Things that have happened recently
- I have graduated with an MA in linguistics! The advantage of an enormous, faceless, anonymous university is that it is impossible for everyone to graduate at once. At the UofC, there was one commencement ceremony for all undergrads and MAs and PhDs, and it took forever and you had to sit through a lot of names and awards being given to people you don't know. At my current school, however, it is so huge that glomping everyone together like that would result in a 12-hour ceremony, so they divide it up by department. That meant that there was a special Linguistics Department ceremony, and I knew almost everyone and I cared about the awards and I liked the speakers and it lasted just long enough. I was also mentioned by name in the faculty address, when the speaker--Professor Oakes--started off with a lighthearted discussion of how he showed up late that morning, just the way he showed up an hour late to my MA oral exam. Then he apologized. Then he gave a terrific address that kind of addressed all my concerns about life in general, and told me everything I know intellectually, but still needed to hear again. It was the nicest graduation ceremony I've ever been to, although I still think that the silly music they play is silly, especially when the (very short) procession of graduates walks too slowly so there's an extra twelve measures of people standing and waiting for the silly music to end. But the food was good: sushi, guacamole, fruit, vegetables and dip, Mediterranean finger food, champagne, and cake.
- I have had two weeks of no responsibilities! It's been great. As I mentioned before, I will be working in Professor Oake and Professor Hall's laboratory (unpaid on my own projects, but still with dedicated desk space), but I needed a special key for that to happen. The key didn't come for about two and a half weeks*, so I spent the time doing a combination of baking and television watching.
- The television watching has been amazing! I have spent the last eight years or so without my own television, so I've been catching up on what I've missed. These include TV shows like "Dexter," (recommended by Melissa), "Dead Like Me" (recommended by my mother), and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (which my mother has been recommending for a long time, and which I always thought was just way too beneath me and unintellectual. However, I gave it a shot, and except for the execrable acting by Angel, it's quite amusing, and full of all sorts of nice fistfights with demons and vampires and stuff. I love Spike. He's quite a brilliant character. A harmless vampire who's all brooding and angsty because he has a soul and feels bad about hurting people and he and his human girlfriend can never have a good life together---that's tiresome. However, a harmless vampire who's all brooding and angsty because he really wants to kill people but has a chip in him that renders him impotent (and yes, they have a good time with that metaphor!) and meanwhile his vampire girlfriend has dumped him for a fungus demon--that's hilarious!)
- Baking has been less amazing, but probably good for me in the long run. The problem with living with a husband and no one else in a household means that when a recipe goes wrong in an edible-but-not-very-interesting way, there's no one to help eat it, but you feel bad about just throwing it away. So I've been experimenting a little, because as good as chocolate chip cookies and pies are, they get boring after a while. Recently it's been cupcakes, but the last recipe I tried ended up tasting quite a bit like a boxed cake recipe, which usually is not the goal when you're making something from scratch.
- I've also been hiking! The husband and I have been doing ten-mile-ish hikes every weekend. Two weeks ago we climbed Mt. Olympia (one of the less Mt. Diablo peaks) and saw beautiful late-season wildflowers. Last weekend we climbed Mt. St. Helena, the highest peak in the Bay Area. The hike itself was pretty easy, because the trailhead starts halfway up the mountain, and the majority of the route is a fire trail with a very gentle grade, but the views from the top were beautiful. Here's Mr. Philena: (if you look closely you can see the summit-marker at his feet.)
This weekend we'll be doing another hike up the north side of Mt. Tam. It should be full of nice redwoods and ferns and maybe some late-blooming rhododendrons.
- I've been doing more reading of Les Miserables in French! I started it over Christmas break, and I have now finished volume one and started on volume two. In terms of page count I'm probably about halfway done, and I suspect I'll finish it this summer. I tried to read Anna Karenina in Russian with much less success, but perhaps I'll try to keep my Russian up with short stories first, before attempting another doorstop.
- Mr. Philena and I have been reading O. Henry stories. I, along with every other eight-grader in the country, read "The Gift of the Magi," but I've never read any of his others, and they're all good. Some of them are predictable, but, like a good basketball play, the fact that you see the ending coming doesn't necessarily mean that it's any less successful. So Mr. Philena correctly predicted that the ivy leaf had been painted on the wall, and I correctly predicted that the new servant girl was the missing fiancee from Ireland, and neither of us saw coming that the whole time she couldn't read, but all of the stories work equally well.
- Lunchtime!
*When Professor Hall emailed me to ask delicately, "So . . . you planning on coming in this summer?" I explained the problem, and she procured me a key right away. I went to the lab for the first time yesterday and did things like turning on my computer, updating the antivirus which had been languishing untouched for two and half weeks, and reading through a statistics book that I'll be working on this summer. Then she showed up and we chatted about a seminar she'll be teaching next semester (and which I'll be taking), which she is using me as a sounding board to help her prepare for. She gave me a reading assignment: Read this article and tell me the parts that make you go "cool!" That's the best kind of assignment. This entry was originally posted at my dreamwidth site, which I will be using as my primary journal rather than livejournal. Crossposting will continue until morale improves.