Wrapping up again

Okay, I'm packing up my office again, coming back to Melbourne for a few months. I've got all my papers to write up, although I don't have all the data I'd like. It turns out 25 people responded to an email I sent out requesting help from Icelanders to participate in my research, but only 3 of these forwarded to my gmail. I only found this out when I started asking random staff members at uni if they had time to do the test, and someone said 'Oh, yes, I replied to your email last Monday'. What the-? I could have doubled the number of people in the study! So now I have to either get Luce to work out how to do it online, or wait until March when I come back again. Grrr!

Aaaand it's all wet and dark outside, although it's really warm (was lovely at the beach last night). The setting sun is reflecting all gold and lovely off the houses in front of Hallgrímskyrkjuna, and I don't have my camera with me. Sigh.

I finally wrote a song over here, I think I like it. I think it's called 'Home is where you are', but that's a bit soppy, so I'm calling that its working title. We can jam on it when Hannah comes over with Brent and Dan. I think I want to inflict some of my songs on people, maybe I'll post them here slowly or on youtube or something.

See youse next week. It's going to take me all weekend to get home, but I'm on way. Just about. (Yay, only 3 weeks til Beth and I go see New Moon!)

I attribute this to insane Americans, whether or not it's a warranted accusation

http://xkcd.com/651/
My God, I have to put up with this crap aaaall the time, and think things like this each and every time. Stupid airlines.

15 seconds of fame

hehe, I'm famous :)

Faroes Fieldwork 2009

omg, this was so funny: I'm in the Faroe Islands with 6 other linguists, on fieldwork. We leave on Monday. Last night we were trying to work out what time our flight is. We spent, I kid you not, about 20 minutes trying to remember, discussing it from every angle imaginable, the time difference between here and Iceland and so on. At the end of 20 mins when we decided we weren't sure and would probably actually need to check, Einar tuned into the conversation when someone decided to ask him if he knew when our flight was. He answered all innocently and completely without hesitation "ten past four". Like, dude, your body's been here the whole time we were discussing it, but where the hell was your brain?! Hahaha!!

It's getting darker...

Wow, so much has happened since my last blog post. In brief: came back to Iceland, now living in Kópavogur instead of Reykjavík :( No, it's actually lovely here, and less than a 1km from where I used to live! Went on a fieldwork trip to Norway, and for the first time ever, found exactly what I was looking for! Omg! (Old people have LDR, young people don't. That's pretty fast language change, which is actually sad.)

Came back to Iceland and got the uni to buy me a nice new Lenovo ThinkPad, which is an absolute monster. I've named him Egill, after Egill Skallagrímsson, an Icelandic hero from the sagas. He was stupendously ugly, killed his first enemy at age 6 (a 10 year old who wouldn't let him play ball with them), but wrote incredibly beautiful poetry. My Egill is like that. Really nothing to look at, but very powerful and a great worker. Except my Egill hasn't killed anyone. Yet. My Egill's full name is Egill Ljótur, Egill the Ugly. Which is actually a fully legitimate Icelandic name. Icelanders are a bit mental when it comes to names I reckon!

I'm off to the Faroes again in a week, and I've finally got this mad experiment to work, although it's going to be a race against time to get the test sentences translated while I'm there as well as running the experiments. Well, we just do the best we can. It's a self-paced reading test, which should give me insight into how the Faroese process sentences, exactly where they have trouble and so on. Cheaper than sticking their heads in an MRI scanner, and should give me similar results :)

And, finally, it's snowing! There's been a dusting on Esja and the hills around us for a while, but it looks like winter has finally come to Reykjavík!