’m dog tired.  I think I’m going to go to bed and read a little Flaubert, or if I’m feeling fidgety, the textbook reading for 260.   Oh!  I forgot the only other important thing today — I got stung by a bee!  I was biking past some oleander and all off the sudden my neck stung really bad.  Never saw or heard or found any evidence of an actual bee, but if it’s not a bee sting, I’ll be jiggered.  It’s itchy tonight.. ew.

September 30th, 2008 | Tags: bees, classes, cooking, pumpkin | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Yurt is about the only sound my brain makes right now.  Thanks, brain.  Keep on truckin.

Mondays are sort of weird days for me, since I don’t have class, but I’ve got lots of TA stuff to do.  Went to campus as early as I could get away with, though still later than I had planned.  I wanted to get to the gym in the morning and check it out, if not actually work out, but this morning as my alarm was going off at 6 am and I didn’t need to get to campus until 1… so I missed my first sort of engagement, but no matter.  Got to campus with a few hours to spare and did a little library reading.  Sadly, I couldn’t get my favorite desk at the biblioteca but I finally found a suitable one upstairs.  The library is much bigger than I realized, and I really haven’t had an opportunity to check it out fully yet.  I imagine they must have more computer-parts-endowed desks hanging around, but I never saw any today.  Success anyway!

Went to LIN 1 and class went fairly well.  Kids seemed fairly aware and the topic was fairly interesting for them, I think.  Read for a while in between LIN 1 and my next appointment and nearly got all the reading I had intended done.  Had a meeting with my co-TA and Professor Ojeda to talk about the stuff we want to do in sections this week.  We’re actually only showing a video, so we’re not doing much and the meeting was pretty short.  I tagged along with Dionne to her first section so I could see what the materials we had to work with were, and how to operate the VCR and stuff like that.  Stayed through her opening schpeel and snuck out at the beginning of the movie.  I’m feeling pretty confident about the sections at this point, after getting to see the students in other contexts a few times now.  Nothing to worry about!

Came home and finished up my reading, had a lovely dinner with Lewis, and decided to pretty much take the remainder of the night off.  I can feel myself getting pretty sapped this afternoon and since I’ve gotten myself fairly well covered for tomorrow I think I better take the chance while I can!  Silly as it is, not working is as important as working at this point.

September 29th, 2008 | Tags: reading, resting, taing | Category: school | Comments Off