Personal
I live in Holyoke, MA in a big old drafty house with my husband, Joel, two greyhounds, and three cats. We have a pear tree in our backyard.
I volunteer at Flywheel, a community arts space in Easthampton, MA, not as often as I should. I'm learning to run the sound board, and I work the door and cafe during shows sometimes.
I adopted my first greyhound, Chase, in 2001. Since then, I have joined the board of directors of Greyhound Options. We have fostered six greyhounds and our most recent foster, Bridget, has become our second adoptee.
In the fall, Joel and I drive around Western Massachusetts and go to church bazaars. We take pictures of the churches, buy lots of stuff, and take pictures of that, too.
I have a growing professional interest in social software, and it's hard for that not to become personal as well. You can (not there's any reason you would want to) see my bookmarks on Furl, my photographs on Flickr, some of my personal library on Library Thing, and my profile on MySpace, Friendster, and FaceBook.
I have studied Latin, Arabic, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German, Hittite, Tocharian, Gothic, Turkish, and Yiddish. Through field methods classes, I have worked with native speakers of Inner Mongolian and Ndebele. I spent a lot of time with Uyghur, too. In college, I taught ESL to people from Cambodia and Bangladesh.
My brother and I came to the study of Indo-European linguistics simultaneously but independently of one another. He is now a Latin teacher in Marblehead, MA. We share a (selfish, I know) hope that one year the North Atlantic hurricane naming scheme will exhaust the Greek alphabet and be forced to utilize the prehistoric Greek sounds digamma and yod.
I worked as a tour guide at Fenway Park during the summer of 2000. At the end of the summer, Joel and I got married at Fenway. It was 9 in the morning, Joel was half-asleep, and only 3 of our friends and some groundskeepers were present.
I was born in New London, CT. I am the great-granddaughter of Lebanese immigrants. My first memory is seeing the 1975 World Series on a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears in my early childhood home in Plymouth, MA. I grew up in Ledyard, CT and got out as fast as I could. Life is better outside Ledyard.