NZEENZ and other excuses

Yeah, my good intentions to get my travel journal posted didn’t come to much, did they? Usual excuse – I’ve been too busy to sit down and write (actually, it’s not the writing that takes the time, because all I have to do is transcribe the handwritten journal I keep when I’m travelling. It’s the photos that slow things down, because I took literally thousands, which I’ve got to curate down to a less overwhelming number before I can post them (and do the odd bit of editing for vanity’s sake 🙂 )).
My busyness has been of an exciting (to me, anyway) kind – on Thursday I gave a paper at a Linguistics conference!!! It was the New Zealand English and English in New Zealand conference hosted by my university, and the organisers were encouraging postgrad students to give “work in progress” papers, so (with a bit of pushing from my supervisors, who kept saying “of course you have!” whenever I protested that I had nothing relevant to talk about yet) I submitted an abstract just before I left for Greece, and had it accepted. Which was very exciting, apart from the getting home and realising I only had a few weeks to write a conference paper bit… So the last few weeks have been pretty much devoted to preparing for the conference (as most of my Christchurch friends are aware, because you’ve probably had the “pleasure” of hearing my talk multiple times as I drafted it!).
Anyway, I survived my first proper conference presentation. I was pretty nervous (and I’m sure showed it for the first few minutes of my talk, stuttering and stumbling over my introduction), but once I got into it and started to relax a bit it went really well, and by the time it came to questions I was feeling pretty confident, and managed to give intelligent answers to the questions from the audience (including some from some *very* well-respected linguists – according to my supervisors, I should take it as a very good sign that they asked questions, because it means what I had to say was interesting!!). And in the tea break later I had more people asking me questions about my research, so I’m feeling pretty happy about how it went 🙂
However, having spent the last few weeks working on the conference means that I’ve been neglecting my actual research, so now I’m feeling very behind, and in need of spending every spare moment working on it. So I think once the load of washing I’ve got in the machine at the moment is finished and I’ve got it hung out I’ll be heading into my office for the rest of the day… so no addition to travel journal today, sorry.

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