Fluency Disorders

Is it just me, or is there something really odd about my hearing this song on the radio for the first time this season on the day of my final on stuttering?

No Service

Those who know me probably know that I've been helping with the Deaf Ministries at my church for a while, helping to interpret. Not the sermons, because I'm nowhere near the talent, practice, or capability required for such a feat. I do some of the songs, and have even done a prayer or two.

I've know for a while that there have been ... "politics" ... in Deaf Ministries, but up until today I've been allowed to remain, blissfully, pretty much ignorant of said politics. Got an email today about some of the stuff, and it disappointed me so much that I've been unable to rally myself into finals mode. It's been 12 hours since I found said email, and I've barely gotten anything written on starting to flesh out my literature review (for my research mentor, but ultimately for me), let alone studying for my final tomorrow, or the one I'm really freaking out about: Wednesday. Happy happy joy joy.

Thankfully my mentor seems to have a very placid personality, or I'm sure he'd skin me tomorrow. I'm gonna see how much I can get done before midnight, and then tomorrow morning before I leave to meet with him. Wish me luck.

Gibberish

Was working on my applications for grad school today. I know, scary. It's actually a very scary concept for me. Basically, I printed up an application for being a graduate assistant. Or so I thought.

Turns out, it was an insight into the thinking processes of my computer. Don't know what or how my computer thinks, but the results were ... interesting. There were lots of exclamation marks. Many, many of them. Probably where the lines were supposed to be. Can't compare it to how it was supposed to look, because I gave away my evidence to one of my students. He thought it was particularly funny, and is old enough to understand the complexities of computers. If you think you might know who he is, his hair looks like exclamation marks.

Oh, and I think my printer has started running out of ink. I'm getting funny little shadow lines where there should not be any ink. No, I don't know why that translates to running out of ink, but I always only ever see this right before the ink starts fading.

Oh, and in case you care, I finally came up with a name for my computer. After three years of ownership (roughly). Ask me, and I might just tell you.

Not so Silent Night

So, for a few days now (read: several) my computer fan has been very noisy, especially upon turning on my computer. Like it sounds as if it's about to rattle itself out of the casing. Think I should take it apart and see what's up? Maybe tomorrow. Or some other time still much later. For now, finals are next week.

Is it sad that I'm getting excited rereading through the preparation materials/articles my research mentor gave me? They're about speech-motor development. And the interaction between linguistic processing demands and the stability of the speech-motor system. The guiding theory behind this line of research is the Dynamic Systems theory, which my mentor didn't see fit to have me read about until ... this last week. I started reading craziness for him in September, and now I start reading about the guiding theory. Makes perfect sense to me. Either way, rereading through everything (so I can make guidelines for writing my literature review) is making everything make so much more sense now. I'm even getting faster at reparsing data in the lab that was parsed incorrectly, and the grad student hasn't even been reparsing anything. She's only analyzing data that I've already reparsed. I know. We have a progress checklist. I'm doing all the work. No, I don't think she's doing anything else for our mentor (<----sarcasm). Who knows? Certainly not me. I'm working right now on a pretend cover letter for a pretend resume in my Rhetoric and Writing Stuidies class. So glad I'll never have to take another one of those again. It's stupid and boring. And my professor is a recovering hippy that's still big in social activism. Makes for an interesting time, it does. And for your viewing entertainment, a little bit of commentary, courtesy of ihasahotdog.com:


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Our Weather is Bipolar

San Diegans are accustomed to the fact that they have cool weather at the start of October, followed by the Santa Ana winds (hot + dry = fire). Then November was full of ups and downs, including rain leading right up to Thanksgiving Day. Now, we're not very far into December, but we've had both rainy weather and very dry weather. All last week I had a massive headache, thanks to the bipolar nature of our weather. I'd just like some well and proper sweater weather, thank you very much.

In other news, I took the GRE last month, and now I'm all ready to be doing grad school applications. Except I need to get some letters of reccommendation. Badly. Yep, I'm working on that. And not looking foward to thinking about how much money I'm spending on those applications. I'm not asking for much for Christmas this year.