Updates from the not-quite-as-wet-as-New-Zealand uh.. Island.

Hey all,

Happy Guy Fawkes’ Night!! I hope you all lit something on fire. Last night JF & I went out to see the “region’s largest firework display” which was quite nice. More interestingly, apparently some 25,000 people turn out for these.. in a town of only 100,000 permanent citizens! It was quite touching to see everyone so excited about the fireworks. It was, again, disconcerting to see everyone drinking in the streets, which is apparently legal. I’ve even seen undergrads walking the streets with the pint (glass) of beer that they took from the previous bar, still sipping away. Odd!

As promised earlier, here are some “scenic shots” of Cambridge… and they’re only about a month and a half old! ☺












Those are all the kind of "prerequisite" Cambridge shots, so, there you go. But here are some more:

Our house, Herrick House. Trust me, it's better with the tree in front. Trust us to get stuck in one of the only ugly buildings in this town!!


Trinity Hall!! That's the library, which is actually very new ('99.. uhm, 1999, since the college was founded in 1350)


Really neat-o and non-Cambridge-looking new maths complex


King's College, from the back.


Tonight I got a craving for cinnamon rolls (really, anything to avoid the homework that looms for tomorrow morning!!) … I didn’t have much time or yeast or frozen bread dough, which is what every recipe I found online required. And then, after cleverly googling “no yeast cinnamon rolls” I found this one… ( http://gilly.ca/?p=9 ) and gloriously prevailed!!! Huzzah. Now, I command you all to go forth and bake quick & dirty cinnamon rolls!



Huh, in uploading the photo of the "glory rolls" from my camera, I found some other ones on there you might enjoy seeing...

The English idea of an "EXTRA-large pizza"



Grad Hall, which is a formalish dinner held every Wednesday night, and to which "smart dress" and gowns are required. JF and I both managed to blink, because we were so embarrassed about being the dorks taking pictures at grad hall like tourists. All in all, though, very fun. (But the food mostly sucks.)







Apologies for any crazy formatting, I've been struggling with this thing for too long!!! Now I'm off to eat cinnamon rolls and draw syntactic trees. Woo hoo!

Buried treasure

Hey, guess what they have in England?



Yep, Aldi! And it's just a few blocks away from me. Hurrah! They still have that "Load your own bags... over there" thing going on, but I didn't spy any Sweet Valley pop. Still, a pretty cool surprise. All in all, am doing well.



Will send more updates soon, I promise. I got some decently nice photos of the town a while back, but really, nothing you probably couldn't find on google. The advantage is that, knowing these were taken by me and with my camera, you can marvel at just how lovely stuff still looks! It's still pretty warm and pretty here, most of the leaves still green and on the trees. I hear they're getting snow in Canada. Ha! Talk to you all soon. :)

Lemons

Sometimes life pushes us in directions we hadn't planned to go. It is our job to make the most of it.

The Visit part 2

Next morning we were all feeling rested as we had breakfast at the hotel:

It was overcast in Christchurch, but that didn't dampen our spirits. We spent a couple of hours at the Antarctic Centre near the hotel. (Fantastic! Everyone should see it!)

On the drive back to Queenstown, the scenery was typical South Island beautiful. We made frequent stops for Pat (see his blog: PeeNewZealand for more photos and his unique perspective on the visit), so they got to see a bit of most of the towns along the way--at least the toilets anyway. We arrived just after dark in Queenstown and went straight to our hotel. Their office closes at 5:00, but we had picked up our room key on the way out of town the day before. We still managed to get a pretty swank meal in town and had a lovely view of the town after dark:

The next day was a whirlwind of activity: going up the skyline gondola to view lake Wakatipo,

(Ok, so here's a better picture of the lake)

riding the luge,

touring a vineyard,

jetboating,

and driving to Te Anau to visit the glow-worm caves. Our poor travelers weren't getting much rest--but then, they didn't come here to rest.

The following day we had booked a day trip on Doubtful sound. The rain that had started to fall on Te Anau stayed mostly on the west side of the mountains. We got a bit of rain on the boat ride across Lake Manipouri to the bus that would take us over the pass and down to Doubtful Sound:

It made the islands and shore appear and disappear in a misty fog.

The view at the top of the pass overlooking the sound was a bit foggy, but still pretty.


Fiordland is a temperate rain forest. I think visitors were surprised at just how chilly it was. Jackets, especially waterproof ones, were a must!

At Doubtful Sound we borded another boat:

The shore and islands come straight down into the water with no beach.

On the way back over the pass, the fog had cleared and we had a pretty view of Doubtful Sound.

Next day we drove back to Invercargill. New Zealand hedges are mostly trimmed--English style.

The Visit

On Friday, August 4, 2006 we drove to Queenstown to pick up our daughters Libby and Molly and their husbands, Pat and Jean-Francois, who were visiting New Zealand for the first time. We left Invercargill about 7 a.m. so we could meet their scheduled 9:30 arrival. Karen chided me, saying the flight would probably be delayed, but I wanted to be there when they got off the plane. We were treated to some lovely views as the sun came up:

We arrived with five minutes to spare and rushed into the terminal hoping they hadn't arrived early. When their flight arrived, they were not on it. We wandered around the airport for awhile, until I finally approached the Quantas check-in counter to see if they could tell me where our children were. We learned that they were not on the passenger list, but would probably be on the next flight, due to arrive in a couple of hours. We took the opportunity to buzz into town to check out the location of our hotel and re-acquaint ourselves with where things were. This is the wharf in Queenstown:

When the next flight also arrived without our family, we were not sure what to do. We were milling around outside the airport about 11:30 when Molly called to say they'd just arrived in Auckland. They had been diverted to Nadi because of fog at the Auckland airport.

There were no more direct flights from Auckland to Queenstown that day, so they were faced with either spending the night in Auckland or getting a flight to Christchurch, where they would have to spend the night. They had been traveling for somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 hours and were desperate to finish their flights. She asked me if we could just drive over and pick them up in Christchurch... (It doesn't look that far on a map.)

I've driven much of that road a few times with our scout group, so I knew what it involved. I offered alternatives, but could hear the desperation in her voice... One bonus was that Karen got to see Mt Cook for the first time: (Its the big one in the middle)

On the trip, we decided there was no way we were driving back that night. Karen called the Christchurch airport and left a message for the kids to call us when they arrived. (Mobile phones are wonderful things.) We were driving through pretty remote areas, but had stopped for gas and luckily had a signal when they called. We told them to find a hotel and call us so we could meet them. We arrived in Christchurch about 7:30 that night. Even in the dark, I could see the clouds begin to roll in.

Finito!

That's it! Today I graduated with a BA in Honours Linguistics, Concentration English, summa cum laude and I even won the "faculty plaque" for the highest overall GPA in my program. : D I'm a bit shiny in this photo, but it was pretty warm in there. While he doesn't have the snazzy photo (as being in Tunisia prevented his attending convocation), Jean-Francois also graduates this week, with a BA in Economics, summa cum laude, faculty plaque for highest GPA in his program, AND the silver medal for the second highest GPA in the entire faculty of Social Sciences. We sure likes us our As, huh? The flowers are from my friend Melanie, whose boyfriend also graduated today (after something like 8 years off and on, working full-time and studying part-time. His parents threatened to shout "It's about time!!!" when his name was called.). I spent the day with them, went out to eat, and had a really nice time. Fear not, Mama, I was feted and cooed over enough to satisfy even your standards today. It's a pretty weird feeling, especially the fact that I'm basically never going to see again all the things and people I have become so used to. No time to be too sentimental, though - slap that plaque on the wall, 'cause there's a whole hell of a lot of new crap coming my way!
PS the only flaw in the day was being annouced on stage as "Maria Theresa"... seriously? WHY is it so hard for people to deal with "Mary"?? My name gets messed up ALL THE TIME. bizarre.

Talking the Talk

I have spent most of the last month preparing a talk for the annual conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association. This conference was last week, May 27-30, at York University in Toronto. My talk was on if/how/why second-language learners of English learn to "introduce" quotations, as in "I said, 'blah blah'", "I was like, 'blah blah'", "I 'blah blah'", etc. It might look weird to see them written, but as I am studying spoken language, just about anything can happen. Basically, no foreign language teacher is going to tell you to say "I was like, 'Wow!'" So, do any second language learners say that? If they do, do they do it in an 'english-like way' or in a 'non-english-like way" and what are some ways they could have learnt it. Really, that's my talk and my research in a nutshell! The short answers are: yes, yes, and the evidence is pretty weak (i.e. is it from talking to people, watching TV, what?) My "exciting" finding was that learners who DO watch TV, movies, etc in English use be like and everything thing else right, while those who don't hardly use any verbs, and use no verb in a "non-english-way". The implications of this, though, are pretty circular. Since this was just a class project that I beefed up a bit, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. And I'm certainly glad it's over!! Now I've got my first real presentation under my belt. (I "co-authored" a presentation back in 2004, but my involvement was mostly behind the scenes with that one) One of my collegues took some photos of the talk. A warning - it is accepted to read from a text, and given the time constraints, preferred by many. However, this means almost all the shots are of me looking down. And since I was using a power point, I didn't have a nice podium to hold my papers to make it easier to look up. argh! Sorry for the lack of wittiness - my brain is fried. Some of the more "interesting" aspects of the trip include, but are not limited to: a surprise heat wave (31 C, with humidex of 41), a transit strike, massively blistered feet, my host's boyfriend suffering a fractured skull after getting kneed in the head playing soccer, and a barbeque serenaded by an a capella choir singing "I wanna dance with somebody"

It was, all in all, a memorable time. And now I can say I've been to Toronto!

The Patio Project

We've debated for some time what to do with the back yard. We toyed with the idea of a deck and had several contractors out to give us a bid for a patio. We finally decided on the patio made of pavers about 18" on a side. First we had 50 metres of pavers delivered. The man who did the delivery could sure make the equipment do what he wanted it to. He didn't have much room, but managed to put 5 pallets of pavers in a little space beside our driveway. This is an aerial view taken from our bedroom window.


Here's another view, this time from my office. The driver got a little nervous if we got too close. I don't blame him.


This is a bit closer, but I'm still on the other side of the fence that goes around our yard. You can see he had a little trouble with the trees, but managed to get the pallets unloaded.


That thing looks awkward, but works on the principle of center of gravity. When the pressure is on, it stays put and lifts the load. When the pressure is off, the center of gravity shifts to the closed end and the whole mechanism slips out of the pallet.



Aru is a student of Karen's who used to do this kind of work before coming to SIT. He's quite a worker. He dug out the back yard and together we hauled the dirt to the tip. Dirt is heavy, so they charged us quite a bit to dump it.


Here are some views as he started to get the pavers in place.


He did quite a job leveling the area. We opted to raise the patio above ground level, so now Karen is calling it a terrace.


I got the brick trim on this side of the terrace in place on Saturday. Here, it is Sunday morning about 11:00 and Karen is enjoying the morning sun while she talks to her mom. Note the angle of the shadows. I'm standing to the north of her and all the shadows from the rafters are pointing south. By the time of the winter solstice, the sun will only be about 40 degrees above the horizon at noon.


Later in the afternoon, the angle of the sun's rays is about the same. I'm hauling dirt out that I dug out to place the brick border around the terrace. Would you believe I moved four wheel-barrow loads of dirt?


On the last bit--the edge along the fence. Hard on knees and harder on hands. Unfortunately, one section went right under a beech tree with a huge root right where I wanted to put bricks. After trying to chop it out with a shovel and saw it out with a tree saw, Karen suggested a hammer and chisel. That eventually worked, but it was tedious.


The finished product (almost). We've still got to put pave-lock in the spaces between the pavers to lock them into place.

I think it looks pretty good. It certainly looks bigger than I thought it would.