It’s going to be an early night, and thank goodness, cause I’m exhausted! I made it through midterm week. Midterm went well, and I spent about six hours grading yesterday with one of my favorite linguistics people (and co-TA) Ariel. We squatted in Sudwerk and had some drinks and snacks, and our waiter was even a linguistics major! Very surprising. Anyway, I got the rest of the papers graded this afternoon, and thus I am done with midterms! Yay!
No one came to office hours today, so I had a really relaxing day. Actually I was dreading section this morning, but our sort of short day of essay topic stuff went over really well. Students were engaged and amused, and I got to talk to each one individually about their topic choice, and it was nice. They didn’t even notice how close to being out of time we were at the end of class! So good times. Walked around the beginnings of the Whole Earth Festival that has taken over campus today. It’s way more intense than I anticipated – I knew Davis had a bunch of hippies, but this was pretty crazy! So we escaped after partaking in ice cream and some free sewing machine repair advice. Came home and cooked up a chicken I had thawed. I had meant to roast it yesterday, but ran out of time, so I was getting nervous about leaving it sitting around all uncooked. Made a spicy fried chicken instead, and holy crap was it good! I’m not a big frying-things fan, but damn, sometimes it just hits the spot. Mmm.
It’s gonna be a busy weekend. We’re going to a conference in Stanford tomorrow morning, because one of the professors in the department asked us to come with him. I’m not super keen on spending a whole surprise day at a conference, but Lewis and I weighed the lost time and stressful weekend against the probable benefit of bonding with a professor we both like, and meeting some of our peers (it’s a meeting of the graduate students and faculty of Stanford, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz) and decided it’d be worth it. So we’re meeting at the train station at 7:30 tomorrow morning for our carpool to Stanford, and then I think he’s going to drop us off at the end of the day somewhere in the East Bay so we can take the train home. Should be exciting!