To Germany

So... check out picasaweb.google.com/piqueen for the photos of my trip. I've spent one night here thus far and my system is still utterly and entirely out of whack. I left the evening of the 28th just exactly as the second horrible blizzard was moving in. When we boarded the plane the expanse of concrete was still just glassy with melted flakes, but by the time we taxied to position to takeoff, I could barely see out the window -- and what I COULD see was only white. We sat out there for an hour before we took off, which was long enough for the passenger beside me to reveal a large number of personal details whose revelation I intentionally did nothing to elicit. The airport was a miserable cauldron of exhausted and unhappy travellers who had waited too long and who knew they were apt to wait much longer. Here's a picture taken from the line waiting to get into the maze waiting to go through security, which I stood in AFTER I spent an hour and a half getting my bags checked.
This next picture was taken under the Frankfurt Airport somewhere, after the delay from Denver caused me to miss my connecting flight to Munich. In the three hours I had to burn there, I managed to get my passport stamped twice -- one saying I came in and one saying I left again, but I couldn't get the customs fellow to stamp it a third time. My friend Bernd met me in Munich and we got on the Deutsche Bahn (DB) straight back to Frankfurt, then on to Mainz, where it is currently 11pm (or 23).
Today we went to the Gutenburg Museum, where I saw the oldest objects I had ever seen -- handwritten Bibles from the 15th century. Johannes Gutenburg invented the printing press in Mainz in the 16th century -- Mainz has been around since 50 BC, and by the 1400s it was a big place on the map (though Munich did not exist yet at all). After that museum came some bread with cheese, then we walked to see St. Stephan, the church whose stained-glass windows were actually painted by Marc Chagall -- they didn't photograph well, but you can see them here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Chagallfenster.jpg
After the church I saw what now rank as the oldest things I've ever actually seen in person: the remains of Roman ships, unearthed when the Hilton was being built in downtown Mainz. (There are two pictures from that museum on PicasaWeb, but the Gutenburg Museum was very strict about people not taking pictures.) Bernd says that Roman artifacts are underground so commonly in Mainz that construction projects have been known to pretend they hadn't found them, just so the contractors can get their work done.
An hour ago Bernd's dad blew out the candles on their Tannenbaum. I need very much to go sleep now -- tomorrow is Silvester, New Year's Eve, so it is doubtful that I will make a blog posting, but probably I should be able to get some more pictures up. Thanks for reading -- and may your Neues Jahr 2007 be exactly the mix of adventure and peace that you most prefer.

Whole Potter Set

Here they all are. The most recent one is the second row from the top, furthest to the left -- Catalan, brought to me by Ingma, the very generous significant other of a Spanish researcher by the name of Lalo Salmeron. My second most recent aquisition is the furthers to the right, the second row from the bottom -- Vietnamese, brought to me by Aaron Hart as he ventured across the world. I just finished a class in phonetics, the very specific diacritic system of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and Vietnamese uses what looks to me like a fantastically complicated accent system -- it must be a tonal language.

Linguistic Tetris Insomnia

If this blog gets posted, I will be amazed. The amount of time I spend writing blogs compared to the number of postings I’ve made -- it’s nothing short of embarrassing. I don’t know why that should be, given that I write and save files all day long, so one would think it would be no Herculean feat for me to upload a file after writing it, but it’s like the vortex that prevents hand-written letters from being mailed. I swear there’s an unnatural force that prevents me from addressing and mailing letters I’ve written. I have letters I wrote as long ago as high school that never saw the magic of a postage stamp, and it’s become rather an interesting collection.
Point being, I doubt you’ll read this. If you actually do, welcome to finals week.
My brain is utterly fried. There’s a fire in the fireplace and the music playing is the music that played soundtrack to my pledge to love Brian forever. It always derails me, and tonight derailment is a mercy. I keep involuntarily writing grammatical trees for these sentences I’m writing. it’s just like when my brain forces me to play Tetris involuntarily when I have insomnia, staring into the blackness continuing the mental activity (or repetition) that filled my day, same thing with tiny elements of Sudoku puzzles after spending an hour doing them.
Perhaps what I write keeps not getting posted because I read over it and decide nobody should read it, then I never work up the nerve to post it. I’ll bet that’s it. But diagram that sentence, man! Holy smokes! A subordinate clause using a relativizing pronoun, a transitive idiomatic phrase with an oblique locative and a complement clause and can’t o this anymore. I know that’s all wrong and I can’t get my brain straight. I just finished 7 hours of writing a final for my Morphology and Syntax class. It’s totally mad, but honestly it’s a rush. Being a 9 to 5 professional for five years got a tad slow; this is stressful, challenging -- and I’m being asked to describe like why categories should be defined if languages’ most universal trait is their tendency to violate their own rules.
Man, my sentences are long. I try to stck short ones in every now and again so your brain doesn’t have to get all convoluted just like mine is, but I can’t help it -- my sentences are just always long. I have to post this right now or I’m going to get unsatisfied with its quality and never put it up. The thing is that I have this poetry I’ve written in the bus over the semester, a set of poetry about stress and dissolution that I keep trying to type up and post on here, but I keep getting distracted. I have my puppy, my fire, my man in California, and the rest of the night to play Sudoku and eat cookies.
This picture is called Introspection, just in case some Colorado summer could brighten your day. God knows it could brighten mine.