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Comrie!

This is one of those dead-tired sort of days.  But it’s okay.  It should be the last one this quarter!

It was a necessarily busy day today.  Had Quechua this morning and we did dialogs and had a little Peruvian feast.  I wish I knew what anything was called or made of, because it certainly was delicious.  Oh, and we drank some Inca Kola.  Drinking neon yellow soda at 10 am is certainly a way to kick off a day.  Anyway.  Much fun was had in Quechua, and my heart is softening a bit towards that class.  Probably a good time to have handed course evaluations out.

Went straight from Peruvian snacks to my lunch date with Bernard Comrie.  It’s so amusing to have lunch with famous linguist-types.  I don’t know what it is about being a grad student that gets you introduced to these folks.  Maybe it’s the benevolence of those above you to spread your name around and get your face known.  At any rate, it was great being invited to lunch.  The food and company were both excellent, and I learned amusing things about Comrie that will stick with me for a while.  He’s a good guy.

Had to ditch lunch a little early to go meet with my TAing professor, and then my research professor.  This is the last set of homeworks I have to grade for this quarter, which is excellent, but sadly means that soon I have to grade the final.  Had a very nice final meeting with my research professor, and wrapped up what we’ve been reading very nicely.  Unfortunately he also assigned me a little write-up to do before the end of next week, so I didn’t quite escape without a short paper to do.  Oh well.  I sort of needed to synthesize what we’ve been doing anyway, so it will end up being rather useful later.

Spent a few minutes with Lewis in the sunshine on the Quad, and puttered about for my spare hour until it was time to go to Comrie’s talk!  I’d seen him give portions of this talk in Cambridge before, but for some reason it was much more engaging this time.  The talk seemed to fly by, and all the questions were very interesting.  Before I knew it, it was 6:00 already and time to go home.  Crashed a fair bit when I got here, didn’t make dinner… but I did watch some Colbert over some left-overs, and made a loaf of lemon bread for breakfast tomorrow.

All in all… a very successful, if draining, day!

March 11th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Yay, yay, for Chester A!

I’m feeling so very delightfully relaxed.  Sorta.  I realized right after typing that out, that per usual I’m sitting here with my jaw clenched as tight as can be.  I do wish I could stop doing that.  I guess on a metalevel I’m relaxed, but on some sort of biological level I’m still all keyed up.  Anyway.

It was a good day.  Penultimate semantics class finished, though it was sort of painful.  Professor was discussing his own paper, which is really interesting, but I didn’t bring it with me (it’s 60 pages!  truthfully, I didn’t print it!) and it was more like a talk than a class.  Got some TA work done after that, and headed home.  Spent home-time pretty well, reviewing my semantics work and doing a bit of thinking about the last meeting with my professor for research I have tomorrow.  Got tired of thinking and mowed the lawn.  Made Lewis take me out to our local “Mexican” place (New Mexican I guess?) to split some nachoes, and then I was feeling all rejuvinated.  Did a bunch more research prep for tomorrow (synthesizing! my greatest talent!) while sitting by a toasty fire.  I’ve had this kitty on my lap all night, while I drink mate and eat what’s left of my chocolate chip cookies and listen to these nice Mozart clarinet and bassoon concertos… life is pretty spectacular.

Tomorrow should be an interesting and sorta big day!  I’ve only got Quechua to get through, but I have a million things in the afternoon to do.  First of all, and I guess most importantly, I’ve got a lunch date with a very famous visiting linguist!  Thankfully it’s not just me, there should be several of us grad students, and a professor friend of ours who invited us (and is good friends with the visiting linguist).  It’s just a little unnerving, but very exciting to feel partially responsible for entertaining someone I respect so much!  After that, I’ve got a meeting with the teacher I TA for to get the last homeworks from him, then my last research meeting with that professor.  Hopefully he’s going to tell me that I don’t need to do any more work this quarter!  And then after that… the lecture that the visiting linguist is giving.  I’ve actually seen him give this talk before when Lewis and I caught him at Cambridge, but it’s a really neat thing, so it certainly won’t be boring to catch again.  Yay, it’s Comrie Day!  (For fun, try to count the number of publications he has on his site..!)

March 10th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: home, school | Comments Off