pictures from xmas

The walkers.Visiting Temple Square to see the lights.
Craig and his Dad warming up at Temple Square.
Self-portrait on Temple Square.

The xmas fun begins

I thought it good hostess behavior to enquire about guests' food proclivities. Here is my email exchange with Oliver. Holy shit!

> Hi Oliver,
> just checking in to see what i need to know about you and
> Sophie and food. must and mustn't haves?
> Jane

His reply:

Sophie's vegetarian, except for fish and shellfish. I try to eat only humanely raised animals, if I can help it.
I like lactose-free milk in my coffee, if I'm going to have milk at all, and I don't eat pork or shellfish. There's lots of vegetables I'm avoiding or trying to partake of minimally,which I do according to too complicated a scheme to describe. A non-tomato-sauce, non-onion, non-cabbage option would be swell, but don't sweat it--it's no biggie. Thanks for asking and coping. Looking forward to seeing you!
- O



>

promised pics

Dinner at our place after seeing the live broadcast of the National Theatre production of The Collaborators.Catherine and Keziah after 'decorating' K's car... imagine loud Christmas music accompaniment.

The tree described in the earlier post.

exercise

This is what I am doing on Tuesday and Thursday evenings these days. Torturous fun. More pics of other things coming shortly. Trying to be a more visually interesting blogger...

On Speaking Russian

"To speak Russian involves a contortion of any English-speaking person’s mouth. We must make ourselves conscious of what have become reflexive actions. We can feel the errors of our mouths as surely as we can see the lack of precision in our drawing. We hear the wobbling, sloppy pronunciation as surely as we see our shaky imprecise hand when we sketch a work of art at the museum. That vowel that one of my Russian tutors called "61" (an idea that helped me with my handwriting of it — forget about the loops! Write a miniature 61 and you’ll have the Russian vowel pronounced from the back of the throat and with pursed lips: “ih” [ы]). I don’t have the vocabulary or oral-agility to spew Russian, so I must slow down the way I would were I relearning a baseball swing or basketball jump-shot. My mouth can handle the move this way and that, but certainly not in and out and over there. And so I study Dina’s mouth — she has good teeth; I peer into Albina’s — she’s wearing lipstick today!; I notice Katya’s wearing dangly earrings! I watch and I imitate, even though I can’t see my own mouth. I feel it.

"Say something in Russian," my friend Jose told me when I got back from a trip to Russia. I am accustomed to speaking Spanish to Jose’s wife, but as I wound up and twisted my mouth into the delivery of an easy Russian phrase, Jose laughed. 'Everybody, look at Bob’s mouth!'"

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/12/13/essay-role-mouth-watching-learning-foreign-language#ixzz1gRd3izng
Inside Higher Ed

the personal side

A few tips.

1) do not have microdermabrasion on your face right before hugely stressful and important meeting. The first time I had it I was CALM and my face just glowed. Today, i looked a little like a burn victim. Maybe outside mimicking inside?

2) don't trust your dreams. I woke this morning buoyed up by a dream in which I had been fearlessly interacting with a very large cobra. I naturally read cobra as curmudgeon faculty and felt a little more confident.

3) don't think a klonipin will 'take the edge off". When the edge is that precipitous, probably only heroin will do, and I don't think becoming a drug addict will actually solve any problems.

update on motto

oh my can they interrupt! We had our meeting today to unveil the Language Center and the troglodytes were out in full force. I think most painful was the admonition that "this proposal could have garnered support but we were never consulted." And I sat there making a mental list of the things on which we have consulted over the last four and a half years and the consul tees' miserable track record:

1) requiring study abroad: discuss, discuss, discuss, vote in favor..... and then REJECT in practice.

2) curriculum meetings: attend, atte... oh, not so much; why would we need to discuss that?

3) departmental governance bylaws: draft, draft, draft, discuss, discuss, --- oh, did I mention that we are still only discussing the introductory paragraph... (big raspberry noise)

4) graduate studies brought in line with national best practices.... oh, please, do we have to? we want to be insular and mediocre.

5) required departmental courses: sure, ok... do I have to teach them, oh, ok.... do our students really have to take them? oh, 'required'? but, well they aren't really useful, are they....?

Stay tuned for the part where I take my sabbatical next year and then transfer to the Linguistics Department....