Anyone who saw me this week probably heard about one of the weird mishaps I experienced. In case you missed out on all the craziness, here's a recap for you. After replacing my radiator on Papa Smurf on Tuesday, a Pyrex dish shattered in my kitchen on Wednesday morning. The explosion sent glass, water, soy sauce and tofu to all the ends of my kitchen: oven, floor, sink, ceiling, and my lunch. Hubby kindly helped clean it up for me because I was late for my office hours and had to teach. That night I took myself out on a date for Vietnamese food (Hubby was attending a concert without me). The foot was great, I got my daily fix of tofu, and walked home happy and full. When I arrived home, I discovered that the rabbit had chewed through wires to our stereo. While inspecting the wires, I received a big electric shock. I found electrical tape and in a hurry, I taped the wires and plugged them back in only to be the unhappy viewer of sparks flying across the dining room, a loud BOOM and a blown fuse. And the stereo stopped working. Ugh. Then on Thursday night, my keyring someone became uncoiled as I unlocked my backdoor and my keys flew across the back porch and stairwell. I have no idea what I did wrong this week, but apparently something or someone wanted me to know that it thinks I suck. :( Luckily, Indiana wasn't that something/someone.
I had a meeting with Indi on Thursday morning. He pretty much repeated everything he said in our last two meetings together, which were in July and May. That was fine by me, I needed the repeat and reassurance. It still seems like everything is on track, despite not being able to getting any work done due to the craziness described above. Indi told me to start making tables of my historical data and then gave me a new paper to read which he authored. I had no idea how to make tables for historical linguistic data, but after reading his paper (which had at least 10 tables of historical linguistic data in it), I had I better idea.
After spending all of Saturday afternoon and evening working on transferring data from note cards to tables on used computer paper, I am more than hopeful about the same pattern I've been trying to explain in various ways for the last 5 years. Until now, my explanation of the pattern was lousy. The theory I had used isn't widely accepted anymore and I couldn't account for all the non-example cases in the data. After spending a summer reading about other theories from pragmatics and semantics, I can now account for the non-example cases. The pattern is in both my cross-linguistic data and in my historical data. This is equal to the scene in a detective show in which the detectives have been staring at the same pictures of evidence and the crime scene for days and finally figure out the missing link. They still have more work before they can get search permits and permits for the criminal's arrest, but they know they have the right bad guy. There is no bad guy in my research, but my next steps are much clearer and I'm well on my way again. I still have a lot of data to sort through and more to collect (Greek and Russian), but the reoccurence of one pattern across the historical data has made my outlook on this week much brighter. (Of course the ice cream and shopping for new kitchen items last night with a friend also helped tremendously). Here's to feeling confident again and weeks of more tofu in new cooking ware.
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