Moving time

I’m in the process of moving this blog over to my own website at emily.albarillos.net. I’ll leave this blog here for a while, at least, but I’ll only post new stuff there.

-Emily

Scottish breakfast tea

I just bought some of Revolution Tea’s Organic Scottish Breakfast Tea (it’s about halfway down the page I’ve linked to) – I shouldn’t have, since a package from Twinings is on its way, but the packaging is so nice and it’s in those little pyramid-style tea bags. And hey, Scottish breakfast tea? Never hear of it. Might as well give it a shot.

15 tea bags for $10 – a little pricey, but it gives me something to look forward to trying in the morning.

Photo of the Day (yesterday’s, I guess)

Parking lot near Revolution Books, just off King Street in Honolulu

Gaiman on Colbert Report

Neil Gaiman (recent Newbery Prize winner for The Graveyard Book) was interviewed a few days ago on the Colbert Report. Watch it at Gaiman’s blog here. It’s fun.

Aloha

I hope that getting married and helping organize the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation are good enough reasons to have stopped blogging for the last two weeks.

More on both of those major life events later. For now, a photo of the first stress-free morning I’ve had in a long time:

Two delicious malasadas from Leonard’s and a cup of coffee, right at the grassy edge of Queen’s Beach in Waikiki. Oh, and THE SUN WAS OUT. Which, believe it or not, has been a pretty rare occurrence here over the past few weeks.

Hiking

Today a friend and I hiked most of the Waahila Ridge Trail – it begins at the top of St. Louis Heights in Honolulu, and goes back into the mountains along a ridge between Manoa Valley and Palolo Valley. Awesome views and some scrambley bits made it a good hike. We didn’t quite make it to the end because the rain was getting serious, but I think we went at least 3/4 of the way.

Between this hike today and an hour run last night, I think I got enough exercise this weekend. Probably should have done some homework, too . . . oh well.

Teas to always have on hand

Evaluating my tea stash today . . . this is the list of what I would ideally always have in the house.

1) Tazo Om. It used to be my favorite. I still really like it but don’t know if it’s my favorite now.

2) English Breakfast tea.

3) Something else black. Earl Grey probably.

4) A green tea, preferably with jasmine

5) Something herbal, maybe peppermint.

6) Something foofy, like the nice teas my sister buys me.

The Great Aloha Run

I did it! I did the Great Aloha Run on Monday! I went into it thinking 1) I’ll be happy to finish in under two hours; and 2) I REALLY hope it doesn’t rain. Success on both counts – I finished in 1:36, and the weather, though dreadfully cold and windy as we were lining up for the start, was dry.

I think around 25,000 people did this race. That translated to a lot of interesting people-watching, and also a lot of zig-zagging as I ran. There were high school bands, three water stations, and a flat-bed truck full of taiko drummers along the course. I wish I’d taken more pictures.

I found my friends at the end and we posed for a few sweaty-happy pictures. Then Frans showed up and gave me a ride home on the motorcycle.

I’m so happy I did this.

Waikiki Aquarium II

I was at the aquarium this weekend for a class assignment. A few photos:

Clownfish

Pair of squid

Tumblin’ jellyfish

Limits of Language: A Very Fun Book

I just noticed a shiny new book – Mikael Parkvall’s Limits of Language – sitting on a professor’s desk and asked if I could borrow it. Bad habit, I know. But he should know by now to hide interesting books before our meetings.

I’ve been flipping through it for the last half hour, reading bits here and there. And it is, as I say in the post title, a Very Fun Book. It’s full of all sorts of random facts and trivia about language, languages, and linguists. It has a Linguist’s Calendar, a (very funny) Linguists’ Guide to the Galaxy, and chapters on everything from written language to language change to tense, mood, and aspect. It’s not a book to be read cover to cover, but a book to be sampled, read at random, jumped around within. I wish I’d had this book when I was teaching Linguistics 102; it would have been a good supplement to our rather dull course reader.