Supposedly, Ben and I will both be learning some Turkish before we go there in September. We will be on a tour so it may not be that necessary, but I think it's good to know anyways and it would be nice to be able to interact with people there on our own, at least for basic things. But before I started with Turkish I wanted to brush up the rudimentary Italian that I know, which I learned for our summer 2006 trip. So I spent a lot of today reviewing that, remembering the vocab that was starting to slip. It's nothing ground-breaking but I really enjoy language; I wish I had the time to take a real language class. Maybe I will once all my coursework requirements for my Ph.D. are done. What is nice too is that I learned Italian with a Pimsleur-like course, though one that has a lot more vocabulary, so reviewing it today was something I could do while cleaning the kitchen and making a key lime pie. It feels both productive and mentally stimulating.

My French, which I actually received a lot of instruction in, I keep up by listening to French news podcasts. They are short and have too many soccer results, but they maintain my listening comprehension. I'm sure, though, that if I actually tried to speak with someone in French I would have a hard time making the words come out of my own mouth. I wish I had time to learn some crazy new language, like any of the Asian languages. I really ought to know Spanish but it's not as exciting to learn Romance languages because they are all like French but with different pronunciation.

I'm trying to find a French-language news podcast to improve my French listening skills. Does anyone know where I should search for such a thing?

Grad school update: I haven't heard from any more schools, but Ben got into Michigan, so we now have one school together. :) He also got waitlisted at Cornell, which means... something.

I have two characters on WoW now, one on Sen'jin with Ron and another on Mal'Ganis, which is the server that Ron and Jonathan have high-level characters on. And today my new RAM arrived, so shortly I'll be able to run it on my home computer. Ron, Jonathan, Modi, and I went to the Punchline in SF on Wednesday night, which was really cool. The best comics were the headliner, Jim Short, who was really fantastic, and one of the opening acts, this Iranian guy from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" whose name I've forgotten.

And I've gotten my car packed and ready, because this weekend I'm going to Tahoe with a bunch of BFC people to ski Alpine Meadows and Sugar Bowl. I'm really excited about this, especially because the weather just turned beautiful and sunny, and because I've never skied Tahoe before so it should be a lot of fun.

My mom got me a daily calendar of French phrases that are more slangy and less obvious, and also some cultural tidbits, and it's pretty funny sometimes. I'll close with two thematically related days:

29 janvier: Allons nous réchauffer au coin du feu.

30 janvier: Les brûlures sont superficielles.

So, I didn't quite mention that I went to Angel Island last weekend with Ron. We hiked around the 5-mile perimeter trail, and I learned about the old immigration station, army post, and Nike missiles. It was really pretty and a lot of fun, and of course the view is great.

This weekend, I headed down to Los Angeles for the last time for a few months, to see Ben before he moves up here for the summer. I got in late Friday, and on Saturday we had a leisurely breakfast at the Corner Bakery Cafe (I love their D.C. chicken salad more than words can say), rented Lawrence of Arabia, and started working on various things for the dinner party that night. I think the menu was, avocado and blood orange salad with Asian dressing, cochinita pibil with cocoa pasta, mango and pico de gallo bruschetta, and cardamom panna cotta for dessert. The panna cotta was great; I should make it more often. I also really enjoyed watching Lawrence of Arabia, throughout the day. It's long but great, the sort of movie Hollywood rarely makes nowadays.

As an aside: I guess my french oral comprehension class worked. I watched Breathless (A bout de souffle) on Thursday, without subtitles, and followed along rather well. That's a first for me. And then today at the SNAP collaboration meeting, I could follow some people's French conversation very easily. There are degrees of difficulty, of course, but that was encouraging.

Anyways, on Sunday we went to the beach and barbeque hosted by Ben's master's program advisor, who had one Ph.D. student and one Master's student graduating. That was a lot of fun; we played beach volleyball, went boogieboarding, and ate a huge amount of really good food. I also tried Ouzo, which is surprisingly similar to absinthe.

Slept very little and then got up at 4:15 this morning to catch the 6:00 flight out of LAX. I landed at 7:15, got off the BART in Berkeley around 8:20, ran home to grab my badge and caught the 8:35 shuttle to LBL, and was at the opening talks of the SNAP collaboration meeting ten minutes early, at 8:50. Phew. One of the first talks used my data, and I didn't want to miss it. When he finished presenting my data, Bill's high-voltage data, and Jens' quantum efficiency stuff, someone actually called for a round of applause for how much achievement that is. I'm in a really exciting place right now, career-wise. The talks today were okay; some were really great, mostly instrmuentation ones, and some were really awful. I'll leave it at that.

Now I'm at home, and my plan for the evening is to sleep a lot and not exert myself. My back is hurting a fair amount; I had kind of a wipeout on the boogieboard. I was on this really big wave (all the waves seemed bigger than usual, I thought), and it broke under me and sort of flipped me over, running the board into the sand and my chin into the board, and my legs got swept towards the beach over me but since my head wasn't going anywhere, it sort of crunched and now my back feels very bruised. Bleah. It does make me rethink wanting to learn to surf, a little.