(no subject)
Time continues to be a bit rough. Grandma passed away on May 28. I flew home on May 29 and have been here since. In addition, my sister lost her job, and Kateri, my constructive sister-in-law, who happens to be an Ojibwa Indian and Canadian and who prior to 1 June could live/work in the U.S. without a green card, has now been denied re-entry into the country until she gets a green card (I suppose she could just say she was visiting America now and get in on her Canadian passport, as she has since lost her job and won't have a place to live after the end of the month). This turn of events has potentially modified our plans so that when Delia comes to Saginaw this week from Oakland, her visit will likely be cut short so that we can take her to her mother in Canada. Their plans for living/working/schooling arrangements are now less clear than usual. On the positive side, it means that I will probably get to see more of Canada that I've not seen (the northern coast of Lake Huron by Espanola and Sudbury).
Weather apart from last Friday, Sunday, yesterday and today has not been very warm, and I've been swimming only twice. I am making good progress on Lorna Doone. It's a good story, but it is narrated in first-person and I have determined that I hate the narrator and find him largely unsympathetic, which makes it a bit less engaging. I watched the entire run of Arrested Development, the second season twice (because I wanted to watch the Sugarfoot episode, which was on the third disc, after which I watched the other episodes of the second season, then started with the first season and went through to the end), and I am now doing the BBC Chronicles of Narnia series, but out of order (first LWW, now the Silver Chair, then probably the Voyage of the Dawn Treader and lastly Prince Caspian). I really really hate Lucy, and I think Aslan does too. I'm about ready to punch Pole, too--as much as an insufferable prig Eustace was in Dawn Treader, he's now mellowed out, but you can tell he just wants to punch Pole in the face too--why can't she just remember the damn signs?
I bought a new graphing calculator. It's got a bunch of functions, and if I don't have any thing to do when I return to work in July I'll read the manual. It is fairly shocking and disgusting to me that this technology, which is older than the hills and which completely sucks in comparison to anything you can do with a regular computer or telephone these days, still costs as much as it does. I bought the TI-83 Plus, the cheapest TI, and it was still 110 bucks. I have my old TI-82 from 1996 at work, and now I can have another calculator at home, so that I can see all my numbers when I do my sums. I hate not being able to see my numbers.
In fun news, it looks like Greg Kobele is joining the Chicago linguistics department as an assistant professor next year. Greg was my graduate student host when I visited UCLA. He worked under Ed Stabler, just like my advisor, Fulop, and it is very exciting for me to think that he is joining the Chicago faculty, whose computational side has seemed to become very stochastically oriented under Professor Goldsmith and Jason Riggle (another UCLA alum whom I met while visiting). As Greg is an S-man rather than a P-man, I think it will be easier for him to resist joining the stochastic side of things (as it makes more sense for the P-side than the S-side, in my relatively poorly informed opinion) and that he will offer another perspective and ideally work with Jason and Anastasia and Chris Kennedy a fair bit. The department is surely doing as much as it can to try to woo me back. Next thing you know they'll pick up a sharp philosopher like Jason Stanley and I'll have no choice but to return!
Stay ever vigilant-- /B/
Weather apart from last Friday, Sunday, yesterday and today has not been very warm, and I've been swimming only twice. I am making good progress on Lorna Doone. It's a good story, but it is narrated in first-person and I have determined that I hate the narrator and find him largely unsympathetic, which makes it a bit less engaging. I watched the entire run of Arrested Development, the second season twice (because I wanted to watch the Sugarfoot episode, which was on the third disc, after which I watched the other episodes of the second season, then started with the first season and went through to the end), and I am now doing the BBC Chronicles of Narnia series, but out of order (first LWW, now the Silver Chair, then probably the Voyage of the Dawn Treader and lastly Prince Caspian). I really really hate Lucy, and I think Aslan does too. I'm about ready to punch Pole, too--as much as an insufferable prig Eustace was in Dawn Treader, he's now mellowed out, but you can tell he just wants to punch Pole in the face too--why can't she just remember the damn signs?
I bought a new graphing calculator. It's got a bunch of functions, and if I don't have any thing to do when I return to work in July I'll read the manual. It is fairly shocking and disgusting to me that this technology, which is older than the hills and which completely sucks in comparison to anything you can do with a regular computer or telephone these days, still costs as much as it does. I bought the TI-83 Plus, the cheapest TI, and it was still 110 bucks. I have my old TI-82 from 1996 at work, and now I can have another calculator at home, so that I can see all my numbers when I do my sums. I hate not being able to see my numbers.
In fun news, it looks like Greg Kobele is joining the Chicago linguistics department as an assistant professor next year. Greg was my graduate student host when I visited UCLA. He worked under Ed Stabler, just like my advisor, Fulop, and it is very exciting for me to think that he is joining the Chicago faculty, whose computational side has seemed to become very stochastically oriented under Professor Goldsmith and Jason Riggle (another UCLA alum whom I met while visiting). As Greg is an S-man rather than a P-man, I think it will be easier for him to resist joining the stochastic side of things (as it makes more sense for the P-side than the S-side, in my relatively poorly informed opinion) and that he will offer another perspective and ideally work with Jason and Anastasia and Chris Kennedy a fair bit. The department is surely doing as much as it can to try to woo me back. Next thing you know they'll pick up a sharp philosopher like Jason Stanley and I'll have no choice but to return!
Stay ever vigilant-- /B/