I feel like I should be writing, so despite the fact that I've not gotten the pictures developed yet (still have one last frame) I'm posting again.
A friend of mine recently organised something called the Joy Luck Club, loosely based on the idea from the book of the same name by Amy Tan. Each week we meet up and one of us cooks dinner for all the rest. This week it was my turn, so I made curry: chicken; lentil, chickpea, and tomato; and fruit. Plus brown basmati rice, vanilla yogurt (there was no plain), steamed carrots and broccoli, and grapefruit pop or lime cordial and club soda. I was pleased with the results, and so was everyone else involved. freakpirate came out, though both cirdt and mr_dave decided not to. The entire idea is pretty damn fantastic, and I heartily recommend it to all.
Classes are going fairly well. I think this six hours a day twice a week thing is actually working pretty well for me. I have to prepare myself mentally and physically for it, but I'm actually doing pretty well for not falling asleep in class so far (as in, it's only every other class rather than every single class, but whatever, it's better) and feeling like I should be studying on the other days.
The field methods class, which I don't think I've posted about, is just about as I expected, which is to say enthralling and so incredibly cool. We're studying a language that has literally a couple dozen fluent speakers left of whom the youngest is about 56 and making a linguistic study of their language: phonology, morphosyntax, etc. Y'all will most likely know of their people (if you know of them at all) as Sarcee, but they're called the Tsuu T'ina now (which is an endocentric name, as opposed to the old one which came from the Blackfoot word for boldness or hardiness (thank you, wikipedia (scratch that, dammit wikipedia, I've just wasted half an hour reading random things about that language family. argh.)). This Friday was supposed to be my day with the other phonology-oriented person in the class (5 grad students and me, pretty damn intimidating) to elicit language data from him (which is to say, we say "how do you say _______?" and he tells us and we write it down. it's kinda neat.) but since he couldn't make it last week the people who were supposed to go then are going this week, so it's our turn the day before reading week. I'm a little intimidated, but it's not terribly difficult writing down what he's saying in IPA. So yeah, it's really neat. Apparently we're going to make some sort of present out of what we come up with and give it to the band, because they're teaching the language to their kids in an attempt to revive it. This isn't actually a hopeless cause; Hebrew got resurrected.
Anyway. I'm falling asleep here trying to type, so I'm off to bed. See y'all tomorrow.
A friend of mine recently organised something called the Joy Luck Club, loosely based on the idea from the book of the same name by Amy Tan. Each week we meet up and one of us cooks dinner for all the rest. This week it was my turn, so I made curry: chicken; lentil, chickpea, and tomato; and fruit. Plus brown basmati rice, vanilla yogurt (there was no plain), steamed carrots and broccoli, and grapefruit pop or lime cordial and club soda. I was pleased with the results, and so was everyone else involved. freakpirate came out, though both cirdt and mr_dave decided not to. The entire idea is pretty damn fantastic, and I heartily recommend it to all.
Classes are going fairly well. I think this six hours a day twice a week thing is actually working pretty well for me. I have to prepare myself mentally and physically for it, but I'm actually doing pretty well for not falling asleep in class so far (as in, it's only every other class rather than every single class, but whatever, it's better) and feeling like I should be studying on the other days.
The field methods class, which I don't think I've posted about, is just about as I expected, which is to say enthralling and so incredibly cool. We're studying a language that has literally a couple dozen fluent speakers left of whom the youngest is about 56 and making a linguistic study of their language: phonology, morphosyntax, etc. Y'all will most likely know of their people (if you know of them at all) as Sarcee, but they're called the Tsuu T'ina now (which is an endocentric name, as opposed to the old one which came from the Blackfoot word for boldness or hardiness (thank you, wikipedia (scratch that, dammit wikipedia, I've just wasted half an hour reading random things about that language family. argh.)). This Friday was supposed to be my day with the other phonology-oriented person in the class (5 grad students and me, pretty damn intimidating) to elicit language data from him (which is to say, we say "how do you say _______?" and he tells us and we write it down. it's kinda neat.) but since he couldn't make it last week the people who were supposed to go then are going this week, so it's our turn the day before reading week. I'm a little intimidated, but it's not terribly difficult writing down what he's saying in IPA. So yeah, it's really neat. Apparently we're going to make some sort of present out of what we come up with and give it to the band, because they're teaching the language to their kids in an attempt to revive it. This isn't actually a hopeless cause; Hebrew got resurrected.
Anyway. I'm falling asleep here trying to type, so I'm off to bed. See y'all tomorrow.
YAY! School is fun!
Have a great day!