Back in Longmont (for 3 days)

Last night, we arrived safely home from our conference/survey travels in the UK and Ireland. It went fabulously and I'll post photos soon!

The conference was great - we loved the city of Newcastle, where it was being held, and the free British museums really are quite amazing! Because of the huge snow storm that rocked the nation, we were treated to some new cultural experiences...for example, inches of slushy snow everywhere (no plows, no one shoveled, etc.) to wade through for the duration of our time there. The presentations were really good and gave various theoretical and practical perspectives of the issue of what is happening in language use and people's identities on the borders of nations, groups, etc. My poster was the first day, and because of the storm the keynote speaker was not able to make it since the trains were shut down. So they held an impromptu "poster session" reserved just for people to interact with the poster presenters! That meant more interaction with people about my research - and, thankfully, many kind and supportive comments and good questions. I was especially honored by the coordinator of the conference who said he would be in contact later this spring as he is revamping his language and identity course and wants to include the information I presented in his class!

After the conference, we flew into Dublin to meet up with our friend, Bev Staley, who accompanied us on the Northern Ireland survey. We loved being able to work with her. She is very special to us as we have used a lot of her former survey experience as the foundation that we built on in our own survey work. She also played a pivotal role in getting me interested in sign language survey to begin with...and she's just fun! :) As mentioned earlier, we had a bit of a "scare" when we didn't have any meetings set up in Northern Ireland 24 hours before we were set to arrive - but God knew what was going on and one thing led to another and we really feel that we talked with just the right people to better understand the situation there. If you know anything about the history of Ireland, and in particular Northern Ireland, you can imagine the various factors that can affect people's identities and language use. If you don't know - feel free to ask and I'll give you more details :).

There was a bit of a scare about coming home as the Dublin airport air traffic control people decided to go on strike the afternoon before we were set to leave. Thankfully, they finished up what needed to be done and we left yesterday morning with no problems. We're so glad to be home! (At least for the next 3 days - we leave on Monday for a week of meetings in Dallas. But we're glad to be going to see friends there, too, so that's the bright spot of traveling so soon after having just arrived!)