Update on life

So, sorry for the long post, but I've been getting loads of emails from friends and family about how things are going, so I thought I'd try to summarise it definitively here.

As you all know, Iceland is busy having volcanic eruptions at the moment. I missed the first two on Fimmvörðuháls, which splashed lava about in a photogenic fashion. Then when an eruption started under the Eyjafjallajökull glacier, it was deemed by the relevant authorities to be both boring and dangerous to get a close-up view of. Ash spewed up, blanketing southern Iceland, wreaking havoc on farms, their livestock and crops. The ash also proceeded to smother most of Europe. This happened right when Einar and I were supposed to go to Norway to do fieldwork.

Our flights were cancelled, and new ones invented. Ordinarily, flights to Europe leave between 6-8am, with flights to the US in the evening. Flights to Norway go to Oslo, and to Bergen in the summer. Our flights were due to leave Saturday at 8am. However, all of Norwegian airspace was closed on Saturday, so Einar and I attended Vigdís's conference instead. Then on Sunday, while southern Norway (ie Gardemoen/Oslo) remained closed, Iceland started shipping people directly to Trondheim. A flight at 1pm, 2 at 2pm, then every half hour or so after that, for 6 flights. Thus, instead of flying Keflavík-Oslo-Trondheim, a journey of about 5+ hrs, it was a 2-hr hop to Værnes. We all disembarked and squished into the carousel area to collect our bags - and found out why we don't normally fly lots of people to Trondheim all at once!

I did manage to take some photos of the eruption on the way over, but they're a bit hazy :(

Fieldwork was great, Einar and I only missed the orientation day. We were 12 linguists, mainly Norwegian, interrogating the locals this time. I thought I was finding only negative results (which are still 'results'...), until the second last evening when we were discussing how our data collection was going, and I discovered that what I had semi-dismissed as just some individuals' funny pronunciations was actually exactly what I had come to Norway to find! This is why I think group fieldwork trips are so useful - the off-the-cuff comments over dinner or coffee by people who know what they're talking about can make all the difference to what we think we've found!

I go for a run each morning when on fieldwork and at conferences, and I've been running in my toe-shoes. I found out that it can be quite cold on the toes to run on snow, but so long as it's not wet, it's not too bad. Einar and I did a couple of self-guided whip-round walking tours of Trondheim, then we headed back to Iceland, this time via Oslo. I was on the wrong side of the plane to see the steam eruption this time :( but a very friendly Norwegian woman took what turned out to be a series of awesome photos when I handed her my camera! :) They'll be up on Picasa in a week or so.

Finally, European airspace has opened up again today, because the wind has changed - it's now blowing the ash over us! Par consequent, Keflavík and Reykjavík airports are closed. This morning on my bike-ride, the air was actually really clear, and the rising columnn of steam was clearly visible. Unfortunately your intrepid photographer didn't have her camera :( and by lunchtime the winds had caught us, and made the air in Reykjavík all hazy. It smells a little bit like camp-fire. I can't smell any sulphur, thankfully! I promise to keep my camera on me until I get some good pictures!

I'm due to get the keys to our flat this weekend, but I won't move in straight away. I was at The Good Shepherd (like the Salvos) this evening, and bought a chest of drawers and a pot to cook with... I also managed to buy <mumble> ski boots </mumble>. Not snowboarding boots. But honestly, they fit PERfectly, much better than any of the snowboard boots I tried on in Norway, they're exactly the colours I would choose were I give complete freedom in my choice (white, purple and pink), and they were 500isk. Which is not very much at all. I though there was a 0 or two missing at first :D

So, things are going well, Luce arrives in less than 2 weeks!!! I'm working now on resumptive pronouns in Northern Norwegian. We'll be going to New York at the end of May. I think Luce is going to book us a flight to Svalbard in June!! :D Brent, Dan and I are recording songs again, and maybe even writing again. Life is hectic, intense, and great.

PS, some links that might be interesting (Icelandic Review): pic of new craters, How to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull

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!

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!)

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!

RtR done

Well, the conference I was organising on 'Relating to Reflexives' in Reykjavík went swimmingly. 2 days of people yabbering about reflexives from all sorts of angles, including long-distance reflexives, logophoricity, methodologies, possession without overt reflexives, how to differentiate between core syntactic binding and non-syntactic coference, pronouns with local antecedents and more :D

We then headed around the Golden Circle (photos), with me acting as tour guide. Lots of hand-flapping during my retelling of the sagas, which I had neglected to brush up on. Dinner of steinbítur (world's ugliest fish = world's yummiest fish) down at the Hafið Bláa 'The blue sea' country restaurant on the south coast, near Selfoss I think. HIGHLY recommended! Food and views were exquisite!! (A seal and loads of birds watched us eat, through the floor-to-ceiling windows.)

I was very happy that my outside-in approach to binding for both Icelandic and Faroese was well received, since this is what I'm going to try to talk about at the LFG conference in July. Lots to do now!!

more iceland

So, I've just had a lovely 5 weeks or so back in Melbourne, and am heading back to Iceland today for another 6 months. Aaaand, I've just gotten another 12 month extension! My performance over my first year was called 'exemplary' :D Woo-hoo! But I've already gotten permission to do the second extension partly in Australia, so I'll be back in July before heading over again. So all those who haven't yet made it to Iceland, get your calendars out and see if you can't squeeze in a visit.

What happened in August?

Wow, that was a busy August! Spent 10 days in the Faroe Islands, where I discovered that there is dialectal variation in their LDR use, from being way more liberal than Icelandic, in the Norwegian/Vestjylland Danish direction, to being more conservative than both Norwegian and Icelandic, although there is always a person restriction, in both complement and non-complement clauses, which I haven't found in any other Scandinavian language. Cool! We also made the news :) (Höski/Höskuldur Þráinsson is my supervisor, and he's the person you see most often in this clip. If you look closely, you'll see quite a few people you might recognise from photos and other places!)


Piotr and I went running all over Tórshavn, and Höski joined us one morning - photos are forthcoming, hopefully by next week on picasa. Luce came down for a couple of days, and I have to say that I really want to have a holiday on the Faroes - take a stack of books, and hit some isolated island (I'd like to go to Nolsoy - not too far from Havn) for a quiet week or two. Just thinking about it makes me yearn to go back! Also did a sea-swim with Ási, Theódóra and her husband Emil. Nearly killed me & T, while Ási and Emil just laughed. *sigh* at least we did it! (Photographic evidence forthcoming :) .) Oh, and the food was awesome, when they were able to find a vegetarian option...

Then Luce & I did the 10km run in the Reykjavik marathon, Luce around 45mins, me just under 54mins. I'm going to see if I can beat 50mins in the next one.

Then I went to Denmark for a conference - the NORMS Grand Meeting. Piotr and I went running each morning with Rakul, our Faroese friend who's a total legend. Höski and another Icelander joined us one morning, and the 3 of us went for a sea-swim on the last run. My talk went well, but I've now seen some of the people who are presenting at the conference I've big-mouthed my way on to in Lund in October, and I'm feeling rather intimidated!

On a lighter note, I got to catch up with a penfriend I've had since I was 15 or 16, who lives in country Jylland (Denmark) and who I last met 13 years ago. Her parents drove an hour and a half to meet me too (good effort by her 79 year old dad, who also lived in Reykjavik 50 years ago!), and I had a very lovely evening/night there. It was strange seeing someone I remember as a teenager looking like a woman, and with a full family, house, etc. She's got 2 kids the same ages as Tali and Ella, and the younger one had the same facial expressions and tummy-sticking-out as Ella, too! But it was also inspiring to meet up again with someone who is living how they want to live, helping run her community activities, and who I have a history with, even if how we met was completely accidental! (She was friends with a pen-friend of one of my friends in high-school!)

Then I went to København and met up with Anne and Steen and their kids, our friends from Iceland who recently moved back home. We went to the Tivoli, and saw a modern ballet of The Little Match Girl, which is one of my all-time favourite stories, and it was very very well done. I managed not to cry at the end, only just. We also went on as many rides as we could, and I went on the giant dropping ride again, scaring the pants off myself. It was great. I suspect I would really enjoy sky-diving :D I shook and giggled for about 5 minutes after the ride finished!

Oh, I think I forgot to mention that we had about a hundred visitors (Tönchen from Melbourne, Thomas and Katrin the Swiss Cheeses, Rosemary Luce's mum, Betty family friend from UK, JC and Jee from Melbourne Uni), with more on their way in a couple of weeks!

And finally, Iceland has night-time again. Not entirely sure I approve, but at least I've got one more summer solstice to look forward to up here...

That's all for now!

June update

Well, June was fairly hectic, as it was always going to be. Luce and I went to Helsinki for a conference, Luce went to Edinburgh for the weekend with Mark, Iceland had its national day and I helped with the Salsa demonstration part of the celebrations, Tönchen came to visit us in Iceland for 2 weeks and we all drove around the entire country together (I've whittled the photos down to around 2,000, still working on it!). Luce and Ási have gone sea-swimming twice so far, l & t climbed Vífilsfell mountain with Heimir, l & t went in the Midnight Run on Jónsmesse night, t & tönch visited the Blue Lagoon, I had my second and third meetings with Faroese speaking people and it turns out that I can mostly understand Faroese! :) Oh yes, and last night we saw Ólöf Arnalds (go on, guess whether Ólöf is a man or a woman!), Björk and Sigur Rós at a free outdoor concert in Laugardal (where we go swimming). Hooray for crazy Björk music that you can dance like a raw prawn to and fend off the threat of frozen toes without looking *too* out of place!

July promises to be a lot calmer, with only 3 papers (Grand meeting postdoc report; Subjects & antecedents; write-up of Humanities conference paper) and some fieldwork (in the Faroes) to prepare for/have done by the start of August - no visitors (until the very end of the month I think). So, it's work on the weekends for me! Oh, and Luce & I have found an organised running group that's training for the Reykjavík marathon in August, I want to do the 10km only, but Luce seems like he's going to be up for at least the 21km! Thank Christ for the perpetual daylight still!!!!

oh wow oh wow oh wow

Faroese is CRAZY! It's totally like Icelandic, but as pronounced by someone from where Elisabeth is from with a speech impodiment. Or should that be speech impodooiment. (Their 'ee' sounds come out like 'ooee' - it's hilarious!)

Well, in more newsy news, We (as in me mostly) had a massive weekend. On Friday and Saturday I had the Humanities conference (Hugvísindaþing). My talk went well, I got to talk for longer than I should have cos the next speaker was sick. And then I got to tag-team answering questions about LDR with Höskuldur Þráinsson. OMG. HIGHlight of my day let me tell you!!

And then I went out with people from the conference, and we had pizza and icecream and I got to ask everyone about how they fly in their dreams. This is totally my favourite question to ask a bunch of people. In my basketball team only one other person flew at all, which surprised the hell out of me cos it had never occurred to me that someone wouldn't fly in their dreams. But at dinner the other night all five of us flew. What's so interesting about this, is how everyone flies differently. We had 3 arm-flappers in our group (like swimming), and 2 no-control at all fliers, with one of these not really flying but doing more sort of massive jumps. He was also the only one who found it easy to get up in the air, for the rest of us the take-off is the hardest part, being easiest with a roller-coaster or something to shoot us up in the air. Only 2 of us fliers with some control over our direction experience gravity as being much stronger the closer we are to the ground, the other finds take-off and low flying relatively straightforward.

I've spoken with people who fly by projecting a force from their heart, chest or belly/belt down against the ground. These people often can't fly over water, as it provides no resistance. In the linguists group the other night I think I was the only one who could definitely fly over water (but I have to be pretty high up to do so), the others weren't sure or definitely couldn't. So: how do you fly? Special pose, force field, manipulating gravity, like treading water, special suit? Where does the energy/ability come from? Is it harder closer to the ground? How do you take off? Do you have control over where you fly? Can you fly over anything - water, buildings, mountains? How fast can you fly (I often find it much quicker in my dreams to fly than to run, with running too often being like Alice in Wonderland!)? Are you aware when you're flying that it's impossible? If so, does this make you unable to fly, or does it make you realise you're dreaming? What does it feel like? Do you always know you can fly, or do you only remember it once you're flying? Aaah, I want to go to bed now!!!

Okay, so then on Sunday was Auður's confirmation - I'll post photos soon. There was a ceremony at the church, then a lovely feast afterwards (oddly no pickled testicles or sheep's heads, but with food that made Luce and I look at it, go "Huh? What the-? Is that-? Oh!!" at the same time, which confused the people around us who were eavesdropping on the English I think!! Basically, you can buy loaves of bread at the supermarket which are sliced horizontally lengthwise instead of vertically in small squares as usual. It turns out they make these massive club sandwiches and rolled sandwiches with the massive slices of bread...), with 120 family members and close friends. (I really don't understand how Iceland has such a small population, when everyone has a million relatives!)

Watched the latest episode of Torchwood - I'm hooked on the AO Dr Who. I love Gwen's facial expressions and I wish Jack and Ianto would be more tender, I loved the episode Jack Harkness with the other Captain JH. *sigh*

Had my lecture on Australian English on Monday morning and got a round of applause - yay! The students reminded me of La Trobe and Monash students, very lovely and definitely willing to ask and answer questions. Interested in linguistics, which makes taking the class like having a sumptuous meal when you've been doing physical work. Replenishes you and makes the air taste sweet...

And at dancing last night a friend from the Háskóli came, his first time, but I think he's going to pick it up quickly. He's coming next time too. And there was a workshop on the weekend, and the guys were all dancing really well, with a couple of very cool new moves that are really energetic. It took me a bit to pick up on the leads, but I go there in the end. And with their better leads, my turns were far more balanced than usual, and I even did a couple of triple and quadruple turns, most importantly without even looking like falling over - woohoo!

And now I've just collected my last bits of data for my NJL paper, which I hope gets accepted. It's due next week, and I'm not finished! But at least now I know a bit about Faroese. I can't wait to get over there, it's going to be so cool!

And then I got to skype with Tönchen this morning, and Beth and Brent this arvo. When people sneeze, Ella apparently doesn't say 'God bless you' or 'Bless you', she says 'I bless you' :D Go Ellachen - you are God!! Hahahah :D