Best and worst of 2008

Karen and I spent a quiet (and enjoyable) New Year's Eve with a friend, and over dinner and drinks I suggested we tell each other what was best and worst for us in 2008 along three dimensions: political, professional, and personal. (The fact that they all start with 'p' is an unintended bonus.) Here's what I shared:

Political best
Barack Obama's victory. Totally.

Political worst
The passage of Proposition 8. Really?

Professional best
Two things: (1) earlier in the year, a round of talks on the East Coast highlighting research done in collaboration with one of my students; (2) later in the year, another one of my students, on the job market, getting several preliminary interviews and a campus visit -- and that's just thus far.

Professional worst
Those who know me know what goes here. 'Nuff said.

Personal best
First, it was taking a nap with our 2-year-old nephew on my chest. Then, it was bringing our 8-year-old nephew back to San Diego for a week (Legoland, the Zoo, the beach, etc.) Then, it was finding out that Karen was pregnant. Then, it was feeling the baby move. That was awesome.

Personal worst
TGA, RIP: I'd been playing music with some friends for over four years, friends who are graduate students and who are now in various stages of finishing their dissertations and being on the job market. One of those friends took a one-year visiting position this Fall, and another was in France for that latter part of the year doing dissertation research. This effectively killed the band -- those of us still around have played a couple times and will keep playing, but it'll never be the same. We may have sucked, but we had some great moments of creative energy and the semi-regularity of band practice helped to cement some solid friendships (I'm glad those won't end any time soon).

Poor choice of words?

From Close Obama Aides Get Tapped (emphasis added):

In an interview with Crain's Chicago Business in 2007, Ms. Rogers said she considers herself an advocate for women entering the business world. "I am constantly looking for opportunities to not only work and assist young women in my business, but also to make room for them and to have people look at them," she said.

Look at them do what? Do they do tricks?

This baby thing is pretty wild

I've already shared this image on Facebook, which just goes to show ya how enthralled I am with it. Yes, in case you hadn't heard, Karen's pregnant (just about 15 weeks in now) and I'm -- well, we're -- really excited about it.

There are two frequent comments/questions we've gotten thus far about this: (1) do you want to find out the baby's sex? and (2) your life's sure gonna change, are you ready? To which my short replies are: (1') no, and (2') no kidding! To be quite honest, I really don't understand people's obsession with (1), but then again, I must admit that -- in response to that obsession -- I've gotten pretty obsessed with my reply to it. Similarly, I can understand why people want to warn me about (2), but at the same time it's not like it's terribly informative. I mean, it'll be what it'll be, I know it'll be different -- but I don't know how it'll be different, and neither does anyone else, exactly.

Hüsker Dü - New Day Rising

Drummers rule

As if we didn't already know:

Playing the drums for a rock band requires the stamina of a Premiership footballer, research suggests.

A giant leap backward, indeed

School's out, and I celebrated by picking up a new MacBook (the black one, natch) with some research money I've been saving up. The worst part so far? Discovering that Time Machine doesn't back up to AirPort disks. (Note Time Machine's tagline: "A giant leap backward.") My cynical self says it's not some kind of technical difficulty in getting it to work, it's that Apple wants to sell Time Capsules (tagline: "A leap forward for backup."). But I bought an AirPort Extreme + external 500GB drive last year, and dammit, I'm gonna figure out how to get this to work.

The best part: I was able to take advantage of the current promo -- "Buy a Mac for college and get a free iPod" -- and of course I got the iPod touch. This time last year I still hadn't even joined the 21st C. with a cell phone, and I was seriously considering getting an iPhone (which were brand-new). I decided at the last minute not to get one, primarily because I didn't want to get stuck with the $20-a-month data plan (now moving up to $30, I hear, compensated somewhat by the significant drop in price and boost in awesomeness for the new 3G iPhone). I thought at the time that if they'd just make something like the iPhone that didn't require that data plan, I'd be happy -- I just wanted a wireless handheld device, the phone was secondary. Then came the iPod touch. I resisted getting it at first, but I finally gave in. And I'm happy I did.

Making my move

For a little while there I had my own blog. It's hosted on a university-owned server, and so the posts tended to be more academically-oriented (but by no means always). And, frankly, it was mostly pretty boring.

At some point I thought it would be a good idea to cross-post my Language Log posts there, both as a way to index them (as opposed to Geoff Pullum's by-hand method) and as a way to allow comments (which Language Log Classic did not). Eventually, the inevitable happened: I was very rarely posting anything other than Language Log cross-posts. Then Language Log moved to its new location earlier this year, and it now encourages comments and has indexing capabilities. So I stopped cross-posting, which basically meant I stopped posting altogether.

So now I want to start this blog to post about stuff that I wouldn't post about on Language Log (or on phonoloblog, for that matter). It might still be academically-oriented on occasion, and frankly, it will probably still be mostly boring. But maybe it'll encourage me to be better at what my friend Ed is so good at: being himself.