Proper way to lift a box

Some pictures, Robb-style

Shelley driving me (mad) to Yakima


Heather and Eddy preparing to float the Yakima


More preparation

News flash

Nate drove a tractor today.

What?!? A Serious Post???

I thought I'd be a little unorthodox and just put a standard news update--a list of all the important issues--here.

Item 1:

I have a girlfriend. Her image may be viewed here. Her name is Heather and she is wicked cool. Her blog, however, is dead, or, as Heather says, its glory days are over.

Item 2:

I'm leaving. I was accepted to the University of Glasgow for my MLitt in English Language and Linguistics. I'll be gone from September of 2005 to September of 2006. Anyone wishing to make a large monetary donation...

This also means that I've graduated from UW.

Item C:

I have a temporary job for the summer. I'm an apprentice! Hopefully I get to learn some carpentry, tile work, and stone-cutting... And my employer is a dadaist! At least, I think he is... That, or the lack of eight ambulatory lemons.

Item 4:

I stepped on my own finger the other day. Now my fingernail has a little white scratch on it and my finger is sore.

Item 5:

The reason I've lost weight

It's so hard to get to the food...

Jobs I'm thinking of looking at

This is more convenient and more annoying than just emailing myself the list.

http://seattle.craigslist.org/ret/79704167.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/trd/79748885.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/wri/79366906.html

More to follow.

More from a government job

We've resolved that it should be formal government job etiquette to not make calls to other departments after a certain point in the afternoon. It seems that everyone waits until the last minute to try to press all their orders through, which makes us all ... up-tight.

To this end, my co-workers and I propose that beginning at 4:20 on weekday afternoons, reggae be piped through all government office sound systems. Mellow mood has got me...

Chiliwack is larger than you'd expect.

I have decided that I have another story worth telling.

Last Sunday, Heather, Shelley, and I, after partaking in a truly EPIC feast of the Thai variety (hosted and prepared with help by my new family, the Dickersons), were talking about how to spend the rest of the afternoon. Suddenly, someone (I think Shelley) said, "we could go to Canada..." So that's what we did. We left at about 6:00 pm from Seattle and, having decided to go somewhere less conventional than Vancouver, drove up to the border at Sumas/Abbotsford- we got there at around 7:30 or 8. On that crossing, the patrol on duty was slightly suspicious of our motives, but let us pass unhindered.

Upon crossing the border, we decided to drive the extra 20 minutes to Chiliwack: we found the name exotic and enticing, and expected the town itself to live up to the standards it had set by adopting this title. We were not disappointed. The restaurant we ate at (masquerading as a sports pub) was actually a culinary Mecca, specializing in such delicacies as Yorkshire pudding. To boot (as they might say up there), we dined in an amazing outdoor patio by a gas firepit.

After finding and touring a Canadian store, which, counter to its appearances, assured us that it was not simply a Fred Meyer with slightly raised vowel pronunciation, we prepared to cross the border (at around 10:00) to return Stateside. At this crossing, however, the guards were less easygoing and were incredulous at our claims that we had traveled all the way from Seattle just for dinner on a Sunday night. We proceeded inside, at their urging, and waited while they searched our car and made us fill out customs forms. We were too happy and tired to care, however...

Please pass the bureaucracy? Or have someone do it...

Here is an anecdote from my new place of occupation.

The other day, I was sitting at my desk in the Health Sciences building, working, and the phone rang. I answered it "Classroom services," as I was accustomed to do.
"Hi," said the voice on the other end. "We're having a blood drive over here in the lobby, and we can't really see what we're doing. Could you turn on the rest of the fluorescent lights for us?"
"I'll see what I can do," I answered. I asked my co-worker Joe if I could go down and do that for them.
"No," he said, "I think the Physical Plant handles lights."
"So should I call them?" I asked.
"Yeah... You could probably do that."
Then I called the Physical Plant. "Physical plant," the lady said.
"Hi, this is Joel in classroom services," I began, "and I'm calling regarding a request I've just received to turn on the rest of the lights in the Health Sciences lobby for a blood drive they're having. They can't really see what they're doing."
"The lobby? Man! I put in a work order a week ago to have those turned on."
"Oh... Right..."
"They're on break now, so they won't be able to turn on the lights until 10:00..."
"I guess that will be fine," I said, and promptly hung up the phone in amazement at the mass amounts of eerie glowing crimson tape suddenly spilling out from the phone and inundating my desk.

Consonant preaspiration and gemination in Modern Icelandic

Though there are interesting features both in the consonant and vowel repertories of Icelandic, this paper will focus primarily upon Icelandic consonant phenomena, primarily those of aspiration, and where related, gemination. This paper will contain a brief introduction to the Icelandic consonant inventory and some cursory information on the diachronic progression of Icelandic consonants (which is helpful in that it enables one to predict Modern Icelandic pronunciation from the orthography, as I have done for this paper). Also introduced are some of the previous and current theories related to Icelandic consonant preaspiration. This will be followed by a survey of some of the data I have compiled from grammars and dictionaries, an analysis of the data as well as a discussion of possible derivations and rules governing preaspiration, and finally a discussion of some problems inherent in a purely syllable-based analysis.

Icelandic stops, instead of contrasting between voiced and unvoiced, use aspiration contrastively. Historically, consonants all contrasted based on voicing, and the orthography represents the earlier voiced contrast rather than the modern, aspirated one: though there are no longer any voiced stops in Modern Icelandic, the orthography includes b, d, gj, and g. Underlyingly, however, these sounds have changed to unaspirated [p, t, c, k], which are in contrastive distribution with [ph, th, ch, kh] (p, t, kj, and k, respectively, as seen in the orthography).

A feature of Modern Icelandic that makes it an interesting study is the presence of preaspiration in certain environments. Several arguments have been suggested to account for preaspiration, which Hansson (2003:24) deems a 'diachronically highly unstable' phenomenon. It is important to consider these arguments before examining the data, in order to assess their appropriateness. Preaspiration is not reflected in the orthography of Icelandic (though it can be accurately predicted from it, either from the orthographically represented gemination or based on environment), but it does not appear to be an allophonic phenomenon. There are several minimal and many near-minimal pairs that illustrate its contrastive status, and Hansson (2003), based on durational studies, suggests that, rather than a 'preaspiration' feature of the consonant, there is a full [h] segment, as part of a surface cluster. Implementing Hansson's suggestion, the Icelandic word epli ('apple') is transcribed as [ ɛhplɪ ] rather than as [ɛhplɪ], the method which had often previously been used. Because of the extreme vowel coloring that almost always occurs in a situation of preaspiration, Hansson also reflects the devoiced vowel in his analyses, and an allophonic equivalent to the previous example includes a devoiced [ɛ]. Though I accept Hansson's suggestion that there is no actual [preaspiration] feature, I continue to use the word to describe the phenomenon of h + deaspirated stop clusters, due to convenience.

Why doesn't anyone ever get drowned in effigy?

It's nice of the paper to group all the comics I hate together into one section—I just wish it didn't take up all four pages.

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Breaking news: For all of my readers in England (I'm pretty sure that excludes just about everyone): I managed to hook up a British phone number to my computer phone in addition to the Olympia one. So, if you're English, and reading my blog, please call me and tell me WHY.

0870 - 3404200

I wasn't going to complain

Someone told me recently that my blog is boring. It's true, I haven't posted all break. It's hard to do so when to go home means a 6,000 mile trek on foot across tundra and volcanoes, and to get anything put on the Internet you have to use a combination of smoke signals, carrier pigeons, and flares. Those flares get expensive out there! Anyway, I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year's. Me, I caught malaria. Or a cold- I'm not sure which.

Sacred Harp!

I have renewed my obsession with Shape Note singing—it must be in my roots. If you want to hear some music that is incomparably passionate, manically enthusiastic, totally unrefined, raucous, poorly recorded, repetitive, and unabashedly white (No complaints now, I gave you fair warning!) while still managing to praise God, go here and click to hear some of the mp3s. If you want to reproduce this type of music yourself, go here. If you're interested in the history, visit this site. Shape note singing is an Appalachian tradition- the notes on the page are different shapes to help people learn to read music. It's generally out of tune (like bluegrass, which is from the same area), because the people singing it aren't trained musicians, and the intervals tend toward open fifths—a very medieval feature. Anyway, if that description doesn't sound interesting you probably won't like it. It sure is very enthusiastic, though.

Ready for another dream?

I dreamed that someone made us all (at UCU) some kind of orange drink for lunch and we were all drinking them through straws, trying to see how fast we could drink them, and at the same time trying to discover/climb some kind of mountain that was either in Greece or Essex (I was having trouble reading the map that for some reason was displayed in my head) and had some kind of shrine on/near it that was supposed to give us experience points. Meanwhile, Josh (Holly's brother) came over to see about delivering or filming some kind of claymation for which we were going to possibly use Ringo Starr as a voice actor. When Josh noticed that we had straws he wanted to have a battle with them (by rolling them up and popping them, then hitting each other). I wasn't too excited about that. Then I noticed that I had a TON of mail. And for some reason Coldplay was playing through the whole thing.

Let me know when you've had enough...

Dream Trend

Let's all jump on this bandwagon!

Last night I dreamed that I was asleep, and my sister came in the room and woke me up, and asked what I dreamed. I smiled because I had had a really awesome dream, and I knew that when I woke up I'd be able to put it in my blog and it would be way more awesome than everyone else's dreams. I had her type up my dream for me so I could copy it and paste it later into my blog. She laughed the whole time because my dream was so funny. Then she left and I realized that it was still pretty early, so I went back to sleep.

That's all I can remember about my dream. I had another one, too, and it was something about monocles (I blame that on my discovery of this jewel yesterday). I don't remember what, though.

Man that dream in my dream was funny, though.

Pretty basic, really

In case anyone ever has trouble with their 1980 Celica, try hooking these two things together. It worked wonders for ours.

In other news, read this story and the ones surrounding it.

I totally had a birthday.

Yesterday. All I can say is that all you people who missed out on eel pie missed out. Turns out Heather is The Master Eel Chef.

<--eel pie

There hasn't been anything of note lately

...UNTIL NOW!

Noteworthy enough to resort to capital letters, even! I got a phone number! Not a phone, or a cell phone, just a number. And I can answer it on my computer. It's an Olympia, WA number for some reason... I don't get that, but I'm not complaining. So if anyone's bored, here it is (against my better judgement): 1-360-516-1972. Don't no weirdos call, and don't call after 11 or so at night (my roomie likes his sleep), but you can even leave me voicemail if I don't answer. It's busy a lot, I can't call out, and sometimes the program crashes randomly, but I love it.

Also, if anyone has a service called FWD (free world dialup), my number on that is 519789

(edit: 30 seconds later)

This blog is a reflection of my soul: boring and stagnant. Don't expect any more than that or you'll be disappointed. Of course, you will be anyway... You should probably get used to it.

SPORTS FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004

The last week has been utter turmoil for me. As the election day draws close, bringing with it the threat of the responsibility that every American must bear or be subject to chronic haranguing ("You HAVE to care! It's your RIGHT!"), I have been exhausting the search capabilities of the Internet, trying to find just that one political quiz that will clarify the whole mess and reach through the ethers to miraculously inscribe upon my (hypothetical) bumper the name of the only candidate whom I may sanely support in the presidential race.

After an entire week of this relentless pursuit of elucidation, I was about to give up, beaten down by the seeming utter lack of suitable candidates for the presidency. I had been through all the parties; Republicans, Democrats, Turtles, Emperors all hopefully presented to me their unique ideologies, and all were turned away--found unsuitable for this reason or that. I argued for hour upon hour with the acolytes of each school and remained stolidly skeptical as to their understanding of the systems they endorsed.

It wasn't until the last, hollow claims of the "Barking Spider Resurgence Party" echoed away to silence in my mind that I heard the sweet voice that was to utterly convince me. "What in this country does everyone agree on?" It asked. "What does everybody love?"

Of course! How can anyone not like sports? What could be more un-American than rooting against Team Spirit? Who in their mind cannot but "pull for the Home Team"?

That is why I ask you now to join with me in voting for Sports in the upcoming election. With Sports at our nation's head, we cannot fail in any endeavor. Sports must win in all situations.

Go Sports!

No Truer Words

I came across a pearl of a poem in the ethers of the Internet today, and I had to share it with you all.

Watch these delicate sausages
Recall the moment their sweet juice rained hot on your tongue
I ache bitterly for this gift of meat
-Anonymous