The Laursonian Institute

Tuckered out, that’s what I am.

Went home tonight after dinner with Lewis and his madre, though we were supposed to go to the high school jazz band concert.  I just came home and vegged out, and watched some TV, and generally chilled out.  I’ll profess to doing some linguistics reading in the middle of watching a documentary on Prince Charles, but that’s life!

Spent the afternoon TAing and talking about dirty words in my sections (our reading this week includes euphemism and taboo) and it sort of creeped me out.  I think maybe I shouldn’t have gone into that topic with them, but in all three of my sections the kids were very engaged and hopefully we had a fruitful discussion about hurtful words and turns of phrase.  I think it’s just scary to swear in class, especially when we’re talking racial epithets.  I guess we’ll see about that one.

Anyway… I think it’s an early-to-bed sort of night.  I’ve got a date with an awful lot of essays to grade tomorrow.  Woot.

November 21st, 2008 | Tags: nerves, slurs, swearing, taing, tired | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Just got home from a concert at Yoshi’s tonight!   Much fun!  Perhaps I’ll put up a picture or two tomorrow… but for now, bed!

November 20th, 2008 | Tags: concert, fun | Category: life | Comments Off

It’s 1 am, and I’m coding data.  And feeling so alive.

November 17th, 2008 | Tags: data | Category: life | Comments Off

Arg.

Things go wrong so rarely on my computer, and I have it set up in so many ways to anticipate my thoughts, that when stuff screws up I’m really taken aback.

I’ve been working on a spreadsheet for the last few hours, coding data for my project.  Some odd combination of keys caused me to switch my color scheme from black-on-white to inverse white-on-black.  I poked around in a few places to try and fix it, but was feeling too in-the-zone to bother long.  But the next thing I did caused a new window to spawn.  I thought that was odd and stuff in the original window was going weird again, so I clicked “save”, closed the other window, and the whole thing crashed and went into document recovery automatically.  Except it didn’t recover anything… and I somehow managed to save nothing.  I guess saving while it’s in the middle of borking isn’t effective.

So here I sit, a night of work partially wasted, wondering how I could be so lame as to not have saved anything.  I think it’s because I’ve been using this desktop wiki that automatically saves every minute, and this blog automatically saves every minute… most of my programs, at least the ones that come to mind at the moment, autosave.  Oh Calc, what happened!

It is, at any rate, a great excuse to go to bed.  Sigh.  I’ve got a whole day of this head of me tomorrow.

November 15th, 2008 | Tags: bork, lame, technology | Category: life, meta | Comments Off

My parents are in town, and I’ve got so much TA stuff to do tomorrow!  Egad!  What a Friday I shall have.

November 13th, 2008 | Tags: parents | Category: life | Comments Off

It was a fairly successful day, but I’m feeling rather cranky at the moment.  I just finished grading a section’s worth of homework and I found a little cheating action in there.  Nothing makes me more cranky than people cheating on their work!  It’s not like we’re demanding an unreasonable amount.  And if you hate the class this much, maybe you should have dropped it.  Sigh.  Anyway.  Let’s not talk about this.

Let’s talk about how Lewis built me a fire tonight!  I should have taken a picture; it was marvelous.  It made our living room all toasty and homey, and it was even nice to grade papers by!  We also got our veg box tonight, and it’s full of bounty.  Oh how I love our veg box guys, even if their website only works some of the time.  Ooh, and we also went to the Co-op and got some essentials.  I had wanted to go to Ace, too, to get some more bulbs to plant before it gets too late, but Lewis and I were both pretty crashed out by the time we were ready to leave campus.

Not much else went on today.  But we have a – blessed! – holiday tomorrow!  I’m going to sleep in, and get a ton of work done, I hope I hope!  I did do a little private phonology lesson this afternoon which went okay… turns out the more phonology classes you take, the more crap you get at explaining all the fun stuff.  But I think my student got the jist and hopefully the homework won’t be too much trouble.  I’m looking forward to doing phonology in sections this week!  Too bad this is the only week of it… I feel like I’m ready to teach phonology classes!

Ooh, I also wrangled Sallie Mae today, which should count as a week’s worth of success at least.  Somehow, calling them is always a huge chore.  I even got stuck in an infinite phone tree loop today… but I prevailed, with what I’m declaring to be at least 2/3rds success.  I have all my loans deferred now for at least four years, which is a start.  A four-year-long start.  In another three and a half years I can start worrying about that last third I didn’t get taken care of today, which is to make sure they defer my loans throughout my stay in graduate school, which is predicted to be six years as the moment.  But whatever.

It’s midnight already… I really should get some sleep!  So much to do, and time passes so quickly while I’m doing it.. it’s like the very act of accomplishing work always makes me further behind!  Reminds me of one of those spider webs where the more you struggle to free yourself, the more tightly bound you become.  But I guess that’s what it’s all about.  Graduate school, that is.

November 10th, 2008 | Tags: cheating, co-op, fire, metaphors, phonology, sallie mae, vegetables | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Well, I sat down to blog, but then this cat sat in my lap and made it rather hard to type.  Short list instead:

• got transcription almost done – 13 minutes to go!
• planted some of our house plants, and daffodil bulbs!
• made delicious breakfast
• had dinner with the Lawyers – yay!

Now off to do some pre-bed reading with this toasty Boo.

November 9th, 2008 | Tags: in-laws, kitty, list, transcription | Category: life, meta | Comments Off

It’s been a week of socializing, which for me, is probably a record.  I went out Thursday with my co-TA to Sudwerk, and here I am again, blogging after a dinner at Sudwerk with more ling friends!  Lewis and I met up with another grad student who lives in my office, and her husband, and we rocked the drinks and eats… so tasty.  They actually had a pretty nice jazz band playing tonight as well, which was excellent though it did make it difficult to hear anyone talking.  Double bonus points for us – we went out to dinner with some folks for the first time, and then we invited them over!  Turns out they like games as much as we do, so we played a round of Zombie Fluxx, and then introduced them to some Cheap Ass Games (namely, Secret Tijuana Death Match).  So much fun!

And to top it all off, I even got a fair amount of work done today.  Here’s to being, I hope, one day away from being done with my transcription.  Sigh.  Too bad I have to code it after that!  Tomorrow should be good though.  A nice, calm Sunday, with a great week coming up!  Tuesday is a holiday, so we don’t have class.  Mondays have always been pretty chill.  And my parents will be in town Thursday!  Yay!  I’m rather looking forward to much in the near future.  And I’m not letting myself get too worried about the upcoming papers, though I know there’s a lot of work to be done…

For now, lets just call this much Saturday success!

November 8th, 2008 | Tags: dinner, friends, games, transcription | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I solved my one-unit problem today (as in, I had signed up for one fewer units than were required) by commiting to something fantastic.  I’m going to learn Quechua!  What have I gotten myself in to!  I do hope you expect a whole blog full of “Arggg semantics!” and “Arrggg Quechua!” next quarter, cause that’s all I’ll really have left to say.  At least I won’t be TAing that quarter.  Wooooot.

TAing actually went really well today, despite the sort of boring subject matter that is phonetics.  I think I got some kids to play with their mouths and discover their articulators and all that good stuff.  Phonology next week, which should be most righteous.  We just did contrastive and complimentary distribution in class today, so I think the next few lectures ought to be on phonological problems or processes.  Yaaay.

Also had a nice hang-out in the TA office (as always!) and secured the plan that I’m going to find a home for my big silly red rug!  Just gotta get the office swept up and vacuumed (and maybe have the floors washed?  We can apparently request this) and then the rug will be in action!  I’m so excited to finally have something to do with that thing.  Anyway, I got some good teaching tips from fellow-TA Heather, and we agreed to meet tomorrow evening for drinks and non-linguistic chatter at Sudwerk, a tasty brewpub nearby.  Lets give that a double yay for making friends and social events!

Only other piece of fantastic news today… I got some cleaning done!  I spent the morning not doing any (school) work and actually getting some much needed house tidying and cleaning done.  I got all the dishes washed, and swept and mopped the kitchen and entry way and bathrooms.  It’s still not very tidy in here, but it’s certainly a good start.  Those floors were looking pretty shoddy.  But Lewis did laundry yesterday, and the rest of the house isn’t actually that dirty, so maybe this weekend in between transcribing my interview, I can finish that up.  And finally plant our bulbs!  Egad we’ve been busy.

Life is so good!

November 7th, 2008 | Tags: decorating, drinking, friends, quechua, rug, socializing, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off