Have had a bit of a crazy week. Well, not in the grand scheme of things maybe - but compared to the past few weeks, definitely.

Started my course - lectures start on Monday but have had all the intros, tours around the dept and the labs (wow!!) etc. now. Everyone seems really nice, lecturers are friendly and seem pretty inspiring which is great. There are 13 of us on the course, 10 girls... Approx. half of us are international students so it's a pretty good mix. Am a bit stressed about whether I'll be able to keep up - if my technical knowledge is enough for this course. But I've got more phon and acoustic experience than quite a few of the others so *shouldn't* be a problem. Keep fingers crossed for me!

Have also signed up to do Spanish - 'Level 1 Plus' they call it... Been about 6 years since I did any Spanish and even then I only did it for a year (and didn't go to toooooo many of the classes... oops) so this should be pretty much spot on. Kirsty has already been roped in to help me - hehe! Joanna, interested? Might be able to do Level 2 next semester, or the reading & writing focused course...

Also still working on the Forensic Linguistics course at Umeå. It's fun actually, I can tie quite a bit in with my MSc but it's more linguistics (d'oh!) than speech science. Having said that one of the assignments quotes a JPFA case...

xx