Normally, when the Hubster leaves for work in the morning, I’m still in bed snuggled up with the cat. She likes that, but this morning, it was different.

This morning, I got up at 7 to make the Hubster his breakfast - a posh bacon butty - because he was to run in the Cambridge Fun Run round the Science Park later, and the website says to make sure you have your breakfast that day. So I made sure he had his breakfast.

The cat noticed I was not in position, and was most disgruntled by this. She decided the way to sort it out would be to run round the house like a loon, going, “maaow” occasionally. After the Hubster had finished eating, I went upstairs to see to the cat. She was at the far side of her double bed in her bedroom, and came straight over to me when I went in the room, and purred a lot. Then, she jumped onto the floor and led me to my bedroom door, where she waited to make sure I was following, then she went round the other side of the bed, which is where she tends to jump up from for some strange furry reason, and I got on the bed and looked down at her and she immediately jumped up and implied she’d like me to get into bed again so she could snuggle up. I complied, and she snuggled. We stayed there for really quite some time.

Later, I noticed that the fun run was due to start soon, so I got ready quickly and cycled up to the Science Park, which smells a bit chemically these days, to watch. I was just behind the start line when they started, so I kind of saw the start. After loitering to see if I could see the Hubster in the throng of people outside Cambridge Consultants, where the start line is (I couldn’t), I went up to Accelrys, where there were a few spectators, some of who I know, lurking for moral support.

Accelrys were putting out two relay teams, one all boys, and one mixed (three girls and one boy). Becky was running in the mixed team, and the Hubster was propping up the rear of the boys’ team. Also in the Hubster’s team (028) were Kevin, James and Paul “Psycho” Sykes. Also in Becky’s team (029) were Toby, Elizabeth and Monica, all shown below, after the race was finished and they’d all got their breath back.

The weather was good for the event - fine, dry and sunny, with no wind or rain or anything. It wasn’t even that cold, as you might expect for the middle of November in England.

Hopefully, all the runners have made lots of money for charidee.

I had a supervision today. It made up for the one I missed last week because of Henry breaking down. My supervisor was in Cambridge today anyway, so he came to my house. That was weird, and I tidied up specially!

He said last time we actually had a supervision, I was a particularly funny colour- because of having been ill - and clearly still being a bit ill! At least it shows I wasn’t making being ill up, anyway.

I’ve been to the pub this evening because it was John’s birthday. There was only me, the Hubster and Spider out, but there was good crack. Aye, lots of it.

I believe it’s now past my bedtime.

Timmy had left by the time I had the ginger beer. It was very nice indeed. Very gingery.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when Jesus Green hosts yet another Cambridge Beer Festival. I had some Golden n’ Eye, which was nice - golden, as the name suggests, light and summery; something else; possibly something else; then some French perry (Uren Foxwhelp; John said it was what it sounded like) with an unknown ABV; some Norfolk Cider Company cider, which I believe is what we had on our honeymoon, in Norfolk, purchased at the Humpty Dumpty brewery shop; then Malcolm told me about the ginger beer: Ginger, from the Marble brewery. I might try the Sly Fox next time - that’s more subtly gingery.

Not that I have a thing about ginger at the moment, of course

I got wrong off a policeman yesterday.

Apparently Trinity Street is one way, and it applies to cyclists as well as cars, and if you’re caught going the wrong way, you have to pay a £30 fine.

I pleaded ignorance, and he let me off, although I had to walk my bike the rest of the way to Sidney Street, feeling very sheepish.

On Friday, I got up very early (5 a.m.) and drove to Guildford, Surrey in order to attend the University of Surrey’s Morphology Meeting that was being held that day. The guest speaker, Miriam Butt, spoke about case in South Asian languages. We’d been given a reading list, but it made much more sense with someone going through it, rather than just reading from the page about stuff I didn’t really understand, like ergativity. I’m a lot happier about it now.

Andrew, my supervisor, did his latest on Hungarian case, which involved a wee bit of GPFM, which I understood having done something similar with Spanish at the LAGB, which was nice. There was a talk by someone else, that I didn’t really understand, then Grev Corbett, a proper linguist - and famous to boot! - did a bit on canonical case. He really looked like he was enjoying himself when he was talking, which made it an enjoyable talk.

One of the things I like about these conferences is that the students, especially the new ones, ask the other students who all the proper linguists are. You discover that you’re in the same room as some famous linguist or other, and that said famous linguist isn’t anything like you thought they’d be like.

One person I did meet was very interesting to me - Andrew’s other supervisee! He divides his time between Perth (Australia), Boston (USA) and London, so even though I live in Cambridge, I’m still Andrew’s nearest student. He’s doing something similar to me but on Ancient Greek, it would seem, and part time at that. I’ll know more on Thursday, when we all meet at Essex to discuss our theses.

I also discovered that the organiser of the meeting lives in Cambridge, so I gave her a lift home as she’d come by train. It was nice to have someone to talk to on the journey back. I’ve also now got another linguist in Cambridge to talk linguistics to, so it can’t be bad.

I dreamt last night that I got caught speeding by a policeman.

(more…)

…so little time.

At the weekend, I went all Domestic Goddess again, and sorted out the airing cupboard. C remarked that he’d never seen a tidier, more organised airing cupboard than ours when I’d finished with it.

There was an ulterior motive behind this airing-cupboard clearance. I wanted space to put some proving bread, which C worked out by the space in the airing cupboard and the banging of baking trays and cake tins and stuff. So, the cupboard was sorted out on Saturday (whilst waiting for Sims2 to do its chugging thing) and the bread was made on Sunday. It was made with a mixture of wholemeal wheat flour ground somewhere localish to Cambridge and oats stone-ground just up the A14 a bit. It turned out to be quite a dense bread, and much tastier than the ones I’ve made before. It’s nice with jam on it. Quince is good.

They never go on about wholemeal oat flour, do they? Only wholemeal wheat flour. I wonder why.