Through the Week

It is Sunday! That means only one thing: that last week is over!

Actually, that's untrue. It really means lots of things. What I said is just the most relevant at the moment.

This past week was most certainly interesting. I had a presentation for my BLC class that basically ended up with me standing in front of the class scribbling facts about the Redwall books on the whiteboard. In spite of that, my presentation was probably one of the better ones (although I think "fish and chips" wins the grand prize). I also had my first house visits this week. Since the group I'm working with for my internship focuses on childhood stammering, they do a lot of recording of kids talking - both kids who stammer and kids who don't. Since it's not always convenient for the kids and their parents to come into the lab and record, house visit arrangements are made for some of the kids, and I was assigned six to do. Last week I finished three of them. I would have taken out the remaining three this coming week, but I had to reschedule one of them because of a conflict that came up. So instead I'll have finished 5 of the 6 by the end of the week, and have one that's just going to chill 'til early in December. Word.

I was REALLY nervous about my first visit, but it went exceptionally well so I'm really glad for that. I got off at the wrong tube stop and got really lost for my second one, but with the child's mom directing me on the phone (business call?) I managed to find the right address. The third one was an interesting case. The child's mom had completely forgotten that I was coming, and so the whole thing was kind of rushed and cobbled together as though at the last minute. I had a good time at that one, though. The boy I was recording mentioned all sorts of fun stuff like how much he liked magnets, and I couldn't help but think of myself at that age. Man, I wonder what it would be like to be eight again?

This week I've got two more house visits, plus whatever else it is I'm supposed to be doing. Oh, it will probably be more annotating. Fortunately, not the same stuff I've been doing. I finished those, basically, and now Kelsey and I are doing orthographic transcriptions of the monologues. It turns out that when the original recordings were annotated, no one thought to do a "real" transcription along with the phonetic syllable and phonological word annotations! It's been a lot of fun so far. The last one I finished was all about this one kid's holiday to Disney World Paris. It sounded pretty cool.

That's all for now. Breakfast time, then I'm going to try to make it to meeting.

PLUR!