One of the best parts of Colorado come September is the beautiful aspen trees that change into glorious shades of gold. Other great things are brisk morning bike rides, coffee filled devotions swinging on our porch swing, and cool, tea filled evenings walking under the stars. We get to be here almost the entire month and we are determined to enjoy every minute of it. We've often been gone just as autumn has arrived in past years - and this is our favorite season! I think that autumn is a much better word for this time of year than "fall" - somehow it catches the essence of its beauty much better than a word that goes with concepts like downhill and getting hurt!
We've been having fun getting to know our new interns, Dan and Sarah, over games and movies. They've found a place of their own now, though, so our temporary roomies will be moving 5 minutes away to an apartment all their own. I think they like it here in CO (who wouldn't!?) so hopefully this year with us will be relatively painless. I say this slightly tongue in cheek because they will be traveling as much as we will so, of course, there's only so much time they will really have to enjoy Longmont. But, at least there's always that joy of getting to come home to someplace you enjoy!
We've been busy getting them orientated and feeding them more information than they probably care to have at once. Timing is critical, though, as we all will start traveling separately for tasks at the end of the month and we need to be well on our way to understanding the needs in Ecuador when we get back together in Colorado mid-November. They're troopers and appear to be taking it in stride. We have full plates between getting them going and keeping up with Holly on other tasks (who knew we'd turn into management...not sure how to feel about that), and both Jason and I working on crisis management with emails for about half of every day and the other half on Thesis data analysis and writing papers. I'm just about done a paper that includes research and information from 24 locations in the Americas where we don't anticipate doing fieldwork. It's been approved for publication by an anonymous reviewer, subject to the changes I've been working on, and will be posted online sometime in the coming year. Holly's a co-author with me and Jason's being a great help today as he edits the final version.
So now it's time to turn attention to the poster that we'll be presenting at the Theoretical Issues for Sign Language Research (TISLR) 10, at Purdue University. We'll be presenting our ideas about recorded text testing and hopefully give others a useful tool to find out similar types of sign language information through newly adapted methodology. But before we get there...
We're looking forward to celebrating Jason's birthday next week with 4 (count them, 4!) days off in the mountains. Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in the Rocky Mountain range at 14,440 feet, is calling our name on Monday. Hopefully the weather is good so we can summit it, and then we'll be spending the rest of the week moseying around Summit County (for us that means lots of coffee, hiking, and staring at beautiful creation). Vacations always come too infrequently (wouldn't you say?) so we are looking forward to it and hiking amidst the autumn colors!
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