Back in the land of ice and snow

Yes, it's still winter here. The ski season starts this weekend, and it's snowing as I write this. My flights here were a bit of a schermozzle (? sorry, I have NO idea how that word is spelt!), the Airbus from Melbourne had to wait for a part to come from Singapore - computer problems apparently. So we all missed our connections, I had to fly to Copenhagen via Frankfurt, and I missed spending the day and evening with friends, as I didn't get to their place until midnight (scheduled was 8am at their place).

So, I got most of my work done at Tulla, rather than during the flights, which means I think I'm totally up-to-date with my movies now! I really liked: Up in the air, Whip it, Astroboy, The break up, and that's all I remember. :)

It's 6:40pm here now, and I'm knackered. Shower, clean teeth and bed for me! Finish my conference paper tomorrow. (As in, the conference is the day after that, so I really do have to finish it tomorrow!)

Sweet chess victory

So, in tonight's game, Luce took back a couple of moves early on, which I thought were pretty important moves, but I let them slide, because we're trying to be nice, and it sort of relaxes me because then it doesn't feel like a real game or something, if Luce wins I can always say it's cos he took back moves he didn't like. Then I overlooked that my pawn could take his queen, and he didn't let me take it back! The pressure was on because it looked like he could now take my queen for free. World War III nearly broke out, Luce starting packing up his bat and ball and was going home (he had the drawer out and was replacing pieces!!), we shouted that we loved each other and both liked to play chess, so CAN'T WE JUST BE ADULTS ABOUT THIS???

The position turned out not to be as dire as I'd thought, a queen swap, so I gave in and thought that if Luce beat me then I totally didn't need to take it personally, and that if I won that that would show that my chess practice was actually paying off. I won a couple of exchanges, which put me up a rook as our pawns were racing towards the king-line, and I was able to get a queen and then sacrifice my rook to prevent him from reciprocating. We had one 'take-back point', to see if Luce could stop me, but no way jose! :)

I'm definitely improving, I see more pretty patterns on the chessboard each time I look at it :D

A chess victory

At the start of November, Luce & I finally started using the chess board my dad made for us for Christmas last year. I won the first game, then Luce promptly won every game for the rest of the month. Being the competitive types we both are, I obviously cracked it with him and we didn't play for about a month. For Christmas this year, I requested that my dad play a game against Luce, just for the satisfaction of seeing him beaten by anyone (seeing as how I seemed unable to repeat the feat).

However, we started playing again after New Year's, and I am thrilled to be able to report my first victory! A clear checkmate, still in the relatively early stages of the game :) (I'm ignoring the fact that he was reading stuff on his computer the whole time cos I take so long to move and he gets bored!)

In the next game I made a couple of bad errors and resigned, so we 'undid' a few moves and continued. I then mated him, we undid the last few moves, he mated me, we undid the last few moves, and then I got the next 6 mates, ie, even with undos, he was still unable to recover. :D This is the major reason I'm looking forward to going back to Iceland: to be able to practice with Ási and then completely whup Luce on a regular basis. Or at least to make him pay attention to our games... ;)

Things accomplished while in Melbourne

I'm going to use this blog post to keep track of the work-related tasks that I accomplish while I'm in Melbourne instead of Iceland. I'm planning on being very productive, and so far so good :)

1. got my author's final changes done, including making her English nice and idiomatic, for the Nordlyd volume on Faroese.
   
2. made final changes on Faroese vs Icelandic LDR paper, sent to Nordlyd editors for publication.
   
3. made final changes on my LFG paper, including fixing f-structures and some argumentation, ready for publication. Editors great, and I'm very happy with this paper :)
   
4. finished transcribing interviews done in Fosen, Norway. Added this data to LDR database that I'm making for the tekstlab. [Still todo: mini-writeup of this data].
   
5. sent off PDs + relative clauses paper to friendly reader.
   
6. perspective study: 800 examples coded for whether the subject of say is the same as the subject of its complement clause or is different. Mini-writeup completed, including having statistics checked by Steph. [Might need to do this for an adjunct clause too... This mini-writeup will go somewhere when I talk about perspective in more detail]
   
   

I'll add to this as I go. By the end of Feb, I'm aiming to have

• the papers for the journal I'm editing reviewed and getting closer to publication
  
• some idea of how to describe my EPs (expletive/dummy/correlative pronouns) theoretically, and be ready for the Humanities conference (Hugvísindaþing) at the start of March
  
• all my interviews transcribed (Faroes 2008, Faroes 2009, Inner Scandinavia to go)
  
• mini-writeups of as many fieldwork trips as possible ready
  

By the end of my postdoc, I'm aiming to have:

• mini-writeups of all fieldwork places completed (Vestjysk Danish, Inner Scandinavian, Fosenmål)
  
• self-paced reading task comparing Icelandic and Faroese data collection completed, and mini-writeup completed.
  
• a second LFG paper [EPs]
  
• at least one paper published in Icelandic [HVÞ 2008]
  

There we go!

RIP Francoise

Well, our first little embryo didn't make it :( And she was even at the 7-cell stage when she was squirted in. Poor little Francoise. I will forever wonder what you would have been like.

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!