Vanil (no-laa)

Vanilla is a word that will always make me a little bit angry. 

When I was in grade five we had individualized spelling lists (I've told this story before) of misspelled words that were pulled from our writing. I tended to write a lot and also wasn't afraid to use words that I wasn't quite sure of the spelling for, so I had some rather tricky words on my spelling list. Or perhaps I simply felt the words were tricky because they were words that I clearly already found to be tricky (having misspelled them in the first place).

I had this one friend who would purposely write as little as possible and very slowly and carefully so as to select only the words which she knew she knew how to spell. In that way she avoided spelling tests in the first place. 

Clever? Perhaps. 

But I couldn't write that way. I wrote furiously, passionately, filling page after page with copious script, using the most lavish words I could think of. I wrote some very purple passages, I'm sure, and I had a spelling list as extensive as my little vocabulary could muster. 

I took risks. I spelled a lot of things wrong. 

Where my friend would write "yummy" I would try out "delicious" or "scrumptious" and...I'd probably leave out an i or something. Onto the list it would go! 

And that's fine. 

I just then had to learn how to spell those words, which, again, was fine. It's not like it's outlandish to have to learn how to properly spell scrumptious. I was fine. 

But I also was forever telling stories about words. 

Anna Lapwood at UGA

I don't even know how I got a ticket to Anna Lapwood's concert, honestly.

We were so excited when we saw her on the list of performers on UGA's docket for this semester. I marked the first day of ticket sales on the calendar and Miriam and I were both poised and ready to buy the minute the portal opened. 

But somehow the show was completely sold out—like, immediately. 

It was rather disappointing. 

But life moves on.

We planned instead for Miriam to head out to Utah with Grandpa, intending for her to hang out with Rachel until the semester was over (Rachel comes home on Thursday)...

But then I was talking with someone on campus about Miriam and Anna Lapwood and they were like, "Seriously—her show is sold out? She can't be that famous!! You should check again."

First of all, Anna Lapwood is that famous. 

But, second of all, there's no harm in trying, right?

Sun letters, moon letters

We recently finished learning all the letters of the Arabic alphabet and now are moving into other little details of the language. One of the benefits of learning a foreign language is the opportunity to look at your own language from a different perspective, which can help you to understand why your first language works the way it does. 

We've spent the past couple of days looking at the difference between sun letters and moon letters. A sun letter causes the "al-" prefix (meaning "the") to assimilate with itself. So, for example, in Arabic "sun" is شمس (shams) and "the sun" is الشمس (al-shams) but you actually pronounce it as ash-shams because "sh" causes the "l" to assimilate. In Arabic "moon" is قمر (qamar) and "the moon" is القمر (al-qamar) and in this case it really is pronounced al-qamar because the "q" doesn't cause the "l" to assimilate. 

When Andrew learned about these they felt somewhat arbitrary to him but slowly began to feel intuitive. 

When he initially taught them to me he spouted off this arbitrary list and I was like, "Yeah. No way am I ever going to remember that."

Like, I knew al-noor changed into an-noor and a few other things that could help me remember but mostly I was like, "There has to be a reason for this, a pattern of sorts." 

Of course, I never bothered to actually determine the pattern because, well, learning Arabic wasn't precisely top-priority in my life (I was busy surviving infants and toddlers). But, when I was teaching it to the kids the other day and I presented them the list of sun and moon letters, I said to myself, "Okay, let's figure out why! There has to be a reason..."

So, here's the list from Wikipedia:

Sun letters	ت	ث	د	ذ	ر	ز	س	ش	ص	ض	ط	ظ	ل	ن
	t	th	d	dh	r	z	s	sh	ṣ	ḍ	ṭ	ẓ	l	n
	/t/	/θ/	/d/	/ð/	/r/	/z/	/s/	/ʃ/	/sˤ/	/dˤ/	/tˤ/	/ðˤ/	/l/	/n/
Moon letters	ا	ب	ج	ح	خ	ع	غ	ف	ق	ك	م	ه	و	ي
	ʼ	b	j	ḥ	kh	ʻ	gh	f	q	k	m	h	w	y
	/ʔ/	/b/	/d͡ʒ/*	/ħ/	/x/	/ʕ/	/ɣ/	/f/	/q/	/k/	/m/	/h/	/w/	/j/

They explain this all in the article there, as well, but we didn't read that initially. We just read what was in the textbook, which didn't explain anything about why sun and moon letters exist, simply listing them out. And that's fine. 

Stress basket

Before we got married, my mother warned Andrew that I was, and I quote, a "stress basket," and that he'd have to handle me with care at certain times (because I was a "little ball of nerves" or something like that).

I was like, "I don't think so. I'm perfectly chill."

My mom just rolled her eyes. 

Andrew assured her he could handle it me.

First of all, my mom was right (of course) and second, Andrew's been great. 

He quickly learned how to notice when I'm feeling overwhelmed and either helps me work through things or simply tucks me in for a nap (I get very tired when I'm stressed out).

It could be said that I'm stressed out now. 

I have so many final projects due and life is going about a million miles an hour and my brain is...well...

Math whiz?

We were talking about how to calculate one's h-index the other day in my post qual class—ironic because the very idea of measuring and tracking one's productivity in that manner seems rather against everything poststructuralism stands for. But, nonetheless, that's what we were talking about. 

The h-index was imagined into existence by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 and it claims to be a measure—or somehow representative—of productivity. Calculating one's h-index is pretty simple, at least in my opinion. You simply find the highest number of papers that have been cited that same number of times. And that's your h-index. 

So, for example, I have two published articles, one of which has been cited twice. My h-index is, therefore, 1 because one article has been cited at least one time. 

Andrew has an h-index of 16, which means sixteen of his articles have been cited at least sixteen times. 

Michel Foucault has an h-index of 309. That mean 309 of his articles have been cited at least 309 times. 

My classmates seemed baffled by this idea, however, so I explained it quickly to them and they got it and then someone asked, "Are you some kind of math whiz?"

Which...if you know me...is a very funny question because a math whiz I am not. 

I have never once claimed math as a strong suit. Not once.

In elementary school, I completed one timed multiplication quiz...ever... So I learned early that I was not a whiz when it came to math. I was a math...opposite of whiz...

A math slug? 

I will brag that I scored in the 95th percentile on the GRE...on the verbal reasoning section.

On the quantitative section?

Groundhog Day (and other nonsense)

Phoebe was so excited that today was hedgehog day (I mean groundhog day) and I meant to do some fun activities with her...but it ended up being a much busier day than I had bargained for. But she had a lot of fun creating her own mythology around what groundhog day means. 

According to Punxsutawney Phil, we're getting six more weeks of winter, but these kinds of prognostications mean very little when you're this far south. 

Our county had a digital learning day while we continued to recover from the weekend's snowstorm. 

And our friends in Durham have had kids home from school since January 23rd! 

I think everyone's aching for life to go back to normal. I hear they're even protesting against ice in Minnesota. So that just goes to show how much people would like the winter weather to pack up and go home. And maybe it should.

Phoebe was actually terribly upset when she looked out the (sunny) front window and saw no snow because she had eaten a big salad with her dinner last night (of her own making). Andrew had made some delicious pizza and we had salad fixings on the side, but Phoebe created a huge salad for herself, which she mentioned looked like a bowl of ice cream, with sprinkles on top (all kinds of peppers that she cut into small pieces). 

There's some inside joke about getting a large bowl of ice cream...if one has had a large bowl of salad...between Andrew and his dad. So they joked about that and then Phoebe was like, "Ice cream...sounds like a good idea."

We don't typically have ice cream in our freezer, though, so I told her she could lick the snow if she wanted to.

She did not want to...because it was dark. 

I told her she could lick the snow in the morning, but then there was no snow left in the front yard!

So we checked the (shady) back deck and there was still snow out there so she licked it before breakfast...to celebrate both her large bowl of salad and groundhog day (or hedgehog day or whatever funny animal day we were calling it...quizzically something to do with both snow and shadow...what is this nonsense? She had no idea but was more than willing to play along).

*****

The ladybug is a paid actor

Miriam and I were talking to Rachel on the phone not too long ago and I mentioned having just so many ladybugs in my bedroom. Like, we've never had this problem before.

Her friend Corbin was there and he was like, "Because it's winter in the south..." (he's from Florida). 

And I was like, "Yeah! But we've never had them like this before!"

I mean, the odd ladybug, sure....but there's been about a billion of them this year. 

Anyway, I was sitting on the chair in my bedroom, reading a paper, when some movement caught my eye. I looked down at the letter board that was on my armrest (never know when you might want to practice your letter formation) and there was a ladybug crawling on the letter L:

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

My dad, as I recall, enjoyed the song "On the Cover of the Rolling Stone," as performed by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show. Today I learned that the lyricist was actually Shel Silverstein. Who knew? Not me. 

But this song has lived in my head for about as long as I can remember.

And today guess who made it into Rolling Stone?! 

Andrew! 

He's not on the cover...but they quote him, so...close enough!

They interviewed him about AI-generated papers that are being cited as real sources, how search engines are picking up on the fake citations, and the ways his students are using AI in his classes.

He's in a magazine!!

Ward Christmas Party (in absentia)

Today while I was attending session after session of conference presentations, I started getting pictures of the ward Christmas party. Miriam passed her driving test this morning (hurrah!) so she drove to the church early and started hanging garlands. Andrew and the other kids joined her later to put up some finishing touches...and then the party started. 

And I think it was worth all the headaches and tears putting it together. People seemed to have fun and it was pretty well attended—around 100 people by our estimate. People seemed to understand the roving rooms set up and many seemed to appreciate having various activities to do. 

I...admittedly...wasn't there (off doing actual job stuff), so I have to rely on what I was told and saw. But what I saw was pretty good. 

Here's the nursery room before Miriam got the popcorn strands up:

The cooken was chicked

This is just to say that on November 3rd I turned in an assignment that was 13,904 words long. Then on November 10th I turned in another assignment that was 3000 word long. And then today I turned in an assignment that was 13,707 words long.

All. For. The. Same. Class.

That's 30,000 words written...in a single month...for a single class.

Add in the 4'33" contest, a bout of pneumonia for Phoebe with everyone else including myself getting mildly ill, the primary program (I'm the chorister!), my job(s—because I have two of them...like a crazy person), homeschooling the kids, one baptism, two Pinewood Derbies (with four separate cars), keeping up with the blog, Andrew being out of town (twice)...

My brain is exhausted. 

We went for a walk this afternoon and I was telling Miriam that Benjamin—who is certainly growing ever more responsible each day but who simply isn't as responsible as other children of mine at age 13—offered to make Rachel's taco soup recipe for dinner yesterday while I was busy taking Zoë and Miriam to their music lessons. 

I asked him if he would simply boil some pasta noodles for us so we could use the leftover sauce in the fridge because taco soup was just...too much. He would still need more supervision for that than I would be able to give him from...not at home. 

Case in point: When I texted him to tell him that we were leaving piano lessons and were on our way home, he texted back "Oh." But he did not start boiling water. So we had to rush to boil noodles for dinner so we could leave for the Kub Kar Rally in time and I was like, "Wow. Good thing you did not attempt taco soup."

*****

"I sometimes just need to verify what he does before I trust it's done. I would have had to make sure the cooken was chicked," I said to Miriam, who was walking beside me. 

The. Cooken. Was. Chicked.

Those are words that came right out of my mouth!

Like I said, my brain...exhausted. 

So, anyway...all I have to do now is prepare a couple of presentations for LRA.

But first I might take a nap.

Waking the moon

I'm 10+ years late to the party, but I'm finally getting around to reading The Red Pencil (aloud with the kids) and I am so hung up on these moon rituals mentioned at the beginning of the book (and, as far as I can surmise, are mentioned later in the book). Granted, we are only on page 115, so we still have a ways to go but, like...what?

So apparently there is a tradition of "waking the moon" in...whatever village our protagonist, Amira, is from...where a "hiding moon" is considered "a curse" so when clouds threaten to cover the moon the people assemble to collectively "wake her" by yelling, banging drums, shaking bells, beating pans. 

And I just...have so many questions about this. 

Is this a special ritual? Like, are there only certain nights that it's important to keep the moon unveiled? Or is it important that she is always free from cloud cover?

Who is keeping tabs on the moon? From what I can tell from the book (and from, you know, life experience), these are all very hardworking people (aren't we all?). So who is assigned moon-watching duty after working the land so hard all day long? Is this task accomplished in shifts? It seems like it would be difficult to stay awake long enough to keep the moon in "view / until sunrise announces / night's farewell" (p. 36), especially if this is a constant thing.

And, again, we're just waking up the entire village to conjure a cacophony every time the moon slips behind a cloud? 

When, then, do the people sleep?

I know the moon wasn't visible when I went to bed last night. The roaring wind, pouring rain, and crashing thunder made enough of a ruckus that I'm not sure any of my hollers would have been heard over the noise of it all. Perhaps that's why cloud cover is bad luck. Who knows?

I don't. 

Stats

Last night I asked Andrew to pull together some statistics for my blog. Like, I could tell that my total posts per year had gone down over time, peaking at 539 (in 2008, the year I was raising only one baby and moved to Egypt) and dropping down to 231 (in 2022, the year I was raising my sixth baby and finishing my master's degree). There are many other reasons for my total number of posts dropping over time, especially since 2010—Rachel offered the fact that I've had, like, four babies between 2010 and now (and mentioned that she was going for an absurd number of babies...but then realized that four was accurate in my case) and Andrew offered the fact that we moved from Egypt to, uh, Orem (which kind of dialed back our "excitement" level). 

Still, I wondered whether my post length had increased (it had) and whether that would even out my total word count—like, I wanted to know whether I was writing fewer posts (obviously) but ultimately hitting the same word count annually. The answer is, that my post length is up on average but my word count is trending downward.

Memorized Scriptures 2024

We had 22 scriptures on our list of scriptures to memorize this year and while I'm not sure everyone memorized every scripture, we certainly made a valiant effort. We officially crossed off 19 of them and are still working on 3. Perhaps we'll cross off more tomorrow.

Beautiful things in my world

On Monday I went out walking with the kids. Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday has been such a slog this semester. But on Mondays we can take things a little slower. 

We had time to admire the leaves.

Space heater

It's mid-October and sometimes chilly, but we're firmly decided on not turning the heater on until November. Just to see if we can (we totally can). 

Andrew (the cheater) moved a space heater into his office and when he turns that puppy on and closes his office door, things get pretty roasty-toasty inside. 

I was in the kitchen just now and he left his roasty-toasty office, leaving the door wide open. 

When I left the kitchen I had a moment of panic when I was hit by a waft of warm air, right in the face. 

"What in the world?!" I asked to no one in particular, sniffing the air. "Is the heater on? What is going on?"

Rachel and Miriam came to investigate with me (the little kids, the younger kids, the kids from Benjamin on down were taking care of Luna) and they agreed that the air was certainly much warmer at head level than ground level. 

This makes sense...because hot air rises. 

But where was the air coming from?!

It was Miriam who pointed out that Andrew's office heater was on and that air was spilling out of his office into the hallway. On his way back to his office he encountered us all bobbing up and down in the hallway, "Warm. Cold. Warm. Cold. Warm. Cold."

The difference was astounding. 

Watching the April 8, 2024 Eclipse

We had a lovely time watching the eclipse this afternoon. While we weren't in the path of totality (we were about 85%), we did notice a significant gloaming effect (another vocabulary word from today) as well as an accompanied decrease in overall temperature. 

Consonant clusters

I'm not taking Paxlovid. I thought about trying it this time around, but it just didn't feel right to completely wean Phoebe while she's trying to get over COVID as well (though I'm sure she'll finish up weaning in the next few weeks, anyway, and then I might have wished that I had just cut her off and taken the medicine). Andrew is taking Paxlovid, however.

Oh, by the way, Andrew and Alexander tested positive today so obviously we've done a bang up job at containing this virus. 

Anyway, Andrew went ahead and got a prescription for Paxlovid. He just had to take a picture of his positive rapid-test and a random doctor online wrote out a script. 

On the one hand, I think that's approaching accessibility (and that's good). On the other hand, why don't we just make it over-the-counter at this point? I mean, it's not like the doctor is doing any actual safe-guarding in this situation. 

We have so many positive tests sitting on our counter...Andrew didn't have to take a picture of his own test. I mean, he did because...honesty is...good. But, I mean, come on... I guess I'm just team "make it over-the-counter." That said, I have no knowledge of how these decisions are made, so I guess I'll let those more knowledgable than me hash it out (but if they're looking for opinions, there's mine). 

Paxlovid.

The first time Andrew used it was when we had COVID the first time and I, honestly, was about 100 times sicker than I was this time around. I was miserable. But, I also had a baby who was still nursing full time, so Paxlovid wasn't even a consideration. But it worked really well for Andrew, who hardly got sick (comparatively speaking). 

I called the drug pax-LO-vid. 

He teased me for pronouncing it wrong, telling me it sounded far too Russian—pax-LO-vid, with a rich liquid /l/ following the tricky /sk/ of the x. Because here's the thing: you look at the word paxlovid and you think to yourself that there's only an "xl" consonant blend, just two little letters. And how hard can that be to pronounce? We have a billion consonant blends in English. I'll share some examples of blends below from this very paragraph:

sounded: nd

tricky: tr

think: nk

consonant: nt (and kind of ns, I guess, though that's a syllable break, so...I dunno)

blend: bl and nd

hard: rd

pronounce: nc
from: fr
paragraph: gr

English: Now, that one is pretty tricky since it looks like "ngl" is three consonants together, which is a somewhat unusual occurrence in English. However, the /ng/ is technically a single sound (/ŋ/ in the IPA), so it's still just a two-consonant blend. Think is technically /ŋ+k/, so that is two sounds.

Tricky, on the other hand, clearly has a two-consonant blend at the beginning of the word /tr/, but although it looks like that /ck/ at the end is another consonant blend, it's really not, phonetically speaking. We've just doubled the orthography representing one sound...so...it's not any different from any other /k/ sound and is not a phonetic blend; it's a digraph.

Same thing with that /ph/ in paragraph. That's a digraph, not a consonant blend. /Th/ is also a digraph—two letters coming together to form a single sound. 

X is tricky in English because it is a single letter representing two sounds /k+s/, so it alone qualifies as a consonant cluster, phonetically speaking, even though it's made up of a single letter.

I'm getting to the story, guys, I promise. 

A day in my life as the wife of a data scientist...

Andrew—of course—went all in on keeping statistics as we made our way across the country and back. He started out keeping copious notes about start and stop times...before he realized that our cell phones track all that information anyway and he could simply harvest that data and analyze it later. 

And that's exactly what he did, which is equal parts fascinating and terrifying. 

Our phones have information about where we are right down to the millisecond of every day, right down to the latitude and longitude of every footstep. It's...wild...and fascinating.

Anyway, if you want to read about all the statistics of our trip (including about the moment I cut the kids off from (sugary) beverages because we were stopping for potty breaks every half hour) you can read Andrew's blog post here.

That link will skip you right past all the coding tutorials he included at the top (so you don't have to wade through those). 

One secret to life, revealed (<--clickbait title)

It'll be our little secret

Don't tell anyone, but when I am suffering from writer's block (when I'm majorly psyched out about my thesis, for example), I open up a Blogger draft and type in there. Because it's soothing somehow. 

I may or may not have 655 words of my thesis saved in a Blogger draft right now. Those 655 words are just a drop in the bucket—for reference, my thesis prospectus is 17566 words (including my references). That translates into 76 pages (and I don't really want to talk about it because writing those 76 pages was hard and made me feel like I wasn't really a writer, or a reader, or a scholar, which is why my thesis itself is only 655 words from today plus the 566 words I wrote a few days ago, so 1221 words total)—but they exist now and they didn't before, so that feels like a victory tonight and so I'm allowing myself to blog about my children...as a treat. 

Will my thesis be finished by next month? Probably not. 

But we're going to just keep putting drops in the bucket—and by "we," I mean "me"—because that's how things get done.

While we were at the park today, Alexander was determined to go across the monkey bars by himself. I helped him across a couple of times, spotting him while coaching him to swing and reach. Then Rachel coached him for a while. And then he attempted it on his own. 

FHE Poetry

I'm taking a poetry class right now, which is wonderful and stressful at the same time. Mostly wonderful, I think.

One of the books I read recently—The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo—had an exercise inside (p. 30) that gave the reader a list of 10 nouns, 10 verbs, and 10 adjectives, and challenged them to write a poem using 5 of each of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives to craft a poem that:

1. is three stanzas long with six lines per stanza, four beats per line (with some wiggle room)
2. includes at least two internal and one external slant rhyme per stanza
3. has only two end stops per stanza
4. makes grammatical sense
5. but is, on the whole, meaningless

Part of the lesson here is that even when you try to write something meaningless, meaning will be there nonetheless, but it can help you approach poetry without a predetermined agenda, focusing more on the sound of things rather than a "message" you want to communicate.