Busy busy busy

Dear blog,

Sorry I've been neglecting you. I've had a lot going on. I somehow accidentally re-entered The Working World, and in case my idle hands weren't busy enough, I re-enlisted in my research class. Of course, you know that I am very happy to be working on research, especially since this semester we have taken a new direction and are working on grammatical typology. I am learning new things every week, I am constantly behind, but I am working really hard whenever I can to catch up and do my professor proud.

I think I partially succeeded at this when I got accepted to the Language Documentation and Conservation Master's program at the University of Hawai'i. She offered her congratulations and sent me a really really nice email, and announced it to the class, much to my feigned embarrassment. Truthfully, I am very proud of myself. I have been working really hard the last two years to make my plans for grad school and beyond a reality, and I am finally seeing the results of the countless hours of classes, papers, projects, research and presentations that I've put in.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Hawai'i. First, it is very likely that I will be alone for my first semester. So far, we are tentatively planning for Nae'ole to stay here while I go to school, so he can take some more time to job hunt, and so I can try to find us a place to live. Since school starts in 97 days (and I leave permanently in 71 days), we don't really have enough time to accomplish these two very important tasks. While I am so sad about this that it makes me physically sick to think about it, the silver lining is that I do my best work when he's not around, which bodes well for my first semester's grades at UH. Another positive is that there is a conference coming up in February that looks to be mostly peopled by the wonderful folks that I met this summer at InField. It will be great to see some familiar faces, and to personally thank some of them for influencing my decision to stop stalling and apply to grad school.

The second incident of mixed feelings regards my research. Over the last 2 years I've gotten very attached to it, and it makes me very sad to abandon my language family and start on something new and unfamiliar. And of course, there's the slight feelings of possessiveness, knowing that someone else will likely take over where I leave off. I didn't I think I'd feel like this, but I ought to have guessed, looking at past semesters when I was determined to stay on the project even though I probably had too many other things going on to be able to make a dedicated commitment.

Finally, and unbelievably, I still have two very important things to wrap up from the wedding: vendor reviews and thank-yous. Believe me when I say that I WILL get the thank-you's done by the 15th of this month, and I will hopefully finish all my reviews today. I'm trying to get all these lingering projects completed, because I now have an entire apartment full of the accumulated detritus of the last three years of our life together to empty, and it's a shockingly large undertaking.

I love you blog, I promise to do a better job.

Love, me.