This may be my last entry?

So, I have graduated. I officially have a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics and Exegesis - although I won't have the diploma until the university mails it out in a few weeks. And I have moved back home, which is producing the expected mixed emotions!

The grad ceremonies (I do like that Canadian use of the word "grad"; it's very useful) were both awesome, although quite different of course. CanIL had its own celebration on Friday night, and then the seminary had theirs Sunday afternoon. In fact, the weekend was absolutely packed with various celebratory occasions, since my parents and two friends also came up to join in the parties.

And now, the promised list:

Little things I will miss:

-green left-turn arrows that flash

-buses that say “Sorry – Out of Service”
-the Canadian version of the “Emergency Parking Only” signs on the highway

-Coffee Crisps

-pirogies (they are sold here, but they are not nearly as ubiquitous)

-Nanaimo bars

-Tim Hortons donuts, especially Timbits

-Boston Pizza

-Montana's

-the Colossus (spaceship!)

-the SkyTrain

-the pronunciation of sorry, tomorrow, south, about, house, and I'm sure I'm forgetting other examples

-the spellings of honour, Saviour, and cheque

-the words eh, keener, line-up (as a noun), and grad as an abbreviation for everything relating to graduation

-bilingual French-English signs and packaging

-the opportunity to listen to the French radio station

-switching from mph to kph, and back

-classmates and friends chatting about hockey

-the ELMO projectors in the CanIL building

-feeling the building shake when the trains go by

-free food in the CanIL Common Room

-ACTS chapel snacks

-free food in the Whitehouse kitchen

-black squirrels

-loonies and toonies

-my credit union

-RCMP patrol cars

-Super Store

-the Willowbrook produce stand

-the Canadian flag

-Remembrance Day ceremonies, and poppies

-Thanksgiving in October (and then another one in November!)

-poutine

-Global TV channel

-PRAISE 106.5 (I like it better than 105.3), and 100.5 The Peak

-Starfield, and other Canadian Christian music

-driving both north and south on I-5 on sunny days

-driving through Lynden

-the Lynden/Aldergrove border crossing

Little things I will not miss:

-the pronunciation of pasta, Mazda, and bilingual (“bi-LING-gyoo-ul” - gah!)

-the word keener (sort of a love-hate relationship)

-the smell of farmland when it's fertilizer application season

-the price of gas

-the price of dairy products

-so many medians!

-sweet ketchup

-classmates and friends chatting about hockey all. The. Time.

-long waits at the border, coming from either direction

-inexplicable traffic in Lynden and/or Bellingham

Not-so-little things I will not miss:

-researching and writing papers

-getting up – and staying awake! - for three-hour 8:30 classes

-reading theology textbooks

-walking to school in the pouring rain

-spending Sunday afternoons and nights desperately finishing homework

-having several gigantic papers all due on about the same day

-paying tuition – or attempting to do so

More important things I will miss:

-Golden Ears, these mountains, and the beauty of the Fraser Valley in general

-living in the land of “X-Files” and other sci-fi TV shows/movies

-the friendliness of Canadians (not just a stereotype!)

-Vancouver

-visiting Vancouver with friends

-Fort Langley

-TWU, ACTS, and CanIL

-registering for classes and being excited about almost every option

-being a TA

-the CanIL Common Room

-sitting around talking about nerdy linguistics things, and knowing everyone at the table gets it and will laugh along with you

-M-Files

-the CanIL computer lab

-ACTS chapel

-the grad collegium

-CanIL and ACTS friends and staff

-the Whitehouse, and Whitehouse friends

-watching “House”, “Glee”, “Doctor Who”, and “Bones” with housemates

-dinner club

-conversations around the table at the Whitehouse

-my church up here

-LifeGroup, and LifeGroup friends

In two weeks...

...it will be one day until my official graduation day!

Time has absolutely flown by. It's still hard for me to believe that I'm actually almost done with all of my schoolwork, forever (or at least for a long time! I won't say "never", because I've already learned that God has a funny way of responding when you tell him "never" about things...). I only have a project and a short paper left for Principles of Literacy, a short paper for Theology, and a lesson plan to polish up for the Discourse Analysis class I'm teaching on Monday. And then glorious freedom from schoolwork - mixed with sadness at the end of it.

This month has been insanely busy, what with all the final papers and projects that were all due at almost the same time, and my brother's wedding with its associated preparations and relatives visiting. The wedding was yesterday, and it went very well! My brother and his new wife looked radiant during the ceremony. My sister and I were candle-lighters, and we also each read a section of 1 Corinthians 13. I'm glad we got to be a part of it.

I guess I should get back to a few more school-related things before bed! Look for another post soon... although "soon" could be before or after graduation, which is kind of crazy to think about!

The end is near, once again!

The end of the semester, that is. But this time, it's more significant.

Mackenzie and I are going home for Christmas break on either the 11th or the 12th - either of which are so very close! Despite the fact that I have a lot to do still especially in my online course, I can't help but not feel too anxious, because break is so very close! I'm really looking forward to it. And also, I have been granted an extension for that online course, which definitely helps with the not-stressing thing.

Also, the first tuition payment for next semester is due tomorrow. Thanks to loans and financial aid, that will not be a problem, but the main thing is, this is the last time I will be paying tuition. Very possibly forever!

It is a weird, weird thing to contemplate the fact that this time next year, I will not be in school. In fact, I will not have been in school for quite some time. Life without school will be quite a change.

Looking forward to a new school year

Well, it has been an eventful summer. I'll give a quick rundown of what I've been up to:

1. Mackenzie and I were able to play flute in our church's production of The Music Man in April. That was an absolute blast! We've been in the pit orchestra before, and I think each time we have more fun than the last.

2. I didn't end up getting a steady summer job, though I cannot count how many applications I sent out and I cannot tell you how tired I got of filling out my employment history, etc. ... but I did earn some money through house- and pet-sitting. I love animals, and so I had fun taking care of various dogs, cats, rats, and fish. Mackenzie was able to land a job at Regal Cinemas, so the family got to see a couple of free movies. It was pretty sweet!

3. I co-taught Sunday school with Mackenzie for 4s and 5s at our church for quite a bit of the summer. That ranged from being very fun to a little stressful, depending on how willing the kids were to calm down when it was time to stop playing!

4. I took Intro to Theology and Intro to Bible online. Both were fascinating and extremely useful (not only because they're required prerequisites for this upcoming year's seminary courses), but involved a LOT of writing. I've decided I'm not a huge fan of distance online courses. I need more structure and more in-person interaction overall. But I learned a lot, and feel more able to articulate what I believe - which is an important thing.

5. We're also both in the process of officially applying to Wycliffe. The application process is very detailed, but having taken those summer courses has already been helpful, since it involves plenty of writing about what I believe about various theological and biblical topics.

Mackenzie and I will be heading back up to CanIL this Monday. I'm really, really looking forward to seeing everyone up there again! There are still a few wrinkles we need to work out regarding financial aid and registration, which is the main damper on my enthusiasm at the moment. But I know that worrying about it won't be helpful. Instead, I'll try to just be excited about what we'll be learning this semester!

More later.

DONE!

Yesterday, I turned in my last final paper of the semester. So that means... I am DONE with school for the year!

(I guess I still have two summer courses to get through, but they're the online distance courses that I'll be doing from home. From looking at the syllabi, it shouldn't be too bad.)

It is such a huge relief to have no more assignments hanging over me right now. I'm excited to go home, though I'll miss many parts of living up here. I'm going to try to get pictures of all the beautiful scenery in the Langley area before Mackenzie and I head home on Saturday, and I'm glad there are still a few days to hang out and spend time with other CanIL folks.

So this may be my last blog entry for a while!

Once again, the end approaches

It's crazy to think that the semester is almost over. Just a few more weeks! Of course, that means I have a lot of final papers, projects, and two exams to prepare for. Trying not to think about that too much, lest I panic.

Winter finally seems to be fading. The huge piles of plowed snow in the TWU parking lots are almost gone - helped by the steady rain we've been getting for the past week. There are crocuses blooming in the yards of the houses in the neighborhood, and robins and Canada geese on the campus lawns. (I prefer the robins.) Today, it happens to be partly sunny outside.

Classes continue to go pretty well. I had to do interviews with three people from the library, which is where I have been doing my Ethnography observations. I had been nervous about them, but they were actually pretty fun. And we read through 1 John 1 and 2 in the original Greek as a class, which was really cool.

Anyway, on to Greek homework. When I finish this workbook assignment, I'll be working on memorizing the Lord's Prayer in Greek. I've got about half of it down so far.

At last!

So today was the last day I needed to be on campus for the semester. (I still have one more final, for Field Methods, but it is a take-home paper that can be turned in online.) The Greek final was... well, not that great, but I think I will manage a decent grade. I wish I had studied that last tense a bit more, though - *sigh*.

We gave a friend from CanIL a ride south with us after the final, since she needed to get to SeaTac to fly home to Vermont. It was quite fun to have another person in the car with us - made the trip go faster.

And now we're home! It feels very, very good - although being pretty much done with the semester still hasn't quite sunk in for me.

Very close!

I turned in my last assignment today! It was a backup DVD of all the data I've gathered on Ilocano over the past three months. I even decorated it with a picture from one of our elicitation sessions. It's quite cool.

Now, all I have left is to study for two finals: syntax tomorrow at 9 AM (ugh, too early), and Greek on Monday afternoon. Both will certainly require plenty of studying, but I'm not too worried. And mostly, I'm so very relieved to be so close to done! It's been a wonderful and very challenging semester. I'm ready for a break.

Edited to add: By the way, the end of the semester LACA party was yesterday, and it was a blast! So much delicious Arabic, Karen, and Ilocano food, hilarious in-joke-ful skits and songs, and of course fun with friends.

The end is drawing near

The last weeks of the semester are going to be crazy busy. I have a group presentation tomorrow, several final papers to write, several more that I have to edit and put together, a Greek test and the final to study for, the last few weeks of elicitation sessions that have to be prepared for somewhere in there, and a final in Syntax.

In order to stay sane, I will have to use my time well (obvious, I know, but not easy), but also leave room for important non-school things like Mackenzie's and my birthday, and (American) Thanksgiving.

*deep breath* Back to work, so that I don't fall behind...

Checking in

I figured it's been a while since I've posted an entry, so I'll do a brief update.

School's going pretty well. I had a Greek test that I think went decently - I actually did some significant studying beforehand, which is generally helpful. Heh. Language elicitation sessions have been going well, too. Ilocano has some really interesting grammatical things going on that will be challenging to tease apart, but it's a fun puzzle.

The weather has been alternating between gorgeous, clear, crisp days and cloudy, drizzly days, which is normal fall weather as far as I'm concerned. The autumn leaves are simply amazing around here, and it's always uplifting to drive to and from school with so much beauty all around.

Had a few more days of work, and the job is still okay. Today I'll be working four hours, which will hopefully not be either too exhausting or too dull. I'm slightly irritated that my longest shift so far is on a Saturday - severely cutting into the weekend downtime that I really do need - but oh, well. I have scheduled in some non-schoolwork time this weekend, so that will maybe balance it out.

Though I'm still enjoying classes and my classmates quite a bit, I'm also getting increasingly ready for the semester break. It's not too far away! And there is still American Thanksgiving to look forward to, even though we (of course) don't get days off from school for it. And a birthday!

The end of the first month approaches...

Wow, that went quite fast!

Things are really starting to get busy here. I have a 10-page paper due tomorrow at 10pm (why am I not writing it right now, you ask? Well, because... I... oh, look over there!), which I'd like to finish before classes start for the day, so I can then move to concentrating on my Greek homework. Thankfully, there's not as much of that this week. Then of course I have my usual elicitation sessions to prepare for, and Ilocano data to listen to, enter into the dictionary program, and use to begin to figure out a phonology of the language. Also, I'm sure there are some course readings I need to do... ahem.

I have had two shifts of work. It's quite physically demanding: I set up dividers in the cafeteria for a private event on Saturday morning, and put them away yesterday while Mackenzie moved the tables and chairs back to their normal positions. Those dividers are quite heavy, and sometimes they really don't want to go back into storage. But I think the job will be okay. I'm just a little worried that since it's so taxing, it wouldn't be a great idea to have many hours of it per week, in addition to all my coursework. In turn, that would mean I'm not earning as much money as I'd like to, for things like rent and gas money. Hmm. By next semester, it'd be nice if I could be a TA instead.

Mackenzie and I have pretty much decided that we'll be going to the E Free church that's quite near Trinity (and thus not far from us). We went again today on this surprisingly beautiful Sunday morning, this time to the service with more students. It was very good: good music, a good sermon, and fellowship afterward. It would be nice to join a small group there, though we're both a bit disappointed that no CanIL students seem to go there.

Lunch time! And then I should really get back to that paper.

Time for a school update

Mackenzie and I have now had our first LACA (Lang. & Culture Acquisition) elicitation session. Those are quite different than the Field Methods sessions - you have to have a concrete lesson plan with an overall topic relating to more than just generating vocab. Our topic for our first session was actions and describing pictures. It went pretty well, though Mackenzie and I were quite tired from staying up late doing homework (and the session is already in the mid-afternoon), so it wasn't quite as energetic of a session as others have been.

Before that, we also had our first group elicitation session (for Field Methods), with the married couple who is also learning Ilocano. It was a lot of fun! Our FM teacher helped us out, since it was the first group session. He did a kind of monolingual demonstration, holding up a rock or a flower or a bigger rock and saying the name of the object in a language that no one else in the room knew, and then our LRP said the word in Ilocano. Then we all started combining the words with simple actions like "give", and trying to figure out how to say "bigger rock" or "two rocks", etc. Our LRP also enjoyed watching us all act out words or actions. Hee!

There was also the first relatively big test in Greek. Despite studying a fair amount I hadn't quite memorized all the forms of the definite article - Biblical Greek has a different form of "the" for feminine, masculine, singular/plural, and four different cases! - so I knew I wasn't going to get a perfect score. But I did manage to remember more than I thought I would, especially when I got to the translation part of the test. At the end of the class period (it's long enough that the TA has enough time to grade everything during class, which is kind of nice), it turned out that I got a pretty good grade. And I am getting all the cases and paradigms memorized, so that's good!

Today's regular Field Method elicitation session went very well. Not only did we have a good time acting out simple words like "push," "pull," "eat," and "drink" (and I think our LRP enjoyed guessing what word we were acting out, too!), we had a fun conversation - in English, not Ilocano yet - about snakes and spiders, and whether or not we found those particular animals scary.

Unfortunately, after the session, Mackenzie and I found out that not all of the words we tried to record ended up actually being recorded. Sigh. The little MP3 recorder that we used is apparently quite tricky, even though we really tried to make sure it was working correctly. Oh, well - at least we have transcriptions for all of the words.

Sorry for the somewhat jargon-y post! Hope it wasn't too boring.

One week down

So today marks the end of my first complete week of grad school. Right now, I still feel excited and energetic, in general (that last part might be because I took a nap yesterday), and I think I can do well if I can just keep on top of all the various things I have to do. Another lingering worry is that I haven't heard back about any of the jobs I applied for, even though I have kept in contact with the job offer-ers as best as I can. I bet there are still positions open in food services, but I more than kind of wanted to move away from that. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, things to do: begin the first Syntax language data project, finish Greek assignment for Monday (memorize vocab, do workbook, read chapters), read the rest of the LACA (Lang. & Culture Acquisition) readings, mentally prepare for the first meeting with Language Resource Person(!!!!), physically prepare by doing tutorials for the sound editing programs we'll be using.

Oh, by the way, I ended up choosing to do Ilocano, which is the Philippines language that I mentioned before. It helped that some second-year students said that they really enjoyed doing it, and that the LRP is really nice. I think she actually works at CanIL.

Still been really awesome to eat lunch in the CanIL common room. We met a bunch of our Norwegian classmates today, and chatted with them. They seem to be a friendly and intelligent lot.

Notes about Canada, and where Mackenzie & I are living in particular:
1. When we go back to Washington to visit and for the semester break, it's going to seem like speed limits are insanely fast. Our neighborhood and all the roads in the Walnut Grove area (at least the parts we frequent so far, and of course not including Highway 1) never have higher speed limits than 60 kph, which is less than 45 mph. Most are under 50 kph, which is around 35 mph. So slow!
2. Macaroni & cheese (the kind that comes in a box) is mostly known as Kraft Dinner here. Even the non-Kraft brand has to have the word "dinner" in the name. But apparently that's how Kraft originally marketed it in the US, too - according to Wikipedia. Weird!

First day of class

... And incidentally, due to somewhat wacky scheduling, also the last day of class for the week, since I don't have any Friday classes!

Anyway. This grad school thing? Is going to be awesome. Hard work, for sure, but awesome. I can't express how cool it is to be in a building full of people who all have the same passions as I do, including the teachers.

First class was Field Methods, taught by one of Dad's former students. This sounds like it's going to be a lot of work - gathering data from a native speaker of one of three non Indo-European languages (in other words, not closely related to English), figuring out what sounds they have in that language, doing a rudimentary phonology (figure out which sounds are important to native speakers), and composing a theory about one aspect of the language, as well. The three language choices are a language from the Philippines with a really long name that I've forgotten (not Tagolog), Karen, and Arabic. I'm a little hesitant to choose Karen, despite some family connections, because it's tonal. But we'll see.

After that class, we chatted a bit with the teacher, who is extremely nice. Then, since we had plenty of time before our next class, we checked out the collegium - basically a really nice student lounge - that's available for ACTS students, and then got our student IDs. My picture is at least a bit better than the one I had for my UW ID, so that's good. ;) Next, we decided to check out the CanIL lounge. It's also very nice, and full of awesome people. We met a lot of new friends, both further on in their degrees and our same year. We also shared in a lot of awesomely nerdy linguistics jokes. Yay! :)

After a quick stop at the library to get the ID card activated, we spent some time in the CanIL computer lab before our next class. We did a lot of ice breakers in Syntax & Semantics, so I feel like I know all of my classmates at least a little bit. They all seem cool, and as usual, come from a very wide variety of places, from other areas of Canada & the US, to South Korea, Romania, and Norway. The professor is from the UK, so I especially enjoy hearing her accent. :) And she is also very nice, with a great sense of humor.

The only question brought up by class today was whether or not Mackenzie and I should drop Greek. We'll already be doing a lot of language learning in Field Methods and Language & Culture Acquisition, so adding another whole language on top of it was not recommended to us. But the teacher for Field Methods suggested we try one day of Greek (first class meeting is on Monday) and see what we think. If we drop it, we might add Ethnography to our schedules, which would also be cool.

So yeah - I think this whole thing will be really, really fun, if I just keep on top of all the work I have to do. I guess it's a good thing that the on-campus jobs I applied for mostly only offer less than 10 hours a week!