It was a long, interesting, and very cold day today.

• High of 25 degrees, and a low of 2. TWO. It was capital-“C” COLD outside, guys.
• I spent the morning framing and hanging art and pictures on the walls of my bedroom. My modus operandi up until now has always been taped-up National Geographic maps. Those are still definitely covering my closet doors, but the actual walls themselves have art now. I feel like a grown-up, and my apartment looks like a grown up might actually live here now.
• I accidentally got interviewed for Utah Public Radio. It was supposed to just be for the school paper, but the reporter came in with a UPR bag and a recording device, so I just went along with it. I was interviewed about being part of a spate of social activism on campus; I started a list of “safe contacts” for people to call for accompaniment if they feel unsafe along on campus. It’s sort of a hate crime prevention strategy. I wasn’t the initiator of the list itself (credit for that goes to my awesome labmate, Salif Mahamane); I just took the initiative to actually create the list as a physical thing that people could access if needed.
• I met with a professor about doing some mathematics education and numerical cognition research in schools starting in January. I haven’t done much hands-on research yet so far, so I’m really excited to get involved in actual testing and data collection. It’s an exploratory study so there’s a bit of leeway in what sorts of analysis gets done, and I’ll be able to get some practice using the measures I intend to use for my own big project.
• I delivered my final Neuroscience presentation about how bilingualism changes the brain. It’s the only grade for the entire class, so it was a bit stressful. I think I went over my allotted time a little bit, and I was still sort of frazzled from the radio interview a few minutes beforehand. I think it went well though. The accompanying paper was much more succinct and made more sense, but I’ve always been a better writer than talker.
• I graded 75~ undergraduate papers. I can tell it’s getting to the end of the semester; I was inundated with plagiarism alerts from the assignment submission forms.

I’m really rather excited for winter break. I’m going to finish my long-overdue cross stitch project and read all the Harry Potter books and watch Christmas movies with Catie. It’s going to be great.