The Laursonian Institute

With her faithful steed by her side, the Laurie plows ahead.

Well, there’s no good way to sum up my days these days except to say: I read the hell out of my day.  I woke up, put food in my mouth, read, went grocery shopping, read, had dinner, and finally finished reading!  Yay!  Knocked back my first Bloomfield essay today, which was nice to get off my plate.  I put together a little plan for what essays to read on what days, and I know it probably doesn’t matter much, but that’s how my brain works.  Gotta read long essays on less busy days, short essays in short spurts, etc., etc. So it was a long-essay day.  Got through a good, basic, foundational-type work from 1914 that sort of set out everything I’m supposed to know about the basics of linguistics in fancy-pants philosopher talk.  Except it’s all the stuff we learned all those years in undergrad, so it was more like a little review than a mind-blowing experience.  Still, nice to get the explanations of the basics by guys laying them down, instead of reading one of the modern textbook reduxes like the kids I’m teaching now.  Plus, I learned like 15 new words today, which is pretty impressive!  At any rate, the picture at the right there should serve as a pretty good summary image of my entire life at this point.  Looks cosy, doesn’t it?

Only other notable success today, besides actually having gone grocery shopping, is that I finally threaded my new sewing machine!  The directions they sent me were lacking some pretty crucial information, and Lewis and I both read through and failed to get it working the first night.  Watched a slew of youtube videos — the first constructive use I’ve found for them! — and managed to get my way through.  Momentary major disasters aside, I sewed two things together!  Hurrah!  Maybe tomorrow or the next day I’ll get to repair some of my stuff, which is what I’m really looking forward to.

I had planned to make pumpkin ice cream tonight, but I just didn’t have it in me after all that reading.  It’s crazy how difficult it is to switch modes from this stuff.  Like I’ve mentioned, I’m reading in a manner I’ve never tried before, and it’s both mentally exhausting and really rewarding.  I’ve never lived this cerebrally before, and it’s mind-blowing in its own way.  I feel like sometimes my mind just completely empties when I’m trying to do something like remember how to make a sandwich, and it’s not as if I’m thinking about linguistics… I don’t even know what I’m thinking about.   I’m just failing to do anything at all.  But I don’t mind so much, it’s a bit like being on my own private mental adventure, full of mystery and surprises around every turn!  With that in mind, tomorrow I start my first full week.  Phew.  I feel like I’ve been in school a year already.

September 28th, 2008 | Tags: forgetfulness, reading, sewing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Berkeley day today!  Yay!

But before the Berk, I started the day off right.  Sort of.  I’ve been feeling like I’m swimming upstream a bit all week, or at least since class started.  So of course, I woke up 15 minutes before the alarm went off and I panicked about being ready to leave on time, and whether I could squeeze any work in before Lewis got up, and what to have for breakfast, and whether I should blog, and all that ridiculous stuff.  So I got up and made apple cinnamon muffins, which are superb.  And I blogged!  At the end of the day (or morning, really) what really matters is that we got out of the house on time, without forgetting anything, and with breakfast in our tummies.

So I went to Albany, and I got my hair cut, which was badly in need of being done.  Cost me way more than I should probably be spending on these sorts of things, but I just have not gotten around to figuring out who else to go to, and besides, I love Melody.  She’s a really cool person and she’s been doing my hair since we moved to the Bay Area, and frankly is the only hair stylist I’ve ever had.  I fear trying to find another one, though I’m sure someone in Davis ought to be able to at least placate me.  It’s not so much about the hair as trusting and liking someone to do it.

Anyway, post-hair we headed to the Berkeley Farmers Market to grab a little lunch and meet up with Nina, the person I miss most from the Bay.  The Farmers Market was cute, and had tasty foods for us to consume.  Saw lots of neat booths as well, and I was glad to see it was a different variety of people that go to either the El Cerrito or Oakland markets, so it felt a litlte unique.  Thence to Jupiter to meet up with Armand and have a few pints.

It’s always so heartwarming and life-affirming to spend time doing nothing with the people you like the most.  It’s so great to see Armand, and he fits in so well to Berkeley!  I’m glad he finds the place comfortable and to his liking.  So we had a few pints, talked about the good old days, introduced Nina to Arms and vice versa.   Yay.

Home again, and back to studying.  Made it through the first of the papers I need to read for 280, and got all the notes I needed for that one as well.  Very  pleased with how the wikinotes are going — I took almost 4000 words worth for Saussure!  Labov was much easier reading, and sadly I didn’t enjoy it as much as the Saussure.  I seem to be getting into the more cerebral philosophical papers, and I suppose sociolinguistics has never really been my forte.  Also sad but true… this blog is slowly going to turn into barely coherent linguistic musings and/or braindump.  Sorry, non-existent readers!

September 27th, 2008 | Tags: berkeley, friends, pints, reading | Category: life | Comments Off

Guess I’m going to start writing these in the mornings, or perhaps more intermittantly overall.  This grad school stuff keeps me busy!

Yesterday was my first day in LIN 1, the class I TA for.  The way my classes are arranged now, I have all my “real” classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and all my TA classes on MWF.  The class went really well!  It was just about what I expected – bleary eyed freshman all hping they don’t have to buy the reader and don’t have to come to my discussion sections, which are primarily on Fridays.  The good news is, the discussion sections aren’t required, so they won’t show up anyway.  Talked with my Co-TA Dionne after class and got some good pointers from her.  She’s thinking about maybe getting our in-session exercises done this week so we can hand them to the disabilities center to get translated to Braille for our blind student.  Not only is this probably a reasonable idea, it’s also makes my anxiety level really decrease about planning my lessons.  If we do them together, especially with such an experienced TA (she’s taught this course, and TAed for it 6 times already!) I really don’t think I can get in too much trouble.

Spent a little while reading on campus after that, and I must say that so far the main library is very satisfactory!  Read quite a bit of Saussure in there while waiting for Lewis to get out of his Latin class.  I was on so much of a roll with my reading we actually put off meeting until a while later, and I got quite a lot done.  I finished up that Saussure last night, and I feel really triumphant about it!  It was a thick, heavy, reading and I feel like maybe for the first time I really understood and was totally behind what the author was saying.  I think the wiki note taking really does help.  Saussure also is a pretty hilarious graph maker, and I think later I’ll put up some of my favorite Saussurian hilari-graphs.

Also had the Linguistics Grad Student Association (do we have an official title like that?  I’d like to think so) mixer.  Had pizza at Steves, which was bueno!  They were sort of finishing up when we finally got there, since my reading took so long, and we wanted to drop by the bookstore and copy shop before hand to get the materials for our new class.  Sadly the readers were 45 bucks each, and the books 40 a piece, so we knocked back a few hundred bucks in books yesterday I was hoping we were done with already.  Oh well.   Anyway, the pizza party was friendly, and it was nice to get to gossip a little bit about what’s going on with our classes and the department and all that.  And to verify with our compadres that we’re all a little lost and overwhelmed at the moment.  Good times!

Came home, watched the debate, and finished that reading… a very productive night.  Debate wasn’t great, but it was interesting.  Guess that’s maybe what one should hope for on those things.  Today — to Berkeley!  Going to see Nina, Armand, and get my hair cut.  Should be great!

September 27th, 2008 | Tags: classes, debate, graphs, reading, saussure, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Can’t manage any more than a good bad list tonight.  I’m tired, frustrated, nervous, resigned, excited, aprehensive, defeated, and at the moment a bit taciturn.  Anyway:

The Good

• got the laundry done
• got my sewing machine delivered
• finished chapter one of the LIN 1 reading
• had a nice walk & talk this evening

The Bad

• see above list of tumultuous mood swings
• couldn’t figure out how to thread sewing machine
• something happened to Boo outside today (something peed on his neck? maybe?) and he’s been sad all day
• Lewis is maybe getting the flu
• failed to make dinner, or pumpkin bread, both of which I had big plans for
• spent an unjustifiable amount of time futzing with new email programs trying to get something to check my two addresses non-buggily
• additionally: something in my wordpress is fucking up, so I can’t even post this blog.

Tomorrow = first day of classes.  Happily, I’m not nearly as nervous as I could be about this.  I know most of the 1st years now, and I already know and like the professor.  We’ve been doing orientations all week, so I already know where the building is and all that, and I feel a bit like an “old hand” around the department.  I even have my “own” (read: shared with 6 other TAs) office.  Also, I only have one class tomorrow, and one class Friday, which seems like a nice small load.  Now to go to bed so I can get up at an appropriately early hour.

September 24th, 2008 | Tags: class, good/bad, nerves | Category: life, meta, school | Comments Off

Herbagic Success

I’m drinking ginger tea, and listening to an old Chris Cornell album.  It still feels funny to me to call any of his solo stuff “old”, but at this point I really can’t deny the fact.  Anyway, I listened to a track of the album he’s releasing soon and it was a really odd experience. If you can suspend your disbelief that Chris Cornell’s voice is coming out of a dance club hit, it sounds like an average-to-decent dance club hit.  With the added bonus that Chris Cornell’s voice is in it.  If the merest hint of “Soundgarden” assails your psyche… it’s all lost.  I don’t think I’ll buy it, and sadly that means this will be the first Chris Cornell thing I’ll pass on willingly…. but it’s time to let him go.  Besides, I just got a sweet Soundgarden rarity (Japanese issue only!) last time I was at Sonic Boom, so I’ve got pleanty of the past to live off of.

There were several triumps today, mixed into that (temporarily) overwhelming malaise I get.  I’ll do the rest of today in the old list format, since it’s getting late and I’ve got one of my biggest triumphs to celebrate ;)

Good:

• Murder Burger
• planted house herbs in herb garden! (see photo above…)
• cat sitting for the Lawyers
• may have figured out some tax stuff
• remember to pay student loans at last minute (and it should be the last one for a while!)
• finally got comedy central videos to work!  hurrah!

Bad

• general type malaise
• work up with one hip all twisted up from gardening yesterday
• spent too long in our desk chairs… need nicer desk chairs.
• failled to go to Yolopalooza

Now… off to watch the last Daily Show!  I’m so spoiled.

September 20th, 2008 | Tags: colbert, daily show, good/bad, soundgarden | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Triumphantly Exhausted Boo

Today was a very entertaining day!

It was supposed to be the first day of our graduate student orientation stuff, but Lewis and I got a bit of a late start and decided to skip the non-mandatory first session this morning.  We did go to campus anyway though, to check out the bookstore and see if we could figure out what books we need.  The bookstore was in a bit of chaos with student workers still running around and putting everything up on the shelves, but we did manage to at least see what our required books were.  Took some photos of the ISBN numbers on my phone so we could go home and see if the interwebs could work any magic for us.

We were pretty famished by then as it was already after lunch time, and we still had a trip to Ace in our future, so we took ourselves to Sams to get our schwarma on. I do love Sams. Anyway, thereafter to Ace to pick up some stuff like gloves for the garden and a lightbulb we couldn’t find elsewhere. Luck on all fronts!

Ace also has a nice selection of ornamental grasses, which is what we’re thinking we want to put in the front yard in lieu of palm tree. Lewis has this wonderful vision in mind of a little pebbled path with grasses and a little bench to hang out on. Not sure how we’re going to achieve said thing, but we at least find a grasses-supplier which is better than I thought we might do. Ace also has bulbs out and ready for spring planting! I was just reading that we should be planting our daffodils and tulips soon, and voila, Ace has bulbs for like 10 different sorts of daffodil, and some nice looking iris and crocus as well. We’re about to go bulb-hog wild.

Those cheeky clouds.

Rest of the day was pretty lazy. I threw together a preliminary budget, while Lewis did a little gardening in the front yard. Boo escaped out the front door while I was walking in and out, and we decided it was maybe time to graduate the little guy to ourdoor privilages. I watched him pretty nervously for the first while until he eventually scared himself back indoors. He seemed pretty tuckered out after such big adventuring, and he pretty much slept the rest of the afternoon (see figure above).

Lewis and I took a late afternoon jaunt to the local park to investigate the screamy soccer noises we were hearing, and spent a while looking at clouds and talking about silly coveted childhood toys. I’m really tempted to troll ebay looking for Micro Machines now! Boy, those things were pretty fantastic. We also identified several excellent looking clouds. The picture on the left is one that looked like a big hand, so Lewis is giving it a high-five. I promise it looked more like a hand in real life.

Polished off the day with delicious stir fry noodles, finally getting around to watching La Dolce Vida, and drinking one of our donated bottles of red wine left from the housewarming party. All in all, a wonderful movie, and the perfect cap to a fantastic day!

September 16th, 2008 | Tags: boo, bookstore, gardening, movie | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Good grief it’s been a busy day!

Another one of those getting chores done types, but they do leave you feeling like a tidying superhero.  I got our papers organized, and got Comcast to agree they sent me a silly bill for an account that’s closed.  Made breakfast, lunch, and dinner (triple play!), paid rent, tidied up the living room a bit, and finally took care of those bread crusts we’d been petrifying and turned them into gallons of croutons.

We also managed to kick up some neighborhood controversy today, because the arborists came to cut down our silly palm tree.  The Lawyers were thinking the palm tree had reached the end of its usefulness in life, as it was now taller than our house and thus provided only a view of the craggy trunk bit.  It also harbored a lot of screamy birds (not that this relates to it’s cut-down-ability) and was filling our lawn with palm tree seedlings.  I don’t really mind one way or the other about it, since it’s not my house to begin with, but it will be nice to be able to plant some more garden-like elements in that space, and to pretty up the fence and front yard at eye-level.  I do hope the birds don’t miss it too much.  I just about jumped out of my skin when they took it down for-really.  I assumed they were going to cut it down in hunks and take it away like that, but instead they just hacked it off at the base and felled it between our house and our neighbors.  For a minute I thought we were having an earthquake, it really shook the whole house.  Can’t imagine what it’s like losing a tree like that in a storm or something.

Anyway, we certainly felt like the bad guys around here.  The neighbor next door gave Lewis some grief about it, including about how we should have used it to put up an owl box… (standard answer: “well, we’re not the landlords”).  And our neighborhood busybody (and resident eight year old) was aghast we’d do anything that rash.  He saved us a couple seeds, one of which he has probably already planted, in case we change our minds.   He also mumbled something to Francie when she came over about having cut down a native plant… which of course isn’t true.  But really… he’s eight.  Sorry about the tree, Nate.

Tomorrow is our very first day of graduate student orientation activities!  All this week is pretty light stuff since it’s run by the graduate student body whatever and isn’t official university or department stuff.  Serious stuff starts next week with my manditory day-long TA trainings and the hopefully informative department introduction.  And I’m finally starting to get nervous!

September 15th, 2008 | Tags: chores, neighbors, orientation, tree | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Got in a few hours late this morning, but still early enough (8-ish) that we saw the sun rise over Sacramento. Ben was kind enough to pick us up from the station, which was great. The only hitch we had was that the Amtrak folks forgot to get our baggage off the train! We were the only people getting off at Davis (tee hee) and it somehow just slipped through the cracks. The agent at Davis called the train and was supposed to have them pull it at Martinez, but it actually made it all the way to San Jose (joke here) before someone found it. They were supposed to put it on the next northbound train, but that too was forgotten, so all told it took it till 5:00 pm to show up. I’m not a bit bothered since we didn’t have to do anything today and there was nothing in it but dirty clothes. Amtrak always impresses me with the level of customer service, even if stuff like this gets messed up in the meantime. The Davis agent called us personally three or four times today to let us know the status, and it was clear that the issue wasn’t systematic so much as so-and-so was being absentminded and so-and-so was too busy to do this or that. It makes me feel like we’re all dealing with reasonable people, like some sort of rider-and-operator cooperative that works because everyone involved loves it. Yay Amtrak.

Anyway, this morning I crashed after we got back home since sleeping last night on the train wasn’t entirely restorative. I slept way better than the trip up, mostly owing to having a fully operational seat this time, but any kind of sleeping sitting up is sure to be suboptimal. So I got up this morning for the second time a hair before noon. We ran some errands downtown after that expecting our bag to show up by three. We hit up Sophia’s for lunch, the post office to mail something for Francie, Ace for some supplies, and finally the Co-op so we’ll have some essen tomorrow. Got a call that our bag wouldn’t be here till five and we came back home and unloaded.

I picked up the luggage when it finally arrived, and then turned right around and went to the Lawyers’ for dinner. They had invited us over to see the USC / Ohio State game and tell them about our trip, and it was lovely to catch up. They’re leaving in a few days themselves to go to Hawaii for a bit as part of a fundraiser auction they won. Should be nice! As for us… orientation starts early next week! Egad. Hard to believe we’re already that far along. Summer is nearly (actually?) over and the leaves are already starting to show evidence of turnage… it’s mid-September!

September 13th, 2008 | Tags: amtrak, baggage, chores, football | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Portland's Amtrak Station

Sitting here in Eugene, Oregon waiting for something or other. I really love the Amtrak, and it always makes me a little sad when it gets caught in train traffic or behind track work or something and people blame Amtrak for the delay. It’s almost never Amtrak’s fault, as far as I understand it, since Amtrak does not control or in any way operate the tracks or schedules, but merely runs these passenger trains. At any rate, we got stuck for a good 45 minutes outside Eugene, and now we’re sitting at the platform waiting for something to happen. We’re quite a bit behind schedule, but for an interstate train it still doesn’t seem too bad. Luckily I have this here laptop, upon which I loaded the Linux port of Civilization II for the Lewis to play in just these sort of situations. Yay!

September 12th, 2008 | Tags: amtrak, games, trains, travel, vacation | Category: life | Comments Off