Crowdsourcing my course materials (2013 edition)

I’m leading a seminar next term with the lofty title “Interarticulatory Timing in Speech and Sign”.

My intent was to explore issues of ‘segmenthood’ and the emergence, utility, and empiriciality of ‘organizing units’ like segments, moras, syllables, etc. I planned to start with general issues touching on articulatory content of features, coarticulation and coproduction, and Dani Byrd (principally)’s take on coordination within and between ‘units’ (syllables, words, phrases). And hopefully allow discussion on both speechand sign, the similarities, the differences, and so on.

The punchline for the course would be a task-dynamic, coordinative structure-based view of the articulators, conceptualized as a gestural score as in Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986ff).I really wanted to ask, for signed languages, particularly ASL, what are the necessary articulators to specify, and how ‘simultaneous’ some of the simultaneous gestures really are, and what, in terms of timing, is coordinating them.

It’s now November, and I’m not really much closer to having an initial reading list down than I was a couple months ago. So I’m turning to you, my learned friends, to help.

I’m looking for an initial 20 or so papers to form the backbone of the readings for discussion. Topics should include things like:

• ‘Reality’ of units like segment, mora/syllable, and other prosodic units
• Task-dynamics, articulatory phonology, gestural scores (Browman & Goldstein 1986 ff)
• Coarticulation and coproduction and the representation of timing (here I’m thinking things like Beckman or Jun on high-vowel devoicing as gestural overlap/undershoot)
• Possibly epenehesis/excresence as an issue in timing
• Timing within and between units (here I’m thinking Dani Byrd’s stuff on within and cross syllable coordination, and things like that)
• ‘Simultaneity’ and ‘sequentiality’ in signed languages
• Coordination of nonmanuals (e.g. alternatives to Baker & Padden?)
• ‘Universality’ or not of units like the syllable (possibly early Corina etc debates about Ms and Hs being like Cs and Vs, Brentari vs other views of ‘syllables’ or similar units)
• Things like how movements and handshape changes are coordinated within and across signs (i.e. in compounds vs in phrases?)
• Emergence of units as ‘targets’ for coordination (here I’m thinking about acoustic landmarks in the Stevens sense, articulatory landmarks (closure, release, VO, steady-state), and non-coordination/control of specific things (like onset of nasality)
• Exteneding the above, prosodic units and processes occurring ‘around’ edges, like Nicodemus on phrase-ends in ASL interpretation, fortition/lenition processes, reset processes, and so on
• And so on.

So I have a few ideas, but if anyone has anything the could point me to, I’d be really, really grateful.

Official blurb:

Production of spoken and signed language involves coordinating physical movements of the articulators (whether the vocal tract or the hands and body) in real time. But what are the units of articulatory control, and how are they organized with respect to one another? Are the sequentiality or simultaneity of gestures on different articulators the product of higher-order timing ‘units’ (e.g. segments, syllables) or do such units emerge from a more variable articulatory dynamic? What are the limits of inter-articulator timing, and do the same limits apply in both spoken and signed language?< Some of the issues we will explore may include the kinesiological content of contrastive and enhancing features in speech and sign, task dynamics and Articulatory Phonology (Browman and Goldstein 1986, inter alia), coproduction and coarticulation, and the emergence of units like segments and syllables from ‘landmarks’.

Clear thinking, please

I don't have a strong opinion about same-sex marriage.  I don't.  Because the problem isn't whether or not people's rights to marry are restrictied--the problem is that marriage is used to define certain rights of kinship, and those rights are improperly restricted by the restricted definition of marriage.  But that's not what I want to blog about today.

What I want to blog about today is clear thinking, about some arguments against same-sex marriage.  Now in my mind, the only clear argument against same-sex marriage is the desire to restrict kinship.  The slippery slope arguments which ends with men marrying dogs (notice the argument never ends with women marrying dogs) or legalizing polygamy is, as all slippery slope arguments, fallacious.  Yes, there's a slippery slope.  It doesn't mean you'll end up where you are afraid you'll end up.  You can stop the slide anywhere you want.

The moral argument also doesn't wash--if God only wants men and women to marry (and only one) for the purpose of producing children, then regardless of your gender arrangements, any marriage which does not involve direct procreation is suspect--people in their 60's, people known to be infertile, people who use birth control.  Also, it is worth noting, people who marry without the intention of having sex, let alone having children, for instance, for political expediency, social advantage, or to disguise an unorthodox sexual proclivity.  So if we're going to start scrutinizing marriage, we have a lot bigger issues than selective kinship between two men or two women.

The one that gets me recently is the repeated message that children need both a strong male and strong female role model in the form of a mother and a father.  Who presumably must be married, and present.  This is a new twist on an issue which was current in the early nineties, that of women choosing to have children without being married.

No one is saying role models aren't important.  What I'm saying is that they aren't critical.  If they were critical, then all those single parents--be they single women who choose insemination, surrogacy or adoption, single men, who choose one of those options, divorced or abandoned people or those *generations* widows or widowers of police, firefighters, soldiers, raising their fallen spouse's children alone--are raising intrinsically and irrevocably damaged children.


And the simple fact is, they're not.  And if they're not, then obviously the premise, that children critically must have a mommy and a daddy in the home, who are married, is obviously untrue.

I would further argue that two same-sex parents in a cordial and respectful relationship, or a single parent of moderate mental health and ability, is infinitely preferable to the case of a mommy and a daddy who are indifferent or abusive to each other (or certianly the children). 

So anyway, I don't have a strong opinion about same-sex marriage. I do have a strong opinion about crap reasoning.  Come up with a good argument, and I'll listen. Spew the same old crap, and I'll happily just sling it back at you.  On any subject.

Can we please get back to furry animals?

This puzzle circulates on Facebook. With absurd answers. It's usually posed as 'how many squares are there, and the fight seems to be between the numbers 25 and 26.  I'm tired of it. Once and for all:

Check my reasoning here

This has been bugging me for a while now. It kind of keeps happening.

Let's say you are a grown up adult human being (assumption #1), enrolled as an undergraduate student at a mid-size North American university. Maybe you're not North American, and hence an 'international student', which I presume requires a certain amount of personal responsibility and ambition (assumption #2).

You are now entering the final week of classes, and you are concerned about your final grade.  You are holding in your hand a syllabus, received on the first day of classes eleven weeks ago, which details, among other things, how much the homework will count for in your final grade, and how late homeworks will not be accepted except in extreme circumstances.  The syllabus also indicates that all lecture materials and handouts are made available electronically via the university's web resources.

You calculate that if you get 100% on the final, you can barely pass the class.  And now you want to know if you can go back and do the homework, which you now walk up to your professor, IN THE LAST WEEK OF CLASSES, to ask what you can do about it.

Your professor, misunderstanding your initial question, which was 'how much is the homework worth', tries to explain, using the syllabus you are still holding in your hand, that some of the exercises were take-home homework kinds of things, and others were in-class exercises that you get full credit for, even if you weren't in the room, a policy your professor, for the record, is idiotic, but it means less work for him, and as it's free gradepoints no one has complained so far. 

You explain that you have often 'not come to class', and didn't know there were any homeworks.  Your professor explains that the homeworks, when they were given, were made available electronically, as indicated in the syllabus you are still holding in your hand. You explain that you never bothered to check. You then ask if you can turn them in now.

Is your professor being unreasonble in simply saying "I cannot accept late homeworks," as indicated in the syllabus, which I remind you you are still holding in your hand, and "You are responsible for the course material. I can't help you with this now."?

Sometimes I just want to slap some sense into people. And sometimes I really wonder if I am doing them a disservice. Then I convince myself that the bigger disservice is letting them go through life never facing the consequences of their actions, not making use of the information they are given, and not living up to the obligations they agree to be placed under.

But is this unreasonable?

I mean, it's the freaking last week of classes. The drop deadline was two weeks ago.  You're suddenly worried about this *now*? And you expect me to help you? Or for that matter care at all you don't bother to come to class (not 'had to miss classes due to illness, or hangover, or work or family or visa problems or some external reason you could not reasonably control), or that you didn't bother to check the electronic materials, or make a friend in the class, to check to see if you missed anything important, like a homework. Which you knew a) you would have, and b) you could check on, because it's in the syllabus you received on the first day of class, and was announced on the first day of class, and repeated several times during the course, which apparently you could not be bothered to attend with any regularity, or check with your professor or someone on those rare occasions you did bother to show up?

And I'm sorry, if you think you can get 100% on the final, and thus 'barely pass' the class, even if I give you credit for all the work you haven't done, you're crazier than you are stupid.

But again, am I being unreasonable?

How much clearer can I be?

We have to explain our graduate admissions process to a lot of people, so we (I) developed a FAQ for it. I tried to be as clear and complete as I could. So sometimes I get weird feedback from (potential) applicants that makes me think either I've left something out, or they've completely lost their minds.

Frinstance. We have a requirement in our applications process that the applicant suggest a potential supervisor. The purpose of this, as we explain, is to provide the applicant with the opportunity to review our research specialties and find an advisor with the relevant expertise.

The real reason we do this is so that the passionate individual who wants to develop teaching materials for teachings Anatolian Hittite to speakers of Vedic Sanskrit has the opportunity to realize that a) none of us do anything relate to language teaching and still less to materials development, and b) none of us do anything with Anatolian Hittite or Vedic Sanskrit. If that's what you want to do, more power to you, but we can't help you with it.

By the way, this does not deter the (usually Chinese) applicants who don't even mention word language, let alone Linguistics, nor even any particular language in their applications (which cost them $100 to submit, plus whatever it costs them to get whatever documents they need, and whatever they have to do or pay to get permission to study outside the country), who instead want 'devote their lives to the profession of teaching' but aren't actually interested in doing any research. Luckily these people rarely suggest a potential supervisor.

So anyway, in the last couple of years, our requirement that they suggest a potential supervisor has gotten construed as a requirement that they secure a supervisor before submitting their application. Exactly how they make that leap mystifies me, and frankly I don't think it indicates a skilled critical reader.

But let's say I require you to secure an advisor before applying (I learned recently that Education does this, but whatever). The response seems to be to send a vague email to everyone in the department, begging to be considered as a student. Occasionally, but rarely, with a vague statement of their own research interests, and usually without any useful acknowledgment of the receiver's interests. Sometimes this is obviously a 'let's send the same message to everybody' (often without bothering to conceal that you're sending simultaneously to multiple addresses).

Now let me ask you this, since if you're reading this blog you are obviously a person of high intellectual standing. If you wanted to find an advisor, what sort of message would you send? Would it be ...

"I would like to apply to your university. please be my advisor. "

... or ...

"I would like to do research on X, and I believe you would be a good advisor for this because of your interests in Y. "

Guess what we usually get.

So what I'm getting at is that if you are applying to graduate school*, you are applying to develop as a scholar and to contribute something to a field.  If you just want a degree, I'm sure you can send $3000 to any number of on-line, for-profit universities that will be happy to sell you one. But don't waste an actual scholar's time with your absence of initiative or ambition.

*Even if you are applying to professional school or for a certificate in something specifically job related, you're still applying to study *something* *with* someone.  Hopefully someone whose reputation for doing whatever they do means that you will inherit some of their wisdom.

Rob does math (is never pretty)

A while ago, a friend asked on Facebook how big a new widescreen TV should be if he wanted the height of the picture to be about the same as his old 32-inch TV, or something like that. I didn’t answer at the time, because I thought it was ridiculous. You want the width to be the same? Or maybe it was the area. It struck me as odd, because at the very least, you want your new TV to have the same picture area, or ideally, the same height.

The old standard TV picture is proportioned at about 4x3.  The newer widescreen TVs are typically about 16x9.  So if you maintained the same width, the height of the picture would shrink proportionally. So I declined to answer the question.

On the other hand, this has been simmering at the back of my head for weeks. Maybe months.  If I wanted to preserve the height of my picture (and add width to make up the new proportion), how would I do that?

So to distract myself this evening, I think I figured this out.

To do it my way (keep the height the same, add the width, starting diagonal dimension about 32 inches):  The 32 inch diagonal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle.  The two other legs of the triangle have the proportion of 4x and 3x.  Pythagoras, I think, teaches us that they length of the hypotenuse (32) squared (=1024) equals the square of the lengths of the other two sides (4x)^2 + (3x)^2.  At this point, I was stymied, since for the life of me I couldn’t remember how to take the square of a complex quantity. 

After some Googling, I finally figured out that (4x)^2 (4x-squared) is 16(x^2).  That is, both terms in the quantity square.  If this is wrong, please let me know and I’ll start over.

So now, armed with this, I know that 16(x^2) plus 9(x^2) = 25(x^2) = 1024 (parentheses here just to remind me I’m now just squaring my variable.  Divide both sides by 25 and we get x^2 = (approximately) 41.  The square root of 41 is about 6.4. 

So the proportions of the sides of my television are about 4 x 6.4 = 25.6 inches and 3 x 6.4 = 19.2 inches. I don’t mind doing a little approximating, since I assume the 32 inch diagonal I started with is also an approximation. 

So, to buy a widescreen with the same vertical height, I need one that is about 19.2 inches high, and it will be a little over 34 inches wide because (19.2/9)*16.  The diagonal dimension will be something like 39.something inches.

So having worked all this out, I built myself a little spreadsheet.  You put in the diagonal dimension of your old 4x3 TV and it tells you the diagonal dimension of a widescreen TV if the vertical dimension is the same, the horizontal dimension is the same, and if you want to maintain the picture area.

Me so smrt sometimes. Unless I got the original quantity wrong, in which case never mind.

I wonder if I could  somehow build an app out of this… Hmm….

Crowdsourcing my course stuff

Just because I know you were on tenterhooks, I think I've settled on my reading list for my prosody course in the winter term. Comments?
Segmental and sub-segmental phonology, content of features, etc.

• Clements, George N., &amp; Hume, Elizabeth V. (1995). The internal organization of speech sounds. In John A. Goldsmith (Ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory (pp. 245-306). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Browman, Catherine, &amp; Goldstein, Louis. (1986). Toward an articulatory phonology. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 219-252.

Syllables, timing and quantity

• Broselow, Ellen. (1995). Skeletal positions and moras. In John Goldsmith (Ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory (pp. 175-205). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
• Broselow, Ellen, Chen, Su-I, &amp; Huffman, Marie. (1997). Syllable weight: Convergence of phonology and phonetics. Phonology, 14, 47-82.
• Hubbard, Kathleen. (1995). Toward a theory of phonological and phonetic timing: Evidence from Bantu. In Bruce Connell &amp; Amalia Arvaniti (Eds.), Phonology and Phonetic Evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV (pp. 168-187). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Prominence stress and accent, deriving the prosodic hierarchy

• Kager, Réne. (1995). The metrical theory of word stress. In John A. Goldsmith (Ed.), The Handbook of Phonologcal Theory(pp. 367-443). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
• Arvaniti, Amalia. (2009). Rhythm, timing and the timing or rhythm. Phonetica(66), 46-63.
• Liberman, Mark Y, &amp; Prince, Alan. (1977). On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 249-336.

Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonation

• Odden, David. (1995). Tone: African Languages. In John A. Goldsmith (Ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory (pp. 444-475). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
• Pierrehumbert, Janet, &amp; Hirschberg, Julia. (1990). The meaning of intonation contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan &amp; M. E. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Beckman, Mary, &amp; Pierrehumbert, Janet. (1986). Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255-309.

Tones and Break Indices

• Beckman, Mary, Hirschberg, Julia, &amp; Shattuck-Huffnagel, Stefanie. (2005). The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. In Sun-Ah Jun (Ed.), Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing (pp. 9-54). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hayes, Bruce, &amp; Lahiri, Aditi. (1991). Bengali intonational phonology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 9, 47-96.

Interactions of prosody/intonation and ‘segmental’ phenomenal

• Jun, Sun-Ah. (1998). The Accentual Phrase in the Korean prosodic hierarchy. Phonology, 15, 189-226.
• Keating, Patricia, Cho, Taehong, Fougeron, Cécile, &amp; Hsu, Chai-Shune. (2003). Domain-initial articulatory strengthening in four languages. In John Local, Richard Ogden &amp; Rosalind Temple (Eds.), Phonetic Interpretation: Papers in Laboratory Phonology VI (pp. 145-163). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Adventures in Healthcare

Do me a favor.  Take the tip of the 3mm plug from your earbuds and press it into your tummy for 10 seconds.

Well, for about a year my glucose numbers have been climbing.  And making good food choices over bad food choices isn't really making a difference. So according to the endocrinologist, it's time to start on some insulin.

Technically, I'm a Type II diabetic, meaning, primarily, that my body makes insulin.  This is as opposed to a Type I diabetic, which is what they used to call 'juvenile' diabetes (as in Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) because it usually is detected early in childhood.  Type I diabetics are insulin-dependent--their bodies either don't make or make insufficient insulin to keep up with dietary and metabolic needs.

Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas. It's job is to attach to receptors in cell membranes, which opens channels in the membrane for glucose (sugar) to be transported into the cell for use in metabolism (for those of you who want more detail, go back to organic chem and review the ATP cycle).  Obviously insulin is necessary for normal life processes at the cellular level.

Type II diabetics are typically treated with 'insulin sensitizers' (among other things) because there's plenty (usually) of insulin in the body, but for whatever reason, it isn't opening the channels.  So what insulin sensitizers do is make cells more ready to accept insulin.  Again, for more (and more informed) details, go look it up.

(One of the myths is that a high sugar/starch diet causes diabetes. It doesn't.  But high sugar/starch diets may contribute to insulin insensitivity, particularly if you're already a Type II or on your way to being one.)

Okay, so here's the story.  On Tuesday at my regular endocrinologist appointment, I got put on glargine insulin, a long-acting (time-release) form of insulin(-like stuff).  I just read the Wikipedia article on the stuff and I sort of understand how it works.  But basically it's a form of insulin that gets 'unpacked' slowly and distributed through the body, rather than going straight in (as 'regular' insulin would) and starting to open glucose channels in every cell it hits.

We've been talking about this for a year or so, when my glucose started climbing.  My HbA1C (also known as glycosolated hemoglobin, basically just a long-term average of glucose levels) was at 8.4, having climbed steadily from a 'normal' 6.4 a few years ago, up to a just over target 7.1 a couple years ago, and, well, higher since. 

What's odd is that my 'daytime' blood sugar readings, when I take them, are normal.  Mostly my post-meal numbers are in the 7-10 range, sometimes a little higher, depending on what I ate.  But my morning 'fasting' numbers, have been absurdly high. They should be 4-7. I haven't seen anything below 8 in a couple years. Often they're up near 14 (although this is complicated by the fact that this is often around noon, after I've been up and around and active--and caffeinated--for several hours).  But the point is, too high.

So my new instructions are to inject myself with glargine insulin at bedtime.  This is kind of cool.  There's a glass vial of the stuff that goes into a pen. There's single-use needle things that screw into the tip, you dial up the dosage, jab yourself in your belly fat (well any fat will do, but belly fat was recommended by my nurse clinician--there are very few pain receptors in the belly and, well, my belly fat is probably the thickest in my body, meaning there's a lot of room to shove some liquid into). 

Started at 8 'units' (still working out what the units are, but basically you turn a thing on the pen to the 8 and it spits out the right amount of stuff through the needle), with instructions to watch the effect in the morning, and increase 1 unit up or down not more than every three days until I start getting 'normal' morning readings. (According to the nurse clinician, 8 is sort of a 'normal' starting dose, and that some people need to go up to 20.)

So this morning was day four, and I've been steadily in the low-to-mid 8 range all the way. This is *such* an improvement I'm very excited by this. I could probably stick here if I actually started getting some decent exercise, but what are the odds of that? (Okay, now that the weather is finally cooperating, I might start trying again.)  Anyway, tonight I'll jump  up to 9 units and see how that goes for a few days. But the point is, I'm suddenly doing much, much better with this stuff.  And I have a new toy to play with. More sharps to figure out how to dispose of, of course, and you can almost always get better compliance out of me by giving me a new toy.

For those of you squicked out at the thought of jabbing yourself with a needle--the needle tips here are super, super fine (much smaller than the finger-jabby lancets I use), and 6mm long. The needle jab doesn't hurt (usually I don't even feel it). What is uncomfortable is the plastic collar around the base of the needle, which, because I'm squishy and hold the pen against myself probably more firmly than I need to, presses into my skin several millimeters. This is the earbud demonstration I started with. That's what it feels like.  After the injection, you can see the little 'hole', only because that's where the collar was, not where the needle was.  So uncomfortable, but not really owie.  And kind of cool--toy, and all.

Best laid plans, or "I love 24-hour supermarkets"

It all started as a plan to dash down to Maple Grove for a first-of-the-season Trader Joe's/Williams-Sonoma run.  I do this two or three times every summer.  I usually do this by dashing down to Fargo, bedding down for the night, heading over to the Greater Twin Cities for some shopping and then back to Fargo for a rest before heading back over the border and home. 

All was going well.  I stopped by Future Shop to buy a spare cable to attach my phone to the Aux outlet in my car stereo (so I don't have to fuss with the iPod that lives attached to the USB cable port in my armrest) (and so I can hook anyone's audio device into my stereo). Fortunately, I had to stop by Staples for a pair of scissors to open up the blister pack.  This will become relevant in a moment.

So I'm in Fargo, having Mexican food, making sure I have cash, and do my usual Friday evening in Fargo routine (while skipping the mall for Mrs Fields cookies), and then get ready for bed.

For this next part to make sense, you have to know that I have obstructive sleep apnea, for which I sleep with a CPAP mask--this is pressurized air mask that fits over my nose and mouth, held on with a neoprene strappy thing, which is why in the mornings you can see me with strap lines in my cheeks and usually my hair pressed into interesting shapes.

Anyway, the mask is hard plastic, and to keep it attached to my soft face there's this silicon gasket thing that goes around the edge of the mask and when pressurized is supposed to maintain the seal.  Because of the relatively high air pressures I need, there's often some comical flappy leakage. So I've learned to do things to hold the mask to my face in my sleep, like sleep with my arm over my face, or a pillow over my chest holding the bottom of the mask down. Or sleeping on my side and pressing the mask into my face with the pillow.

So back to the story. I'm staying in my palacial not-quite-suite in the new Hampton Inn in Fargo.  This is the nicest hotel room I've ever stayed in. I suppose it helps that it's brand new.  Aside from the amenities you might expect, the light in the bathroom is controlled by a motion sensor. How cool is that?

Anyway, I'm getting ready for bed and I discover that I've torn the gasket thingy on my mask, inconveniently near the bridge of my nose, where because of the way the mask is built it's difficult to put any extra pressure down toward my face, and even more inconveniently on the right side such that any air that escapes, which is most of it, blows into my right eye. Not comfortable.

I have not slept a night without my mask since September 1, 2009. I have dozed off without it, lying in front of the tv or in bed listening to music or somethig, not more than four times. Three of those times, I woke up with a sore throat from snoring.  So I want my mask.

So I put on the mask and try to stuff the gasket around my nose so it holds.  As soon as the pressure hits it blows open.  I go down to the front desk and get some tape and try to tape it up. No go. Scotch tape doesn't like to stick to greasy silicon apparently. 

So just about 2 am, I head out in search of something more useful. Like surgical tape.  But the Walgreens that I know about is closed. As is the Target.  Luckily, there's a grocery store that's open, Hornbacher's.

I live across the street from a 24-hour drugstore, which may be the only one in Winnipeg. When I end up moving, I'm going to miss that.  There aren't any 24-hour grocery stores in Winnipeg that I know about.  I love America.

Anyway, so there I am, grocery shopping at 2am for the first time since moving to Canada.  I did find some tape, and as long as I was there I went looking for mint and cinnamon M&Ms which I heard about for the first time a few hours ago. And I looked a Crystal Light, in the absence of the Fibersure lemonade I like. Ended up getting some diet root beer for liquid. And wheat thins because if I'm up at this hour repairing my mask I'm damn well going to pump my sugars up.

So I bought some clotch first aid tape (which is supposed to be very adhesive *and* easy to remove--yeah, right) but since it is designed to stick to skin I'm going to assume it can deal with a now slightly cleaner silicon mask.  It's also 'easy tear', which is where the scissors come in. I have never,  in my life, been able to tear surgical tape, medical tape, or athletic tape that was 'easy-tear'.  Which is wear the scissors come in.

The end of the story is that it is now 3am, I'm blogging while I wait for the mask to dry from where I hit it with a non-alcohol wipe to clean it, and now I'm going to try to repair my mask enough for me to go to sleep.

But the point of all this is a) I love America where you can shop for things at any hour of the day or night and b) I don't think there's any way I'm going to be in any kind of shape to drive to Minneapolis and back tomorrow.

But I've already reserved my palacial room at the new Hampton Inn in Fargo for two nights, and I'm damn well going to enjoy it.

My best toddler story

This has come up with my nephew and his mother-in-law on Facebook recently, and this story is too good not to tell again.

My dad used to pick Michael and his brother up at daycare and they'd spend a couple of hours at the house until his mom or dad could pick them up before dinner time. 

One afternoon, I was making tacos or something for dinner and Michael saw me shaking chili powder into the pan.  He asked what it was and I said something about it being spices for what I was making for dinner that night. Then he asked if he could have some.

Me: "You want to try the spices?"

Michael: "Yes."

Me: "It's spicy. You might not like it."

Michael: "I wanna try."

So I gave him a little bit in the palm of his hand which he picked up on his fingers and put in his mouth. And then he toddled away.

A few minutes later, he came back, asking for more.

Me: "More? Are you sure?"

Michael: "Yes."

So I gave him a little more.  Maybe 1/16 teaspoon. Enough for a couple of good licks, but not enough to make him sick.  And he happily toddled away.

A few minutes after that, he came back, asking for even more.

Me: "Really? You're sure you want more?"

Michael: "Yes."

At which point I looked at the clock.  His father was not more than 5-10 minutes away.  And I thought "Well, not my kid." and so I gave him more.  Probably about 1/4 teaspoon. It looked like a lot for a little guy, but wasn't really a lot by culinary standards. 

And, as I said, not my kid.

I *think* I told his father when he came to pick him up. I know I *meant* to.