The Laursonian Institute

Yay, it’s election day tomorrow!

I didn’t get as much reading as I could done today, partially because Lewis and I spent the dinner and post-dinner hour going over all the state initiatives.  Some good stuff to vote on this year, and some not-so-great stuff to not vote for as well.  Here’s to hoping everything turns out!  I especially have my fingers crossed over props 4 and 8 (fingers crossed for denial, of course).  Quite looking forward to voting, at any rate!

Schooly stuff went alright today.  Mondays are supposed to be my easy days, but it was a bit of a slog anyway.  Had some late-breaking midterm snafus where it turns out we flubbed the answer key, though not from lack of knowledge so much as being rushed and not reading all the questions all the way through.  C’est la vie, though it makes us look like schmucks.  Had our weekly meeting as well instead of the Wednesday one, and it doesn’t look like we have anything scary on the horizon TAing-wise.  Get to do some neat phonetics this week, and phonology net week!  Yay!

In other news, it’s really cold today!  Davis-cold, I should qualify that, since it’s really only in the 60s. But it’s been raining and windy and our house gets real chilly when the sun isn’t out to warm it.  Our kitty spent all day wrapped up and sleeping in a blankie, and I really wanted to do the same.  In fact, that’s where I’m off to next!   What luck!

It’s fantastic to know that at the end of every day, I’ve always got a warm, blanket-covered bed to come home to.  Bed is the best place.

November 3rd, 2008 | Tags: bed, blankets, cold, elections, midterm, taing, voting | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Hooooboy.  It’s a week.  It’s midterm week for my chilluns.  I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but work for this class in the last week (overlooking, of course, our oh-so-important data gathering fieldtrip Sunday I failed to write about).  I spent all weekend grading papers and homeworks and writing the midterm for this Friday.  Blurg.  I got no reading done, and have been generally lacking in sanity for a number of consecutive days.

I just need to focus on getting through tomorrow, and get through Thursday.  I have some freedom thereafter.  No sessions on Friday, one class canceled on Thursday.. if only I didn’t have to present a few papers that morning anyway.  Sigh.  But it’ll be alright.

I guess I was just hoping that I’d feel footloose and fancy free after the scariest part of my quarter, collecting data, was over.  But instead it felt like the last milestone before the marathon.  I didn’t know I could “buckle down” any more than I have been, but there you go.  A few nights worth of being up at 8 am and working till midnight is starting to wear on me a bit.  But I think I can hold out till Friday.  Which is also Halloween.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to carve my pumpkin that afternoon?  Seems sad that it would happen after Halloween…

I did sign up for classes today, and pretty much get (finally) caught up on my work that’s been slippery-sloping (if you will) since last week.  Pretty soon here I need to pick my paper topic for my theory class and get moving on my research.  Classes for next term are looking really neat.  I’m taking Advanced Semantics, the Philosophy of Language (why do I do this to myself?), and the introductory Functional Cognitive Imaging (where I get to learn to read fMRIs from a cognitive science standpoint) …  It’s quite a load.  Also, I’m the reader (as in, paper grader) for Intro Phonology, which ought to be righteous.  I’m a bit nervous overall, but it should be good to sink my teeth into some serious theory and stretch my wings / broaden my horizons into the more concrete brain science business.  I hope!

Alright, it’s midnight already and by my count I’ve finished everything on my to do list today and more.  Quite a bit more.  Go me.  Go me, to bed.

October 28th, 2008 | Tags: classes, grading, halloween, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

This whole week has been ones of those where at the end of my day my whole body just shuts down.  I sit down to blog, knowing I have lots of stories to share, and my eyes slowly close, I sink in my seat, and my brain starts to run, run….

The last several nights I’ve had a hard time getting to sleep despite being as tired as I am now.  At some point work tapers off and exhaustion sets in, but my brain never stops worrying about what I’m doing, or need to do, or should do, or might forget to do.  There are so many tiny pieces of input into my day I really need a better way to organize them.  I like to think I’ve got a good short term memory, but with as much reading and learning and the all-exhausting taing I’m doing, there just aren’t any neurons left to fill that purpose.  Things just fall right our of my head, like a sieve.  It reminds me of laundry day, where at the end of the day you’ve folded so many socks you can’t carry them all at once, but you try to anyway.  No matter how big of a handfull or armload you think you can carry, you inevitably drop a bunch of socks on the way to the drawer.  Those socks are my thoughts.  And they keep spilling on the floor.

Wednesday has to be my worst day.  I know Fridays I teach more, but they have this added bonus, a character of flippancy almost, because they’re Fridays.  I know that all I have to do is make it through that two hours of teaching, and I’m really off free for almost three whole days.  Nevermind that I do more work in those three days than the remaining four, but there are no social obligations which takes the pressure off quite a bit.  Except, of course, this weekend.  But sociolinguistics just wouldn’t be what it is if I didn’t have to do something as partially terrifying as asking pointed questions about strangers’ lives.  And this is the one and only time I have to do this.  In the forseeable future.  Ish.

I don’t really feel like talking about class today.  I did a lot today.  I’m now two-thirds done grading essays.  I remembered (whoo!  remembering anything!) to print out a bunch of papers I need for my 260 project.  I even read half of one.  I got my section done, and it went pretty well, despite my total lack of semantics knowledge.  I did a million tiny tasks this morning… tried to set up an email list, sent some emails I needed to do, and this evening I got my schedule for next week up. My schedule for next week looks, if at all possible, scarier than this weeks.  But I think after this, it levels out.  I present in 260 on Tuesday, and that’s the only thing I need to do (officially..) besides the final project in any of my classes.  Phew.

But really the only major happening of my day was that my tire was again (arg!) flat when I got out of section.  And I put new tires (actual tires, not tubes) on my bike just two days ago!  Anyway, it did make it obvious that my 5-times-patched tube was inadequate, and I was meaning to get new tubes anyway.  So I took it to the bike shop (by which I mean Davis has about nine..) and they had just enough time to change my tube before they closed.  Yay.  My bike always rides so well with properly inflated tires, and it turns out I was way under inflating the new tires.  My old ones were 65 psi, but the new ones go up to 100, which is way firmer than I’m used to.  Rode home like a dream.

Came home to my wonderful Lewis, who hugged my stressful day away.  And then made me delicious dinner.  The ol’ quinoa stuffed baked squash bit of heaven.  So tasty.  And I am so ready for bed.  Here’s to tomorrow, an easier day than today.

October 22nd, 2008 | Tags: bike, list, mind running, schedule, sleeplessness, taing, tired | Category: 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

What a wonderful day!

Got up early, but spent most of my day grading the first set of homework.  That stuff really burns me out… but the kids seem to be getting syntax more than I feared they might, so that’s great!  Maybe we won’t have so much work to do this week to get syntax whipped into shape.  Yay. I also made cider this morning! It’s delicious and it makes the whole house smell nice while it steeps. I even used our own homemade apple juice from a big bag of jonagolds I juiced a few days ago. So tasty.

As soon as I was done with that, I was ready to get out of the house!  Lewis and I borrowed a car and got ourselves down to a bike shop to fix my poor tires.  Turns out I have an abnormal tire size, so the first shop sent us away with a referral to a different shop.  Second shop only had one set of tires that would fit me bike, so that’s what we’ve got now.  They’re “slicks” (as in, have no tread) which I’ve never ridden on before, but as the guy at the bike shop helpfully pointed out, the barely treaded and now worn down tires I was using were essentially treadless anyway.  Gave the bike a test drive this evening with the new gear, and so far so good.  It’s also nice to have brand new tires that don’t have any structural problems or previous wounds.  If only I could say the same for my tubes!

Anyway, after the bikeventure, we took ourselves to a pumpkin patch to pick out some halloween friends!  Getting there was a bit of an adventure, actually, since Lewis and I had borrowed the manual transmission Bug, and neither of us have driven stick for quite some time.  As it turns out, all my years of Giles (approximation here, not my car, but an identical looking one) played out in my favor. New VWs have touchy clutches, though the actual shifting is much smoother and less of a workout than my dear Giles. That poor guy had such shifting trouble! Anyway, I ended up driving to the pumpkin patch cause the stick was getting the better of Lewis. Must admit, it was fun!

Pumpkin patch was great. Lots of good gourds, lots of families and kids, and baby animals! In addition to a pumpkin patch, this particular place had a petting barn! We didn’t pay to go in (since going in pretty much meant the petting, not the looking portion, and it was mostly under-8 types), but we did wander the perimeter and admire all the cute things. They had baby rabbits, chickens, and kittens, and even a baby goat no bigger than our Boo. A very nice touch! So we made it home with our two-gourd bounty (mine, a traditional and stalwart looking pumpkin, and Lewis’ some sort of green gourd) for way less money than I anticipated. Yay!

Came home and sort of completely crashed, as is wont to happen. Failed on the dinner front, though I was all excited to make “Clare Hall Soup” today. Perhaps tomorrow. But importantly, I did manage to finish the reading I had set out for the night, and that puts me in pretty good stead for tomorrow. The Lawyers’ are coming over as well tomorrow for some general maintenance, so it ought to be a busy one. Ah, the weekend.

October 18th, 2008 | Tags: bike, cider, driving, grading, pumpkin, repair, taing | Category: life, school | 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

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

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