The downside of correcting papers at McGoff's

A bug just drowned itself in my Harp. I guess it likes typos even less than I do.

Altitude sickness symptoms, or, Why are the birds laughing at me?

After reading a certain blog, I was ready to go enjoy some summery degree weather in Arizona. When we landed in Phoenix, it was about 79. Guess what the temperature was when I woke up this morning?


25.



That’s because Flagstaff, unlike Phoenix, is waaaaay up in the mountains. We’re sitting at about 8000 feet. Mankato is at 1000, just for reference.

I didn’t even bring a jacket.

It’s extremely dry here in the semi-desert. My hair is almost completely straight, and our professor’s hair, normally a soft explosion, is only wavy. The low oxygen level is making the hiking around just a little difficult. On the up side, I look like I have consumption – pale skin, high color, dilated pupils. By Monday, I’ll be seeing spots. Sexy, no?

Truly, though, it’s not that bad. It’s beautiful here, and the air smells strange but good – sort of a mixture of pine and cinders. There was a prescribed burn going on when we drove in last night, and the smoke was still lifting this morning. This is one of the Dark Sky Cities, which is great – especially with the Orionid shower. I had forgotten how long it had been since I’d seen the Milky Way. Looking up seemed a kind of homecoming.

And yes, it’s colder here than in Minnesota, but only for a few hours after sunrise. The air is so clear and thin that the sun cuts right into the skin. Walking to NAU this morning, the frost and ice held in the shade, but the air quickly became warm enough for me in just my teacher clothes. I've been nerding out over sessions on the pragmatics of modals and semi-modals and the use of corpora in second language teaching. Whee!

Still wish I could see everyone's 14-year-old horror, though. Hope everyone's having an excellent Highland Days - I will expect pictures of the revelry.


By the way, you know that thing people say about ravens sounding like they’re laughing? I walked by a bunch of them this morning, and it’s totally true. I’m not talking gentle chuckle, either – they sound like they’re laughing at you because you stubbed your toe or your mom died. The word that’s always used – raucous – is the perfect descriptor. It’s fucking creepy.

First snow (Wednesday)!

At first, it was spitty crappy snow, but when we left Bloc, it had become lovely. I think it was Thursday that it was so unexpectedly cold that the fountain was still going for a while. The wind was blowing the spray towards the library, and on one side, the flowers and such were covered in ice. Beautiful:

In other words, I am filled with impotent rage. About two hundred of my files are safe but inaccessible on Ivanovich’s MSU disk space. Included in those files are transcripts, labels, and papers for the linguistics research project that Ganglebot and I have been involved with for over a year (almost two years for me). In less than a week, I will be going to Flagstaff with our project coordinator; there, we will meet the Swedish linguist we’ve been teleconferencing with. Together, we are going to present this research – schemata and data from two separate but linked projects – and assist the comp sci/applied linguistics world in building the robots that will eventually rule us. It’s pretty exciting.


WHY, THEN, HAS MSU SUDDENLY DISABLED THE FILES? WHY DO THEY REFUSE TO GRANT ME ACCESS? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Maddux and Englishmen

There are not many reasons I continue to go to my Wednesday night six-till-forever class.

I guess one reason is that I’m a total grammar geek. Who else would be so excited to meet a linguist who uses “forthwith” in speech and makes it sound normal (even – dare I say – cool)? Ganglebot, I guess, and maybe Spaz-Tastic. Also, I don’t want to fail.


The biggest reason, though, is the Antimonolingualist. The AM and I are in the same group, which means we usually sit by each other, which means we spend class daring each other to conjugate a line of “The Jabberwocky” in all twelve verb tenses, writing each other notes like “ghuck you” and “that oghends me,” and working British-style negative modal progressives in sentences such as You ought not be orgasming right now. We tend to throw ourselves into the exercises, especially the ones for kids. It turns at least two hours of class into fun nerdy fun fun, rather than excruciating boredom.

This is for you, Antimonolingualist:

(It goes on this:)