Highlights: trip to LA for Christmas and New Year's Eve, new quarter with new professors, Arrested Development and dinner with Midtown, lots of fun activities with Blake.
Current Book: Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
Details:
LA: I spent two weeks with family and friends at the end of 2009. Blake was with us for the first week, and was able to meet or get to know most of my people there. I saw my Squirt!!! I was able to go to Tribe a couple times and to see Becky, went to A Christmas Carol and celebrated Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve with my family, had a cuzen's lunch at Mimi's with VERY SLOW service but A LOT of fun conversation, had Indian food with Nicky and Eric, and Blake finally got to go to Bob's Big Boy. All in all it was an excellent two weeks, and I enjoyed seeing everyone. I will be sure to upload photos next weekend. When I returned from LA I spent a day putting away clothes, gifts, and cataloging new books so that my room and school things were ready for the start of the quarter.
Winter Quarter: I began a new a quarter on Monday with all new classes and professors. I am taking fourteen units- advanced phonology, research methods in SLA, Greek 2 and New Testament Greek. I am also interpreting 11 hours a week and working 20 at the lab, so I have a full schedule. However, I anticipate this quarter being lighter in outside-of-class work due to the reduced quantity of required reading. My phonology professor is a stout rudy German. He looks like a garden gnome and can be described only as "jolly". If only he had a pointy hat! My research methods professor is not nearly so much fun as a character sketch, nor, unfortunately, as a professor. Both of my Greek classes are taught by the same professor, a knowledgeable but scatter-brained man whose speech patterns remind me of a tightly wound coil: "So x causes y. X causes y. X. Okay x? X causes y. Y, okay? Y." It takes awhile for the point to come around, but he really knows his stuff.
In the lab, I am working now on several aspects of Eva's study in preparation for our data collection trip to Gallaudet Universary. I have been quite busy there!
Midtown: On Tuesday nights, Midtown Friends meets at Becky's to watch Arrested Development and to have dinner. This week we also went out for coffee afterwards. I had a great time catching up with everyone! I will be hostessing a Seder on the Thursday night of Holy Week, so I will be missing the first Thursday and Friday of Spring quarter in preparation for it. (Possibly Wednesday too)
Activities with Blake: With my schedule as it currently stands, I am done with school at 3:00 on Thursdays, so Blake and I have designated that our weekly date night. I made garlic herb chicken (thank you shake n' bake) and twice baked potatoes. For dessert I used the desserts cookbook Ira and Amanda gave me to make an apple streusel cake. We watched an episode of Top Gear and one of my new movies. Thursdays are going to be awesome! As it happens, this has been a busy Blake-and-I weekend. On Friday night his best friend had a surprise birthday party, so we went to that. Surprise, surprise his friends are nerds (hooray!) so we watched First Contact and the newest Star Trek film. I found out that Dave, one of the guys, has a deaf cousin at Fremont (a residential school for the Deaf). Then, last night we went to Blake's friend Blake's house for a game and pizza night with Blake's family (not my Blake- friend Blake). I also got to meet friend-Blake's daughter Ember, who is a lot like my-Blake's little sister. It's been a fun weekend! And now for studying...
