Jerusalem update number 3

Wow, when it rains, it pours: three blog posts in as many days - highly unusual for this blog! I suppose frustration, failure, and stress all need an outlet.

Well, our worst fears are confirmed: a bunch of Hebrew sound files are mysteriously missing. In our hectic attempt to be fully prepared for this trip, we failed to be as thorough as needed. I'm actually astonished by this, because not only am I a pretty organized person, but so is Amy, my incredible RA. If the two of us are having such a hard time, I suppose I should take some comfort in the situation, because perhaps it was simply inevitable that something like this would arise.

Luckily, the lab here in Jerusalem is happy to wait till we send them the complete list of items and sound files, which hopefully will happen in February after our return to Tucson (and after we beg our poor native Hebrew speaker to return to the recording booth). It's really a lucky thing that we are working with such amazing people in Jerusalem who are willing to do this for us.

In the meantime, I've moved on somewhat to Maltese, given that we'll be arriving there next week. I've created spreadsheets with lists of all the Maltese words we recorded, and soon we'll be able to rip those individual sound files out of the recordings and start item selection for Maltese. No matter how little progress we end up making, it'll all have been worth it, and we'll certainly be (better) prepared for the trip that we'll be making a year from now.

It's both hanukah and christmas - so being in Israel right now feels kind of neat, even though I'm not at all a religious person. Tonight we'll be having a christmas eve dinner with our very sweet neighbors (who happen to live in the house of a dear family friend who recently passed away), and then we'll walk to the Dormition Abbey for a midnight mass. I attended a concert at the same church five days ago, and it was unbelievably beautiful - a Lithuanian choir sang pieces ranging from Bach to modern and really filled the cathedral with beautiful music.

I suppose to be fair, I should say a few words about downtown Tucson, since so much of my recent blogging has been so linguistics-centric. I hear that the south end of the 4th Ave underpass has now been demolished (yay!) and that construction of the new underpass is proceeding well. The Scott Avenue improvement project is also apparently in full swing, and a new and welcome addition has arrived on the eastern end of downtown: Maynards Market. Although I haven't had the pleasure of seeing it in person, my sources tell me that Maynards is pretty swank, and does an impressive job of being site-specific (it's located in the historic train depot) and urban. I can't wait to get back home in February and see it for myself.