| PJ 3 Schults' Home Page | PJ3 Times | Pete | Julie | June |
| Vol 5, No 1 | New Year’s Edition | Sunday, January 1, 1995 |
Julie’s job search continued through December, but on December 21 the City of Sunnyvale Library called with an offer of full-time, permanent employment! She will start January 17 as an Adult Services Reference Librarian. The job will involve some collection development, an area that she has wanted to add to her résumé for a while.
Julie has been working as a temporary librarian with the San Jose Mercury-News since October. She finds information and articles for readers who request them. There was the possibility of the job’s becoming permanent, but she felt that the job required more of a business orientation than she wanted in a permanent position.
The new job in Sunnyvale will require the same commute ‘over the hill’ as the Mercury-News job does, but that seems almost unavoidable in this area. The car is holding up well so far.
Pete’s linguistics program is interesting. The program is structured as much to train students in how to develop a convincing argument as it is to explain actual data. This is good preparation for their future careers since theoretical linguistics is about deciding which theories best explain the data, and that requires a precise notion of just what a given theory explains or doesn’t.
The university is different from the U of M. There are only 10,000 students rather than 50,000. Also, the department here encourages collaboration under the theory that linguistics is not done by a single researcher alone but rather within a community of linguists. Of course assignments are written up individually, but the students regularly get together to hack the data sets to bits and put together a theory that explains the data.
Pete has been working as a Graduate Student Researcher. This has meant some time in the library finding out what sort of research is happening in German syntax. Having gotten an overview of the field, he now is reading more deeply in a particular area. He will be doing more with this topic in the spring, but for winter quarter he’ll be a Teaching Assistant for a course in computers for the social sciences and humanities.
On August 27 we loaded the truck (with a lot of help from our friends) and headed west. On the road to Santa Cruz we stopped to see the Mitchell SD (World’s Only) Corn Palace, the Black Hills (the hills themselves are even more awe inspiring than the presidents’ heads carved into them), the Great Salt Lake (where even Pete can float), and Lake Tahoe. We got to see a wide variety of terrain and vegetation--flat, arid salt flats, tree covered mountains, and sage brush covered land.
We got to Santa Cruz on September 3 and unloaded (again with help from friends). We are now settled in. We’re about a half mile from the beach where we can walk out onto the municipal wharf. The wharf’s main attraction is the sea lions that rest on the cross beams underneath it. It also has some good restaurants.
Its been a bit of a geography and culture shock here. Pete’s commute to school each morning is a 3 mile bike ride that takes him from about 14 feet to about 800 feet above sea level. Its a good workout, but the ride home is real easy. Julie, too, must commute, but she has to drive 25 miles (during which she reaches 1800 feet) to San Jose.
Another interesting difference from Minnesota is that every week the paper prints a map with the week’s earthquakes in the area. Most are under 2.0 on the Richter scale, and we have not yet felt any quakes, but it does keep one aware of the fact that the ground here is not entirely stable.
There’s also this huge lake-like thing nearby that seems to have more water than all 10,000 of Minnesota’s lakes combined. And people can surf on it without even having sails on their boards. :-)
We miss our friends back in Minnesota, but we have been making new friends here. The folkdance community and the collegiality of the Linguistics Department have helped make the transition smooth.
Of course we found the folk dancers in town. We are dancing with Seabright Morris & Sword, a side that is only about 3 years old. They dance dances from two village traditions that we already knew (Adderbury, Bledington), but they have somewhat different style from Midwestern varieties, so we’ve had to do some relearning. Several Seabrighters (and others) performed a Midwinter song set and mummer’s play on Pacific Avenue and other locations in town. A splendid time was had by all.
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