Ref grunt

Haven't done this in a long time. To my Chinese librarian friends: 'Ref grunt' is a library blogger term referring to a short blog post that relays an interesting interaction with someone at a reference desk. I believe the term originated with this blog, which purports to provide the answers to every question (but not the questions!) asked during a shift.

Here's my own from today:

student: "Can you tell me where to find a dictionary?"

me: "Oh, there's a bunch sitting around. There's one right around the corner from me. We also have links to online dictionaries on our website."

student: "RIGHT ON!"

(Maybe you had to be here--he was pretty excited.)

The new quarter

It feels like we are already in the thick of things. Sunday was spent on a field trip at a burn site in the foothills of the Cascades. I can pretty confidently identify 5 or 6 species of trees up there now. (It helps greatly that there are only 5 or 6 trees that grow up there.)

Since it was the first week of class, there were a lot of people sort of feeling each other out. Sure, a bunch of folks knew each other already (it's a 400-level class after all), but still, there was butt sniffing. It's amazing how different it was from what happened the first few days in Beijing. Is it because everyone is from the same school? Or is it the high-hippy quotient? Thing is, the environmental studies students aren't really hippies. There more like alterna-mountain men. I mean, you don't meet vegan wildland forest fighters everyday, do you?

OK, in Eugene you do.

Today I have my first conversation date. Over the past few days I've been looking at chinesepod.com. It's pretty good, and the lessons are really well varied. A little dialog. A vocabulary section. Lots of practice sentences. Then exercises. I think it might be a good self-study tool. The big challenge here is keeping from forgetting things and finding the time to do at least a little bit every single day. That's tough when work is piling up.