Had office hours with Dr. Boudewyn over Zoom this morning from about 10:10am to 10:25am, hung around Scotts Valley a bit to keep an eye on the plumbers but I had to go to campus at 12pm. Took the bus to Science Hill and checked out a school Dell laptop from Science & Engineering Library in order to get my coursework done today. Crossed the bridge to go to College 9 and Social Sciences 2 because I planned to have my MatLab Zoom meeting from the CaT Lab again, like last week. It turns out Isabel had been wrapping up some tea and arts and crafts with the first-year grad students of the lab. They made stuffed fabric hearts. Too cute. I have a couple of pictures.
MatLab Zoom was okay, but we definitely need to brush up on behavioral experiment design from Tuesday. I only took paper notes that day because I didn't have enough time to troubleshoot the school laptop kiosk from McHenry. My ThinkPad's original battery borked its firmware chip again on Sunday, and with minimal chances for a power surge up here in SV, I've been triple-stressed about a replacement battery coming in on time. On that note, I did pick up that Asvine V126 I'd been eyeing for weeks, and it's such a gem to write with. The extra-fine nib flows well, writes thin, and the body weight relieves less pressure around my thumb joints.
Arrived somewhat late to seminar, I was anxious until I just up and presented my research question about theta waves and cognitive control in foreign-accent speech perception after 7 of my classmates. I sped through the script with a few more asides and ad libs I care to admit, but it was worth it. My classmates (Nicole(?), Nora, Crawford, Cat, and Ruhi) asked me 7 or 8 questions back to back about the role of experience, lower level phonemic plasticity, first-gen and second-gen immigrant children, why Chinese and not Spanish, pilot testing, the conditions, and their own experiences and anecdotes; and I even drew a table of my conditions/sample groups on the blackboard, 3 sample groups by 2 conditions, for 6 conditions total. I was and still am stunned they were so interested, and how fast I was to respond — I didn't even KNOW I could think/talk that fast, but boy, I really squeezed out those 5 (or 6 or 7 or 8 ... oops) minutes. Fav thing I said in the Q&A, because it's funny: "Experience [with accents growing up] is, like, the secret sauce in the experiment." Dr. Boudewyn gave me some advice too, to look into interlanguage minimal pairs. Everyone's research proposals were great; I especially liked Ruhi's, Nicole's, August's, and Colin's.
It was so nice being in my element and the joy carried me even through the slight traffic on Highway 17 back up to Scotts Valley. Replaced my laptop battery and it works great and unwound for an hour or so on the computer. Later stir-fried a bit more bell pepper to get some veggies in with my leftovers from yesterday and continued bouncing between YouTube videos. What a week. And it's only Thursday! :-)