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This was going to be a seven quick takes post for Friday but I was too busy on Friday even for seven quick takes. I have finished morpheme analysis for all the year 3 transcripts, but I don't think this pace is sustainable. I am dreaming of morpheme markings every night. In addition, there are more of the earlier transcripts (people drop out in every year of a longitudinal study) and they are longer. They may be less complex because they are conversations rather than narratives, but I have many, many hours of work ahead of me. Anyway, here are my random paragraphs strung together for Sunday.

Having a child in junior high is bringing back a flood of memories for me. We've had some recent conversations about appropriate reading material for kids his age. I am hopelessly out of date, you may not be surprised to learn. But I remember being in sixth grade, when awful books were being passed around among kids who thought they were more mature than they really were. I still wish I hadn't read them. Hard to know how to guide someone who is emphatic about not wanting guidance. His math grades plummeted during a recent unit where he made one sign error after another. It sparked a painful memory for me: first-year algebra, weeping in despair because I kept making sign errors. I got a D on a test. I was not a girl who made Ds on tests, ever. I was sure I'd never get it. I wish I could remember what got me over the hump.

Having a child in junior high also helps me to enjoy my baby. Her needs are so simple and I know that I can meet them: nurse her lots, change her lots, hold her lots, love her lots. Blessedly uncomplicated. It's not that I don't appreciate Alex, not at all. I'm just more confident about mothering a six-week-old than mothering a sixth-grader. Even if I goof up, and nurse her when she wants to be changed or vice versa, it's a low-stakes mistake that she'll never remember. It can be humbling, mothering children who have clear opinions about the decisions you've made.

I have begun calling my automated disambiguator Vladimir, or Vlad for short. He is like a very dim ESL speaker who keeps thinking that "to school" should be a verb and not a prepositional phrase. When I run my next batch of transcripts I am going to delete "school" from the lexicon of verbs because I am tired of changing it manually. He also wants "behind" to be a noun, which tells me something about his predilections. Sometimes I want to say, "Vlad, don't be a moron -- how could 'yelled' be a perfect participle in the sentence 'they yelled'?" Then I remember that I'm talking to a piece of computer software.

My husband brought a friend home from work unannounced the other night. Things have been crazy at his job in connection with the economic craziness, and he's been working late a lot. I was wiped out well before he got home. After I got Pete to sleep I thought about putting on my pajamas, but I decided that instead I'd hand Elwood the baby when he walked in the door and go straight into the bathtub. I didn't know that his friend would give him a ride home and Elwood would invite him in, but I'm glad I wasn't greeting a guest in my bathrobe. Anyway, I was telling Elwood about my day and his friend was listening in some perplexity as I nattered on about Vlad and his limitations. "This is...a computer thing?" Makes me glad that my husband is a math geek with an imagination. He would never anthropomorphize his own computer software, but at least he will smile at me when I do.

I've got a post about our baby's name mostly drafted but then abandoned. I have four neglected knitting projects on the needles. I have clutter on most of the flat surfaces of my home, and a rather alarming aggregation of fluff and cracker crumbs and small sequins from a disintegrating knight costume scattered across the dining room carpet. All of this suggests to me that I need a little more balance re: the dissertation. It's strictly internal pressure that's been driving me, produced by my fear that I'm going to be one of the PhD students who gets to candidacy and then just languishes there. I'll see what my advisor has to say -- we have a phone conference set up for Tuesday to talk about progress and goals.

The trouble with random strings of paragraphs is that they so rarely lend themselves to tidy endings. So I will end untidily instead.