The Laursonian Institute

Thinking about the sum of reasons which accumulated to determine that Lewis and I landed in California, not Washington, when we repatriated from Cambridge.  When your life is in the moment, it always seems as though there is a single, clear path by which order proceeds.  Only in retrospect do I realize how many degrees of freedom were available to me, all unseen.  I’m not displeased to have become a permanent Californian, but I’m surprised that this appears to be the case.   When you get right down to it, the reasons we’re still here are quite mundane.

1. We were getting married in Davis, a few months after returning from Cambridge, partially because my parents had moved away from Seattle and it seemed harder to get stuff done there than somewhere we had a representative living.  It was also cheaper, and we had (collectively) more California friends and relatives than Washington ones
2. Also because my parents left Seattle, there was no real support structure there when we arrived.  No place to stay while we got on our feet.
3. When we started looking for jobs, looking in the Bay Area was easier than Seattle since you can drive there for interviewing purposes, and Lewis was familiar with the area since he grew up in Oakland
4. All our stuff was in Davis, since we had driven the U-Haul here after graduation, in part to drop off Lewis’ (dad’s) car back where it belonged, and in part because it was closer and the Lawyers had space for our stuff

I suppose what it all really comes down to is that mom and dad left Seattle, and without them there to lean on while we found our way in the world, we didn’t have anything promising there.  I turned in my Washington passport for a Californian one for the same reason so many other people are here – the lure of opportunity that seems wanting in your home.

California is a lovely place.  It seems trite to even bother assessing a place of so much plenty on these terms, but the truth of it is, California is a lovely place.  A nice place to live, to work, to experience, to find yourself.  It’s so open, so accessible.  I don’t know if moving to most livable places is like my emigration here, but it’s nearly flawless.  We have our jokes, the things you have to attenuate to so the locals are appeased.  The hills are golden, not brown.  We have weather, it’s just not like your weather.  You can never have too much rain, it’s good for the crops.  Never, ever call it San Fran – and let us never again speak of Frisco.  Here in NorCal there’s only one City, even if you live in or near other metropolitan areas.  (It took me a while to get over that one, though I realize that all us Seattle metro kids always called Seattle “Downtown”, even us South Enders who were so much closer to Tacoma’s bleak downtown.)

In Davis, if not everywhere here, there’s an abounding optimism about life.  The city puts so much stock in livability, in a city for everyone to enjoy.  The attention paid to bike transit never fails to astound me and adds immeasurable quality to every day life.  I love that the bike path is full of runners and dog walkers and stroller ladies and kids biking to school every morning.  I love that everyone I pass says hello, and that even the disaffected youth aren’t getting into any more trouble than smoking pot in the arboretum.  I love that even when it’s really, really hot, the weather is dry and bearable.  I love that we get torrential rain throughout winter and spring; it’s good soup weather, and ones life should always be amenable to soup.  I can’t even express how much I love the adjacency to produce we have – I don’t know if I could live anywhere that didn’t have fresh peaches and pineapple guava and figs all summer, and squash and kale and carrots all winter.  And while I’m on the topic, let me mention what may be my favorite place in all of Davis:  I love the Co-op.  The Co-op embodies all of my favorite things about Davis and Northern California, from its social protests of Israeli goods to its cooking classes for kids, to its deep community commitment and its quirky but lovable staff.

Despite this all, I can’t help but feeling there’s a piece of me wandering the trails up north.  It’s the quiet, introspective, spiritual, hermetic me.  The shy version of myself that is checked out and disengaged and ready to process input without bias.  Maybe that’s just the feeling of my own naiveté having been left behind at a specific point in time.  I can’t help but feel like I went out for milk and never came home again, leaving all my baggage and memories and sentimental items in some abandoned apartment.  And this Californian me sometimes just yearns to be whole again, and to make use of all those lessons about life I had learned.  (It’s amazing when you realize all the things you thought were codified parts of your parents’ life strategy were just ways of passing time and pacifying bored kids).

We’re vising for a few weeks this summer, and I think we’re going to camp on the peninsula on our way up.  I’m half afraid I’m going to go native.  I’m going to pitch that tent in the Hoh and you’ll never see me again, even with the lure of your organic fruits and sunshine.  Well, except my dog will be in Davis, and the thought of his sad little brow waiting for us to come un-abandon him….  I guess I should add that to the reasons I’m still in California.

5.  My dog is still here.

June 10th, 2010 | Tags: home, homesick, life, list, past | Category: life | Comments Off

It’s on, tomorrow.  It’s my last scan.  My last bit of data collection.

My life is snowballing, thundering down a gully toward some unknowable future.  It’s all coming at me so fast.  My route branching in a thousand directions, each segment of which terminates in some unseeable end.   Every juncture presents me with the opportunity to alter my future, and every juncture reminds me that I’m already on the way to some result, some destination.

This week my brain caught fire again – a conflagration of ideas.  These moments are my most high-spirited, my most optimistic, my most productive, and to my own eyes, almost oppressively important.  The essence of my life shifts, albeit minutely, to putting in the work the last mental pyre set up.  There’s not much stopping my momentum when this spark takes, but it’s worrisome knowing that my intellectual life depends on these randomly distributed flames.  Though in all honesty it’s not as barren as that; the simple fact is that no fire burns without fuel, and with enough fuel and my brain as flint, something will catch sooner or later.

I’m sinking back into PDP modeling,  I find connectionism to hold great sway over me, and it captures my imagination better as a model of neural networks and cognitive processing abilities than any others I’m familiar with.  To make matters worse, I have been completely unenamored with phonological theory since my existential falling-out with Optimality Theory several years back.  It surprises me a great deal that some of the progenitors of OT also have a background in PDP, since the two are not particularly compatible.

I keep putting connectionism behind me as a child’s model – an intellectual fantasy that is too inherently appealing to be taken seriously.   I can’t tell if trying to work in a connectionist framework damns me to an outsiders future, but I can’t help but dabble.  I’m in this PhD business to indulge my intellectual fantasies, and hopefully to do some good research along the way.  I know myself too well to think I could very long justify giving up a model I like because it does not hold a prominent place in linguistics or cognitive science at the moment.

Today I made the first move in the new direction.  I solicited a professor with the architectural blue prints of my second qualifying paper, the first approximation of a connectionist model that incorporates the better part of several other theories in an interesting and potentially tenable way to model perception and sound change.   If it’s accepted as a topic – which I’ll more or less know by the end of the week – I’m afraid I have to formally hand in my structural linguistics passport and ally myself instead with that scourge of that theoretical social sciences…  I’m going to have to declare myself a card-carrying psycholinguistic sympathizer.  Even my former plans for myself can’t escape my brain fire.

Formal phonological theory, I’m breaking up with you.  You do not have the grounding in cognitive principles I need.   So long as you can’t fulfill my needs, I must look elsewhere.  And that elsewhere is neural modeling and neurolinguistics.  Places where there’s more to life than a well-warn philosophers armchair.   Where there is data – quantitative data!  Measurable outcomes!  Biological correlates!  You’ve told me the truth is not out there – but it is.  It’s inside every language user at every moment, and it’s there for the taking.  I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us, but I need more than you can give.  I’ll never forget you and all you taught me.  I’ll carry forth those lessons into these new and exiting lands.  But you’re holding me back.  And I have so much to accomplish.

May 18th, 2010 | Tags: brainfire, future, ideas, modeling, PDP, QP, TRACE | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

This mental space is comforting, maddening, disturbing.   An item attempting to leave orbit with no way to judge the amount of fuel it takes to leave orbit, I’m seizing anything flammable and throwing it on the pyre.  I can only pray my resources and stamina can outstrip physics, and only then will I know whether my craft can even survive the atmospheric pressure.

The future is so tangible I can feel its inevitability and irrealis in even my most mundane actions.  My advisor has been slice time corrected and smoothed and sits before me the concatenation of every time sample simultaneously existing in the moment and serving as the culmination of decades of his actions.  His purpose is realized in the fomenting of my labyrinthal crusades, and it could not have been otherwise that he exists in this moment to give me sphinx-like hints to this quixotic riddle.

My erstwhile mind fixates on my own past, my foibles, my inconsistencies, my unworthiness.  I’ve been mentally tidying, mending this dusty web of acquaintance.  Apologizing for pains I’ve caused is ultimately futile, but somehow any end is better than a loose one.   I move from situation to situation, compulsively regurgitating agonies I’d swallowed in vain hope to rid myself of them.  My social failures dog me, but hopes of reconciliation and restitution have been long vanquished.  Failing toward forgiveness I find only my prostrate shame discarded, the detritus of accumulated actions and reactions no longer relevant to the narrative.

I rouse myself from these seemingly precambrian delusions only to discover I’m entrenched in the same mundane reality I ever have been.  Reading accumulates, papers get procrastinated, I impress, aggravate, avoid the same people in the same places, and I remember to walk the dog.  The inconceivably numerous voxels of reality concatenate together to form an interminable rope from past to future I am bound to follow.  Free will somehow remains: enduring, wieldable, oppressive.

April 22nd, 2010 | Tags: advisor, failure, fate, friends, future, metaphor, past, pressure | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I feel like I’m living life with all my nerve endings exposed.  A sea anemone asking to be bruised with experience.  Grasping at the plankton’s hint of exuberance.

I can never help feeling like I’m on the cusp of either disaster or infamy when this happens.  Like the stakes are so high.  I feel invincible and reckless.

April 21st, 2010 | Tags: exhilaration, life, short | Category: life | Comments Off

Today was the first day of Spring Quarter classes for me.  It went really well.  I’ve only got two classes this quarter, and they’re both things I’m sort of inherently interested in and professors I like.  Today was Historical Linguistics (i.e. language evolution) and it’s taught by a professor I’ve not had before, but who I rather enjoy.  I’ve been working with him a little on a creolization project, for which Lewis and I recorded stimuli a while back, and he’s someone I get along with very well.  He called me a ‘kindred spirit’ in class today, and we had some hearty conversation after class about some of the applications of theoretical phonology in the functionalist / non-formalist domains.  I really feel like he may be the last missing piece of the advisor Frankenstein I’ve been trying to build.  He’s not into neuroscience, but he’s very interested in the applications of cognitive science to phonology, as I am, and that puts him more squarely in my camp than most neuroscientists anyway.  His class is being run in a discussion-oriented manner, and I did a surprisingly large amount of talking today for a first class sort of day.  It’s nice to have a professor teach to you sometimes, which he tends to do since I’m really the only phonologist in the class, and I’m feeling quite up on the theory points we were debating today.  Anyway, it should be a good class and I think I may ask him to be on my committee before too long.

Other than that, I’m feeling generally really on top of things here.  I’m surprisingly confident about my project and my ability to do it and write a good paper from it.  I did my first fMRI scanner operating this past weekend and it’s certainly not hard.  After so much practice in the operator training, it doesn’t feel strange to stick people in the machine, and running the controls is quite straight-forward.  I thought it might be more scary than it really was, but it’s all so automated and the magnetic field is so basically harmless I don’t feel like I can do that much wrong.  I’ll be doing my next session this weekend, and I have the first date to try my own study booked already.  It’s coming up really soon, but I’m so excited to get it off the ground and get my first subjects in the scanner, I really can’t wait.  I keep telling myself that doing it at all is a laudable achievement in my own eyes – I’ve been wanting to do an fMRI study since I learned it was possible in my first lingusitics class.  I’m so excited that it’s finally going to happen, even if I don’t want to stick with cognitive neurolinguistics after this, I’ll be glad I had the chance to try it.

So it’s going to be a good quarter.  I’m being paid to do my own research this quarter in stead of TAing, and I’m taking a few units with my advisor for that same purpose.  I can’t help but finish getting my data together this quarter.  If only the analysis goes smoothly, I may well have this QP out on time!

March 30th, 2010 | Tags: classes, ERW, research, scanner, study | Category: school | Comments Off

I showed Lewis a sample of my handwriting from high school, and it’s almost unbearably minuscule.  Crafted with such precision and detail as to be unreadable.  At the time, that’s exactly what I was hoping.  I could put thoughts so tiny down on paper; so tiny that few would see and fewer would care.  It’s almost as good as writing in code, but better at capturing the meta-level of feeling like a minuscule, illegible individual.

It has been remarked on occasion that I’m more aware of my motives and thoughts than others.  I often wonder how much of this is made up, and how much of this is just the product of too long staring into my own self.  I can’t imagine myself any other way, and a failure of this kind of imagination not only serves to create an infinity of shyness, but the surety of action.  I am the way I am because there’s no other possible way for me to be.  I’ve always felt very sensitive to insincerity and falsehoods – not that I haven’t used my share of both –  but it has keep me on the straight and obvious path in most situations.  When one thing is clearly contrary to my nature, there’s no reason to pursue it.  This strong feeling of right and wrong which seems so entirely undeniable in my make-up also makes me feel like a good case for morality in atheism.  It’s not because some religious authority told me to act the way I do, but because my parents raised me with a strong moral pole.

On the other hand, knowing oneself too well can be very much a maddening endeavor.  When I feel unsettled about something, it’s almost consuming.  The irreconcilability of two potential actions, the lack of an obvious right, the need for action without precedent… all of these cause me undue anxiety.  In situations which require tact, politics, strategy, or serious compromise, I might as well be lost at sea.   There aren’t many situations where what I want and what should be possible or allowable don’t match up.   I generally work hard for what I want, and achieve that, and am satisfied with my results.    Or I don’t try, and I don’t desire whatever result would have come from that effort.

Now, I’m stuck in the middle of something ridiculous, but my brain keeps running over and through the situation.  I’m feeling a little drunk on success of such a minor variety, but I want to repeat it again and again.   After all these miles I’ve come, I’m still the illegible tiny-writing girl dreaming of acceptance and popularity in some circle of those I respect and want to know.  I pick someone I think is a person to aspire to, and I want to know them.  I want them to know me, accept me, encourage and inspire me.  I need intellectual stimulation based in respect and safety and mutual enjoyment.

This weekend, Lewis and I and another couple had a few beers together, and I felt like I was living that moment.  It was a pair I really respect and enjoy, and I want them to like me.  We had a really good night, and I think it was enjoyed by everyone involved.  I want more, but the issue is impossible to push.  The very knowledge that you desire someone else’s company this much is a damnable offense.  It demonstrates irrefutably the political and power imbalance in the dynamic, and I come out on the bottom side.  If having a good time with someone I look up to means this much to me, there’s no way I have anything to offer in return of equal value.  Nothing I can do will mean a quarter as much as this couple having a laugh with me, and it’s so incredibly maddening to know that.

I also know this isn’t likely the way anyone else involved sees it.  I can’t double-think, though the talent would be incredibly useful, and as such, I’ve already ruined it for myself.  I’ve let something get to me, and it’s tarnished me a little.  These moments of mine which are from the heart and soul, and not the mind, are impossible to enjoy without rusting the polished exterior.  If it’s something I’ve worked for, there’s sombre joy at the knowledge of success.  Success at the endeavor of being me and being liked for it is… like watching a movie so engrossing and beautiful that when the credits roll, you can’t help but feel a little more empty.  I see past myself, and the vision of myself as a confident and likable person just leaves everyday-me with an assurance of the impossibility of it all.

Yet I tell myself this – there have been, time and again in my life, people who rouse my spirits to this degree.  And there shall be again.  I’ve reached that point of being settled enough in Davis that I’m longing for friends and laughs outside my own humble walls.  And friends will come – it took me years in all my new homes to find my Bryannes, my Steens, Cerises, Darins, Armands… and I’m already at an advantage here.  I have a happy home life, a lovely husband, a large social network, and twice the confidence of prior years.  I just need to give myself the time and space and opportunity to find those people Lewis and I can spend countless days sparring and joking and theorizing with on the smallest of life’s details.  There are so many invigorating people on this earth, how long can it before we fall into the orbit of another?

March 22nd, 2010 | Tags: doubt, friends, self | Category: life | Comments Off

There’s a quiet in Davis that used to unnerve me.  At night it settles in, leaving only the faint ocean roar of the 80 in the distance.  All those people hurrying to San Francisco, or Tahoe, or who knows where blend into a white noise as subtle and compressed as the Tule fog.  No planes overhead, no dogs barking, no BART, no beats or bass lines from cruising cars.  No yelling, no shopping carts, no bangs, booms, shots, or sirens.  It used to be so disarming, coming up from Oakland for a night, to have night settle in and dampen all but this ribbon of freeway.  I don’t appreciate the quiet now, though it no longer makes my ears strain for hints of auditory mischief.

Despite living in what counts, for the west coast at least, as the middle of nowhere, Davis is indisputably on edge of the urban fabric.  The freeway is a constant reminder that we’re a stones throw from the crossroads of everything.  San Francisco pulls like a magnet in our conceptual field.  Sacramento is like a neighborhood everyone just forgets to visit.  Tahoe is our back yard disguised as a country club.  Half the cities you’ve ever heard of in California are a stones throw away.  Davis is tangled in the roots of Northern California’s transportation bindweed.

This irreconcilability is part of what erodes away the impression of inapproachableness I used to feel about Davis.  That this town was a proud, staid, calm, settled place.  It is those things, but it’s also full of undergraduates finding their place in life.  It has local produce and Co-op supporting hippies and keggers and midterms and pool parties.  It has a tight core Davisite community, but also a population that supports more pizza places and bars per capita than seems possible.  In the end, it’s just a town.  A funny, slightly quirky town – the sort that orders brand new low-emissions double-decker busses and whose major town event involves a parade of home-made bikes and antique farm equipment – but a town nonetheless.  For every boycotter of Israeli-made products picketing outside the Co-op, we have a handful traffic scofflaws parading around Davis like it’s their private property.

For all of this, Davis is great.  Approachable, amusing, and immensely livable.  I’m happy to be here, making memories and building a life surrounded by such warm and likable people.  But there’s this part of me that seems to be as strong as ever, this sense of home burned into my being, that won’t ever let me feel at peace here, or anywhere.  I can be on the winning team, but I’ll never have the home-court advantage.  I accept this as reality, as something I do not strive to change, but I can acknowledge that a piece of me believes in something I can no longer grasp.  There are all these memories built up already, of places, and sounds, and smells, and feelings which belong so wholly to another time and another land that they may as well belong to a different life, surfacing like deja vu from some past existence.

Today, this spiritual hallucination is the ocean.  My ocean is different than the one we have here.  It has sand which is perpetually cold, and so very hard.   Stinking banks of seaweed are scarce, but driftwood stacks in huge piles at the high water line.  There are no seals or dolphins to speak of, but tide pools enough to fill even the longest days.  Buckets of sand dollars are waiting to be found; an infinity of small rocks hide an unimaginable number of even smaller crabs.  The beach is pierced again and again with clear, very cold streams running into the Pacific.  If you look long enough, you may see a deer or raccoon on the margins, where forest abruptly gives way to sand.  There are no bed-and-breakfasts, no hotels with outdoor pools, no steakhouses.  Just a cold, steady wind threatening to give you windburn, water so cold you don’t dare put more than your toes in, and misty, rainy silence so deafening you can’t help but know yourself in that moment.  You’re not on the path from metropolis to metropolis, from urban sprawl to urban center.  You’re hours away from everything.  So far from any kind of civilized life that no one even really lives here.  It’s just you, this pavement disguised as sand, and the crushing, life affirming solitude that is the coast as its meant to be.

February 28th, 2010 | Tags: davis, home, life, memories, ocean, sea, town | Category: life | Comments Off

Namely, me.

It’s been a rather busy quarter so far, but we’ve just now reached the midway point.  I’ve had some kind of massively successful day.  These are my favorite sort – the kind where you wake up thinking to yourself that it’s going to be a rough day, and then you just nail everything as the day goes.  Perfect performance in all realms.  I feel like I’m being an accommodating, thorough individual and life is repaying me by letting me make a good impression on people and do a decent job at the things I care about.

I recorded stimuli for a creolization project this morning.  It was a little like an IPA pop quiz, and I was doing it as a favor for a buddy of mine and a professor whose class I’m taking next quarter.  Wanted to do a good job, and it seems as though it went just fine.  Recorded each set 10 times, and wasn’t asked to redo anything.  Only little mishap was that my head is producing some ridiculous clicking noise, which sometimes happens to me.  I think it might be when I’m getting sick or something, my nasal cavity increases in pressure when I’ve closed my velum and it makes my ears pop.  I had noticed this a while ago and thought it was just something I could only hear in my own skull, but apparently it’s loud enough to get picked up on the microphone and disturb my recording a little.  I think they can edit it out, but it’s a little embarrassing to have a head which pops and cracks of its own volition!

After that I headed to the lab to meet with my advisor for the first time in two weeks.  We had a really good meeting, very relaxed and pleasant, and on top of that, also productive.  He seemed impressed with the work I had been doing while he was out of town, and I’ve gotten the go-ahead on the design I came up with in his absence.  Furthermore, he’s been talking about me to more famous psycholinguist types, and had a discussion about phonemic adaptation with Greg Hickok!  Apparently Hickok has been working on a phonological adaptation experiment as well, but with whole phonemes instead of features.  I’m not sure what the status of his project is now since researchers are generally pretty close-lipped about work before it gets published, but it sounds like he did find some effects which is incredibly encouraging for our study!  I think it also made my advisor happy to see that famousy psycholinguist types are also doing work in our area and, to quote him, “the field is still wide open”.   Anyway, we tooled around with our experiment design and landed on a scheme we like, so I’m at the point where I’m ready to record some stimulus and start putting things together to prepare for our first pilot runs in the MRI.   Whoohoo!

In a related note, I also ran in to my advisor’s wife (who also works at the center) and she had some very nice things to say about me.  I’ve never really met her before, but she stopped in an office I was in to see who I was and tell me that she edited the letter of rec that my advisor wrote for me and was very impressed with me.  She was being a little jokey about it, but it’s nice to hear someone say, even jocularly, that I’m an impressive person and that she was hoping they’d be able to keep me around in the lab because what I do is very cool.  If that’s the content of my advisor’s letter of rec, I feel like I’m in rather good hands.   It’s the back-door equivalent of having someone stop you and tell you that your advisor has been talking about how great you are.  Many yays for that!

Speaking of people speaking well of me, I also got into a little snafu over my assignments next quarter.  Apparently I had been assigned to be a reader for the historical linguistics class that Lewis’ advisor is teaching, and that he had specifically requested me.  Unfortunately, my advisor was also hoping to give me a graduate student research position in the lab (ie, no TAing-type work, only research work you actually get paid for, as opposed to all the research I’m doing anyway but not getting paid for).  I hadn’t meant for this to be a surprise for the department, since I presumed it was being communicated to people that this spring was my ‘free’ quarter, which the fellowship I won last year allowed me to have.  Turns out, there is no ‘free’ quarter since they can’t afford my fees if I don’t work and they had given my a job without telling me.  Needless to say, my department chair wasn’t really happy to hear I thought I was going to be a researcher not a reader, and it was a bit of a debacle.  At any rate, he called my advisor while we were meeting and last I heard was he had backed down from saying I needed to do this readership and told me advisor ‘we should do whatever is best for Laurie’.  That’s a very good place to be, even if it’s causing the department some strife.  I’m not sure what the final outcome is going to be, but it sounds like one way or the other, I’ll get that research position, even if I have to do both jobs.  Which would, on the bright side, be a decent amount of money!

Last, and I suppose least, I think we also finally picked a project for our phonetics paper, and it’s something I’m actually surprisingly interested in.  It’s going to be a very short paper which is only an experimental design, and I’m coauthoring it with two of my best friends in my cohort.  Yes, that does compute to something like 1.5 pages each.  I’m really looking forward to that, especially given the frustrating next week I’m potentially having in my psychology class.  I got my presentation moved up a week by surprise, and I’ve got a rough draft of that paper due the same day.  I’ll get it done.  I’m feeling so on top of the world right now.

February 9th, 2010 | Tags: advisor, compliments, lab, linguists, phonetics, project, QP, recording, stimuli | Category: school | Comments Off

So.. we got a dog!  And thus, it’s been a week of high expectations and stress and patience.

Our doggie is a very good dog.  We’re had the surprise yesterday to discover he’s not really a mutt.  He’s the spitting image of a Glen of Imaal Terrier, and I’m feeling prepared to say he’s not a mutt at all.  Add to that the fact that he’s surprisingly well trained, and I think we have an escaped fancy dog.  I don’t understand how he failed to get adopted in the pound, since we got him from a rescue organization.  Perhaps the rescue groups just pick up all the good dogs from the pound as they come in?  At any rate, he’s house trained, he kennels, heels on the leash, doesn’t bark, ignores our cat (99% of the time), and doesn’t beg.  He loves  belly rubs, brushes, and sleeping on his doggie pillow.

Despite all this, the life adjustment has been a little rough, but pretty fulfilling.  We’ve been trying to be proactive about getting him exercise and entertainment so he’s manageable at home and tired for when we kennel him.  So Lewis and I have been getting up at 7 to take him on a walk so we can fit it in before classes, and then again when we get home and take him out of his kennel.  It’s been working really well – he gets mighty sleepy after he gets home and eats, and he’s been really good about kenneling and sleeping through the night.  All the fresh air and exercise is good for us, and a very pleasant way to start the day!

All in all, I think that makes the dog experiment successful.  I’ll be glad when Watson gets his silly cone off (he’s been bothering his neutering scar) which should be in a day or two.  It’s been a mighty expensive week, but making a happy and whole household sometimes means taking a dive like this.   So here’s to another good week, tired and distracted though it may be.

January 22nd, 2010 | Tags: dog | Category: home | Comments Off