weekend update: i spent wednesday night through saturday lunch at the CUNY conference on human sentence processing held this year at the university of maryland in college park. the conference was good, saw most of the usual crowd of folks. i left on friday night to spend the night with my mom, who lives 1/2 hour away in virginia. she has gotten all crazy about re-doing the house. everytime i go home, something is different. recent updates have been a newly repaved driveway, a new retaining wall for the garden, a new fence at between the driveway and the backyard, and new cabinetry for the bathroom. this time, the dining room was newly painted and had new furniture (a 1945 dining set including table, 6 chairs, sideboard, and china cabinet). it's lovely. she and dad are planning on refinancing the house to get money to redo the basement (take out the old grungy carpet, repaint, new ceiling, lighting), screen in the back porch, and redo the kitchen. all this when they're 3 years from paying off the mortgage. they will essentially be starting over again with the mortgage, since the amount they're taking out is just about the same amount they originally bought the house for, 27 years ago. sigh, there goes my inheritance...

on sunday i horse showed at my barn. this was my first show on random and i was all kinds of nervous. my classes were the last 3 scheduled for the day, but i had no idea how long everything would take, so i wanted to get out there about noon. since my car is still in the shop* a friend from school, AC, took me out there. i warned him that it would probably be hours, but he wanted to come (get out of the city! smell the clean air! see some pretty horses!) so off we went. got there, gave random a bath, grazed him while he dryed off, tacked up and rode a bit, then put him away and watched the show while i waited for my classes. jeezus it was a long wait. we didn't get finished til about 8pm. after all the waiting, i won a 5th and a 3rd in my jumping classes (low adult hunter division, fences at 2'6") but nothing in the flat class. and they ran out of 3rd place ribbons! hmph. we'll see if i actually get them ever. rg. cuz random didn't have his head down and relaxed. gonna have to work on that.

*don't EVEN get me started

sadly, it's now back to the grind at work. i have it in my head that i want to graduate in may 2005. but gawd, that seems close. i haven't even completed one experiment that will go in my dissertation. i just want this to go well. i just want to be done.