Well, I sat down to blog, but then this cat sat in my lap and made it rather hard to type. Short list instead:
Now off to do some pre-bed reading with this toasty Boo.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Alien pod part, missing plant greenery
It’s been really amazing having so much free time, and having gorgeous weather at the same time! Today Lewis and I managed to move the mystery plants out of our soon-to-be-herb garden and into a shady spot below the tree in the corner. It turns out our little plants (I do wish I had a name, or anything even google-able) have little root bulbs, like multi-rooted beets. I was really surprised after I dug the first one up! They definitely look like little alien creatures. I hope they’ll do okay in their new location… they do look pretty hearty.
So that was the afternoon. This morning we rolled out of bed fashionably late and got to our last welcome week seminar right on time. It was an info session on using the UC library system, especially for the social science and humanities. It was actually surprisingly informative. It seems like the average incoming graduate student would know how to use a library, but either I’m rusty, or I never realized the extent of my privlages as an undergrad. But there was also lots of good grad-specific stuff too, like how you can use the library for the classes you TA for, and what privliages a graduate student researcher gets (like getting a library proxy card for the professor you work for so you can check stuff out for them in absentia). Another really sweet thing is that the way UCD runs things each subject gets assigned one of their librarians who is responsible for knowing generally their way around the resources of your field, so there’s actually a linguistics-ally inclined librarian just waiting to photocopy journals for me. Yay! The best part of the whole thing was perhaps that the librarians giving the presentation were really hilarious and entertaining people, and it made me really excited to start doing my own research.
Went straight from the library seminar to try out the ol’ UCD wifi network on my beloved lappy. No glitches to speak of! Got signed in, got on the network, and was off and running. This makes my “things that I might not know how to make work on my linux lappy” list satisfyingly short. I know networks can be a real beast, but I’ve had nothing but luck on my machine, and it’s been a total trooper since I got it. Even managed to get streaming audio up and running last night, though I’m still stuck at getting flash in Opera (my own fault for using not-Firefox but I’m completely addicted). All I’m saying is, as soon as we get Colbert Report videos working on this thing (actually they don’t work in Firefox for me either) I think I’ve got no “major” hitches left. And that’s a pretty damn low-level major hitch.
The plant parts - I remembered!
A short run to the Co-op later, and we were home eating brie and apple sandwiches and contemplating our gardening triumph du jour. I should remember to take a picture of those silly plants for the blog tomorrow, though they won’t be nearly as amusing now that they’re planted and you can’t see their little tuber-sacks. Gardening pretty much sucked the life out of me this afternoon, so I read for a while on the lawn. I’m really getting into my Flaubert, though it took me a while to warm up to it. Cutest moment of the day happened about then, too. We’ve been letting the Boo out in the afternoons to get his fill of fresh air and outdoorsiness, but he was distinctly less curious than he has been for the last few days. I think at heart he’s an indoor cat that craves people more than he craves adventure. Anyway, he had mostly been sniffing around for a few hours and seemed to have gotten pretty bored, but as soon as I sat down in the lawn he trotted right over to me making those little Boo blurts he does. He sat down on my blanket, curled up against my leg, and was asleep mere moments later. It’s as if he were waiting all day for someone to be doing nothing outside so that he could do what he wanted most – nothing. With someone watching over him so he didn’t have to be nervous.
Which reminds me of the sort of sad event of the day, even if it’s only sad in a doting-parent sort of way. Lewis was watering the newly relocated foliage, which is about as far from the hose spiggot as possible. So the hose lives in this roll-up-house device for storage, that requires a lot of pulling to unravel. The little plastic house isn’t secured to anything, so you end up pulling it across the yard a bit while you’re trying to get yourself more hose. Anyway, the Boo was sitting nearby the hose house when Lewis pulled on it and it made a scary cement scraping noise and moved at him. Our kitty panicked, like he always does, and tried to run inside. Sadly, he was too scared to be paying enough attention to the door and ran right into the closed portion of the screen! Nearly did it a second time, and then finally found the open part we had left for him for just this sort of emergency. He was so mortified he didn’t go back outside all day. Poor embarrassed and scared kitty!
Tomorrow should be great. The only welcome week thing left is a coffee and bagels social, which sounds pretty tasty, and has flexible attendance hours. After that, it’s major garden tackling time – I think we’re going to prep the rest of the beds in the back yard for planting, and if I’m still feeling frisky after that, maybe even move some of the herbs into their plot! And with any luck, the Boo won’t be terrifying himself into any more silly predicaments. All I could do was watch and go, “Aww.. oh no!”
It’s been a very long time since I’ve been up (as in, slept the preceding hours) before four am. I’m not sure I’ve ever had to be up that early, really. This morning the Lawyers were headed to Hawaii and Lewis nicely offered to drive them to the airport. Guess they had a 6 am flight, which meant we needed to leave Davis just after four. Surprisingly we got to bed last night at a decent hour, and the 3:45 alarm didn’t seem as ridiculous as it could have. We made some tea, drove to the airport, drove home, and promptly slept through the remainder of the morning. Boo seemed confused about the going-back-to-bedness, but after a little jostling we all were sound asleep.
So needless to say, we missed our 9 am bike tour of campus appointment, but I’m not too bothered. My theme this week has been to try and not worry about non-mandatory things. All of this welcome week stuff is voluntary, so though we’ve signed up for lots of stuff, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth stressing my last week before classes. We did, however, make it to campus for our first seminar – an introduction to funding. Just on time, too. The funding situation for graduate students is really bizarrely complicated, and it feels so much better to hear the finance officers explain that it’s just really complicated. It’s not that anyone is being a masochist about it, it’s just that all the grad programs are patchwork funding quilts and we just can’t expect that this stuff is going to be centralized. So a sigh of relief there, and a double sigh to see that both Lewis and my tuition got paid right on time – yesterday! I apparently owe them the “typical remainder” which I can feel satisfied not freaking out about now, since I know that if I’m going to be a TA they’re going to expect I pay this two hundred dollars of tuition. I have no idea why. We bought our books, too, and checked out the student union eateries for lunch. I’m starting to feel like a real student!
King of his lair. Sort of.
Super productive afternoon after we came back. I finished weeding the back yard gardens, and mowed the lawn. Seemed like it was a good time to let the kitty out, so I watched him in the yard for a while. He’s really surprising outside, because I figured until yesterday that he would be off like a shot when we finally let him outside. I don’t know what gave me that impression, given his general nervous temperament, but he has completely proven me wrong. He sort of keeps an eye on us the whole time he’s out, and he didn’t even remotely try getting out of the back yard today. He actually seemed to get bored after poking around a bit and came and meowed at me to be pet. Silly boy.
At any rate, the weather was really wonderful today, the perfect temperature for sitting out and reading, so I spent a while doing that to give Boo a chance to feel like he could hang out for a while. We also trimmed up the front garden, and it’s really starting to look nice around here. I can’t wait to plant some plants! Made a delicious cobb for dinner, called my parents, and I’ve been chilling out and watching Mythbusters ever since. I’m going to call this day a total success. Anyway, here’s my picture du jour… my adoreable kitty poking around the newly trimmed back garden. Yay!
