for your viewing pleasure...

i know i promised people pictures, but have been slow getting to them. this is my favorite of the ones that i've seen so far (L->R: becca, becky, matt, kara) because everyone looks a little bit mischevious. the two posted below just make me laugh. as i was flipping through the album that kara created, i was like, "hmmm....why is everyone sticking their tongue out in pictures?" and then i realized that the common thread here is erin garrett (with kara on the top; with matt on the bottom). i think she might have been trying to get people to stick their tongues out for said photo ops. i'm not sure why. but it certainly seems like something she might do.

the one day i'll admit that i'm proud of the state of pennsylvania...

...is the day that it votes for barack obama. i am definitely supposed to be writing a paper but can't seem to tear myself away from the election coverage. i think i will probably be nervous for the next four hours at least. lacey and i headed to the polls around 9:20 this morning and i got pulled to the front of a reeeeeeeally long line not once, but twice. apparently it pays to live in toftrees. i also like to think it has something to do with the new hair cut and color (i did not get pulled to the front of lines in 2000 or 2004). i actually can't believe this is my third presidential election. i can't imagine how old this must make my parents feel ;) even more impressive is that over 1,000 students had turned up to vote at the station located in the HUB (the student center building on campus) by 7:00 this morning. Check out this video. It's really impressive.

i don't want to dominate this post with politcs, but i did think that this was really cute. i have a cousin whose daughter walked around during Christmas echoing, "i'm barack obama and i approved this message." i thought nothing could top it until one of our students sent me this video of his daughter touting cheers of "obama '08." you know you'll love it.

i haven't gotten any pictures from our group efforts this weekend yet, but i can post a couple of previews. this one is kenneth (papa smurf - who i don't actually know but totally swiped these pictures from), becca (as the camp counselor from nickelodeon's salute your shorts), and matt in the background doing something very official looking (as one of the officers from reno 911).

another picture that i think is adorable is one from lacey's album that shows her (far right) with jeremy, carmen, and kristin (from left to right) at the speech given here by bill clinton last week. i couldn't make it since i had a pretty packed afternoon, but these are probably the four people that i know (another would be ms. becca schlegel) that wouldn't have missed it. there's a rumor that both lacey and kristin got the pleasure of shaking mr. clinton's hand. no word yet as to if either has washed their hands since the blessed event.

okay, one more nonpolitical message to come. some of you may remember the excellentness (yes, that's totally a word) of the victory of penn state over ohio state two weekends ago. as would be expected, there was some excitement at the victory that escalated to what the local papers depicted as riot status. in fact there are some pretty crazy pictures that came from the student newspaper showing the madness. and while some of the events shown are certainly unfortunate, but if you get the time, flip through to #41 - my personal favorite, showing a student leading a crowd in what i imagine as a cheer from his post at the top of a light post. makes me giggle even now to think about it.

T minus 48 hours and counting

this week started with a day that felt like it should be friday and is seriously only getting longer. for some reason, there are a lot of class things, lab things, speaker things, and impossible-to-get-finished things that need to get done this week. funny how everything continues to find a way to come to a head at once. but in order to keep spirits up, i'm going to decorate this post some pictures from our pre-pumpkin carving trip to the corn maze last weekend. if nothing else, it kind of felt like home :) this first one shows me bringing up the rear after being scared by a man who had backed into the corn to try to get out of our way. i thought he was just another one of the "scary" halloween decorations that littered the corn maze throughout the incredible journey. and then he moved. and i screamed a little bit. sounds about right, doesn't it?

this week has seen both bill clinton and sarah palin at penn state. exciting, i think, but i think i forget how exciting it is for the pennsylvania natives in particular - who aren't used to counting so much in an election. proving to be a perpetual disappointment, i attended neither session, knowing that as an obama supporter, i would tell any republican that they should - in all good conscience - go hear clinton speak before deciding that they really didn't want to support the obama/biden ticket (it's all about making an informed decision, after all). but somehow i suspect that if i have to hear sarah palin utter the word "maverick" one more time, i might want to beat my head against the wall. so i abstained from both. plus, i'm from iowa. we get this kind of stuff all the time, right?

according to lacey, we got a lease in the mail today, so we are officially slated to become residents of oakwood avenue sometime next summer. i remember that copper beach was just putting a community in in columbia when i was moving away. and i remember that the rents there were a LOT cheaper. but i can hardly type a sentence with columbia in it without smiling. though few people really understand why i might be pumped about a mid-semester trip to missouri, i can't help but be pre-ecstatic that i will be back in CoMo in two more days.

the only last bit of "news" that is have is that it appears that nick and skew are planning a trip out this direction. i think the tentative plan is for them to fly in to dc and then robby, nick, skew, and i can meet up and at least hang out for the weekend (i don't have vacation days stored up like they do, so i can't be in attendence for their entire trip, but they probably need some quality boy time anyway...) the only catch at this point is that the original choice for the date of the trip is the same weekend that matt will be here for the michigan state game, so that doesn't work... hopefully we can get something put together so that we can all hang out. those central boys will just always have a special place in my heart. and they should, really, because they're some of the sweetest people anyone could know. karen can confirm that.

okay, i'd better finish up and some work and get to bed so that i can get going with "the day before i leave," but let me leave you with this image. tonight, the guy on the elliptical two machines to my right was singing....what i think was R&B....really loud...and nobody could hear the music playing on his headphones but him. it was awesome.

"never bend your head. always hold it high. look the world straight in the face." (h. keller)

Happy Birthday, DAD! i'm not sure if parental versions are what lead to beautiful fall days in appalachia, but i'm certainly not complaining. and today was a beautiful one, indeed.

it's been an overall very fun and very busy week sliding into an equally fun/busy weekend. most of the week was caught up by meetings and speakers, but nothing that wasn't valuable, of course. penn state hosted the symposium on family issues this week, which was focused this year on immigrant families. little did i know that there would be discussion about postville, iowa - a town that turned some sets of eyes my way but that i was pretty sure that i had never heard of before. sometimes i guess you have to move 1200 miles away to learn a little bit about what's going on back home. interesting.

but....i don't feel much like discussing work (i swear my thesis is almost turned in). this weekend is a more fun and interesting topic. friday night involved me basically just laying on lacey's couch watching shows that she had tivo-ed. it was awesome. i don't remember the last time that i did something of the like. maybe right after i got back from austin. but i didn't even read an article. it felt great.

saturday was kristin and erik's annual halloween party. my amy winehouse costume made a debut and was a hit, but jeremy totally stole the show with his unanticipated showing as dorothy from the wizard of oz. i'm telling you, until you've sat next to a cross-dressing dorothy watching penn state play ohio state in football, you really haven't seen anything :) he's probably going to want to kill me for posting that pic, but i'm going to do it anyway. he really, really enjoyed the halloween candy that mom sent to share, so in the end it seems like a fair trade, right? i also took a general people pic to send to lacey since she was in texas this weekend and thus had to miss out on the fiesta happenings. that and i thought that kara might enjoy seeing krisitin as another halloween character outside of the first time the two of them met. now kara can picture kristin as daphne rather than as carrie.

actually, a good portion of our department is pictured at right. from left to right you see carmen, a 2nd year student (lipstick on a pig), amy (velma), amy's dad, uh oh, i forgot that guy's name....but he was super nice and assured me that he was a real penn state fan and not just in costume. then i think rachel (possibly misspelled - dressed as a referree). rachel is kristin's trainer at the gym and the nice guy (i feel like such a jerk for forgetting his name) is her boyfriend. then there's kristin dressed as daphne, kieren, another 2nd year student (cleopatra), you can kind of make out the green and red arms of adam and caroline (mario and luigi) and then kristine's head in the foreground (an '80s aerobic instructer). kristine's probably not going to be a fan of this pic either, but she's very unassuming about how adorable she is in general.

today my main accoplishments were coding videotapes at the lab and also carving this AWESOME pumpkin. bear in mind, there were a lot of obama pumpkins that will probably be appearing soon on the internet, but i stuck with my original plan, pictured below. hope you like :)

i'm sorry...i seem to have lost half of october

both my winter coat and my crock pot made it back out into the open today. it must be about that time. i either barely noticed it moving in or did a much better job of ignoring it this year. but suddenly it was cold and i found myself replacing the winter cap that i left on the plane last year (made it from PA to the midwest something like 4 times, to Canada and back, but didn't survive the final leg of the trip from CA - go figure). needless to say, it's cold here.

perhaps i'm lucky, then, that i've been spending all of my time indoors. over the course of the last week, your best bet was to either find me at the gym or in the lab working on one of our many ongoing projects. we're recruiting a few more participants for the attention study, so i'll be back in the ERP lab soon enough. we're also piloting families for the HAPPY study, the visits for which have been taking what feels like an eternity. last night's family was at the lab for 3 hours. thank goodness our task is playing with cute kids or that would be miserable.

the most trying thing at this point has been trying to learn how to program computer tasks. i have absolutely no experience in this area. i have another graduate student who used to be a programmer around to help me, but even she is finding this to be a challenge. so....i guess we'll see.

several pieces of good news, though. first, there is another good and relatiely inexpensive concert coming up at the same small school we caught ingrid michaelson at. lacey is out of town that weekend, so i'm currently recruiting other friends to attend. second is that i have somewhat of a training plan laid out. this is good news and if i can just start getting comfortable with my position in academia there appears to at least be a place for me to fit. it additionally involved telling three facutly members that i adore that they would not be serving on my comps and dissertation commitee after all. that stunk, but they generally seemed to understand. i had a third and fourth but i got distracted by the world series. one was probably that i'm leaving for missouri next friday. and in less than a month, i'll be heading home. things like that are always good news.

and finally, before i had even left my apartment on sunday, nick had run the des moines marathon. in fact, he was through almost half of it before i even got out of bed. very impressive, and i'm very proud of him :) perhaps we'll meet up over thanksgiving break and share a drink in celebration of his awesomeness. you know....since i'll be home and all :)

i'm finally just sitting at home for what feels like the first time in ages. in real time, i think it's something closer to two weeks. but it feels good. it would feel better if the mizzouri/oklahoma state game wasn't making me so nervous, but it still feels pretty good.

i found out this week that coach is bob knight is coming to penn state. if lacey wasn't in new york with her family, i would already have been trying to coax her into attending. but i suppose i'll let her bask in the glory of family time & a major longhorns victory - particularly since i have just finished saying how much i am enjoying my own quiet time.

i think i had mentioned kaleb's tenth birthday and how hard it was both to believe and to digest. today we piloted our new study, dubbed the HAPPY (Health and Positivity in the Preschool Years) study, with jeremy's nephew who actually reminded me of kaleb in a lot of ways. i wasn't sure how many people i had shown this picture to, when tristin's good ears led amy and the rest of the fam to a little mojo show at the state fair. note kaleb appropriately centered between the other two long-haired fellows. i love them all, of course. and miss everyone like crazy. josh also just celebrated a birthday. he'll always be older than me, so his aren't quite as hard to swallow ;)

i just finished scheduling my "training meeting" which is one of my requirements as a fellow on the Early Childhood Mental Health (ECMH) training grant. i'm not entirely sure what this will entail, but in my mind, it is talking with kristin and one of the executive members of the grant (i've chosen dr. rick gilmore because of his expertise with neuroimaging, which we're thinking will be part of my dissertation work) and basically laying out the groundwork for my training from now until i finish the program. that's both exciting and terrifying. but it would be nice to have a sense of how where i'm at is going to relate to where i'm going.

kristin is also currently interviewing postdocs, one of whom we (the other grad students, staff, and i) we will hopefully be talking with in the coming week. i hope she finds a good match. and i selfishly hope we get someone who will be a good model for how to actually do a dissertation and find a good postdoc. and possibly who is interested in some of the same things that i am so as to get a few papers put together in the process. although if next year at this time i feel like i have improved my technical writing skills to the point where i can pretty much write independently, i will be happy. we did get a new picture of the lab, though. and as always you really can't tell kristin from any of the students. she's on my right in the photo. to my left is rachel, then amy - both of whom you have heard and will continue to hear about, i'm sure.

i'm almost caught up on my schoolwork from being sick for a week and then gone for a week. i've decided to audit my stats course, which takes a little bit of the pressure off (i won't receive a grade for it), but i'd still like to take everything out of it that i can. it was slightly impeded by my having to write a computer program for one of our computerized tasks for the HAPPY project. if you're thinking you didn't know that i knew programming, it's because i didn't. and i still kind of don't.

but it doesn't stop me from being excited already about being in columbia in about 3 weeks. i'm wondering if we can possibly still talk lacey and gary into joining us...

everything really was bigger in texas...

brrrr! it's getting cold again in the happy valley. i remember a few weeks ago reminding myself that i shouldn't complain about how hot it was at the football game because these days would be here soon enough. and here they are...

it probably doesn't help that i'm coming off of a week of 90 degree weather in austin :) it was a really wonderful time. i tried sending mom and dad a really cute picture from this outdoor restaurant that was probably my favorite place on the trip. what you see in the picture is the outdoor seating, the restaurant on the left, and to the right were terraced rows that led down to an outdoor stage (unfortunately no outdoor music the night that we were there). it was so wonderful. i made lacey promise that we could go back there the next time that i end up in austin (we are trying to convince becca, josh, and matt that that should be our next summer group trip :)

i did get to see some live music though, as anyone who visits austin should, i think. my hope was to see a show at stubbs, but there were country bands there on the nights that we had free, so that didn't end up happening, but true to form for the live music capital of the world, there seemed to be different bands of different types tucked into nooks and crannies and bars all over the downtown area.

AND i did get some work done, too. actually, i think that the preconference training that i went to might have been one of the best workshops i've done since i've started graduate school. it was an event-related potentials (ERP) workshop, which meant looking at a lot of brain waveforms a little bit of chatter about electricity, and also a little bit of wondering how on earth i am ever going to make it out of graduate school and somehow land a respectable job...all while trying to work really hard to do good developmental science. this could be a pretty incredible journey, if i do say so myself.



this is probably one of my favorite pictures from austin texas - the other one includes kristin and i'm not sure how happy she'd be about being sprawled on my blog :) but lacey and her friends were excellent hosts. they took me to this place, which if you love french fries as much as i do, you are bound to think is awesome. plus, i love little bar and grill type cafes as much as the next midwesterner. i may not eat a lot of hamburgers, but that doesn't mean that i don't appreciate the character of so many of the places that make them their staple product.

two more things before signing off...a happy, happy 10th birthday to kaleb. i really have struggled all day to figure out how ten years have passed. it seems close to impossible to me.


and then...oh my goodness, i certainly don't want to post a lot of political things on here, but did people see this interview with sarah palin? it was just painful for me to watch. honestly. the discomfort actually hurt me a little bit. kind of like how it feels to watch bush say.....well anything. someone remind robby that he's still one of my most loved, dearest friends, k? because i'm pretty sure that if he ever reads this, he will no longer be speaking to me.