:: p-dog ::

Guten Tag, Motherfucker!*

We're home! Bryan is doing the laundry, we pryed 10 days of accumulated mail out of our box, and our tent is set up in the living room to dry thoroughly after it rained on us on the Oregon beach. Our pictures are posted, categorized, and labeled on gallery (more in Oregon, new albums for Washington and Vancouver)--they chronicle the whole trip fairly well. Here, I'll just round up some highlights, list-form.

Most miles driven in one day: 953, from Vancouver to Berkeley in 16 hours along the length of I-5.
Best comment from random passer-by: CRUNCH -- as an old station wagon bent its rim on a curb in a Vancouver park. Unphased, from the car window: "You must be European!" yelled the rotund, hairy man who had observed Bryan doing random feats of upper-body strength ten minutes before. "I've never seen an American exercise!"
(runner-up) From a flamboyant bartender: "Where in California? You guys are too white to be from LA."
Best animal: Mason Jar the dog, sitting on a bar stool at the Firehouse in Seattle, doing tricks and eying her master's beer.
(runner up) Fat black bears at the wildlife rescue place in Oregon
Random wonderful finds: (places we stumbled into without recommendations or travel-book mentions) Billy Goat Tavern in Mount Shasta, CA, Clay's Smokehouse Grill in Portland, Firehouse Bar and Grill in Seattle
Random acquaintances made: Fred the 80-year-old Canadian RV traveler, Zaza the portly drug dealer, Roger the chatty sausage-maker
Best atheist wisdom: From Bryan, accused of elf-hate in the Hoh rainforest: "I don't hate elves, any more than I hate leprechauns, or God."
Most unusual dining experience: Liliget, our first Native American cuisine, in Vancouver: salmon, cod, mussels, duck, and venison
Most useful German phrases that can be constructed with our new skills: "Give me that wine, now!" and "I have ten dollars. How many beers can I buy?"
Most absurd vehicle: This Chevy truck, which we passed and re-passed in order to gawk. It's much bigger than it looks in the picture.
Best scenery driving: Oregon Coast
Accomplishments: Leslie graduates to intermediate stick-driver (Now proficient in: downshifting to slow and climb hills, driving in rain and strange cities. Next skills to learn: backing up without running over things, dialing down the racing start)
Bryan learns that when Leslie is driving and remarks that something is pretty, he should get out the camera and take a dozen pictures
Thank yous: Seth, Johanna, and Catie for travel recommendations, Bryan's grandparents for 3 nights of housing and five meals

*How Bryan apparently plans to greet German-speakers. We listened to four hours of German lessons in the car, as well as all 10,000 songs in my music collection.

:: Leslie H - 10:38 AM - ::

From the Road:

The trip is going fabulous-ly. Much natural beauty, relaxing car trips through winding mountain roads, and a few neat towns to cap it off. We've had great luck with places we've stayed and restaurants we've stumbled into; for a full narration check out the pictures up at gallery (there's an album for California and one for Oregon--Washington and Vancouver to come). Bryan and I are currently sitting at the dining room table in our current guesthouse (the Bluebird) in Portland, planning our four final Oregon hours before we drive into state #3.

:: Leslie H - 10:10 AM - ::

Oh yes, and we're leaving on a road trip.

Today!

Here's our itinerary:

Day 1: Lunch in Mendocino, night in Humboldt Redwoods State Park
Day 2: Redwood Natl Park, Mt. Shasta
Day 3: Crater Lake, Ashland, OR
Day 4: day in Ashland, night camping on beach
Day 5: Portland
Day 6: Portland
Day 7: Seattle
Day 8: Olympic Natl Park, night with Bryan's grandparents
Day 9: into Canada
Day 10: Vancouver
Day 11: Vancouver
Day 12: drive allll the way home

Then three days to catch our breath, and my internship starts June 1. We will almost certainly be posting pictures and news along the way.

:: Leslie H - 8:07 AM - ::

Let the Wedding Plans Begin!

The end of my semester segued neatly into my mother's visit. She came to--well, there are all sorts of metaphors I could use, but basically because Bryan and I had made zero progress on the whole getting married situation since he proposed almost two months ago. Oh, we'd idly looked at a few locations and talked to one jeweler about my real ring (I swear, I'm almost ready for it--it's been weeks since I realized I wasn't wearing my trainer and couldn't remember where it was), but there had been nothing that you could reasonably call progress.

So Mom arrived, took one look at my single file folder devoted to wedding planning, scoffed--in a loving way--and took things in hand. We visited five sites in the East Bay, some casually, others with their designated wedding-rentals person, flipped through maybe a quarter of two dozen wedding magazines she brought with her, talked about food and colors and dresses and the possibility of a bouncy castle, toured hotels to reserve rooms for out-of-town guests, and laid out a schedule for everything that needs to happen between now and next March. We even dropped in on a jeweler and fiddled around with some rings--it happened to be next door to the Office Max where we were buying the 2-inch binder to replace my file folder.

It was a full 48 hours.

And progress! Progress was made! Mark your calendars for Memorial Day weekend, 2007! Bryan and I have narrowed our candidates to two sites in Berkeley: the Brazilian Room in a park in the hills--pretty, convenient space with a nice view, and the University's botanical garden--ceremony in a grove of redwoods and reception in the garden's conference center. The botanical garden is not taking reservations for 2007 yet, and it's quite popular, so we've reserved the Brazilian Room and will decide whether to forfeit our deposit if we can get the date we want at the garden.

Here are the two sites. Both have advantages, but I lean towards the garden if we can get it.

Brazilian Room (for the ceremony)



(for the reception)



Botanical Garden (for the ceremony)



(for the reception)



More pictures of all candidates are up in gallery.

So that's the news. Thank god for my parents and their event-planning expertise. If you have any suggestions, send them my way--I guarantee I have a section for it in my giant new wedding binder.

:: Leslie H - 8:27 AM - ::

Grad School: 50% Complete

Really done this time. Mixed feelings of course: I'm glad to have taken care of all the mad work at the semester's end, but I'm not jumping for joy over being one year closer to getting another real job. I'm not sure if you know my feelings on those, but they're not positive.

Our IPA group worked through yesterday afternoon and early evening at a frantic pitch, determined to finish by 8. We skated in a little early, emailed off our final report to everyone interested, and Laurel and I were able to make it for a little sunset fondue (and wine, lots of wine) to celebrate the semester's end with some friends.



[More pictures of our night, plus some of my IPA group, up at gallery in the spring album.]

My mom arrives in about an hour for wedding consulting. Bryan and I have managed to see three or four sites, and we actually put a date on hold at one, just in case. We have a few appointments to check out other places, and Mom is evidently bringing a suitcase full of wedding magazines. Looks like we actually are getting married. :)

:: Leslie H - 1:10 PM - ::

Stress Wounds

I've never been a paragon of grace and elegance, but my casual clumsiness reaches new heights during busy seasons. I just don't keep track of my limbs very well and keep ramming them into the edges of tables and walls. I'm currently sporting self-inflicted bruises and broken skin on my ankle and thumb joint, where I flailed my hand right into the coffee table. The current winner is a palm-sized, rainbow-colored bruise on my left thigh, earned when I stood up to give a presentation last week before I scooted my chair back from under the desk. Ouch.

I was discussing this with Bryan, who I frequently hear injuring himself by crashing feet or elbows into the furniture. We decided that we both just use a little less of our brain than necessary to navigate our bodies--maybe 80% of the attention most people give it. Usually this works out okay for us: we point our feet in the general direction of the stairs and manage to climb them. Sometimes, though, we set a course for the kitchen that's just a little off, and end up walking full-speed into the door frame.

I'm still not done with the semester, by the way. I keep expecting to be finished, but we keep spending hours revising this K-8 schools report (8 yesterday, 8 today). Tomorrow, though, should be the end. Really this time. I mean it.

:: Leslie H - 5:07 PM - ::

Quantitative Methods: Check or How White is Your Name?

Took my exam this morning (verdict: hard but fair) and had one peaceful moment of looking around and sighing happily that here I was, learning things and writing about them in a big room full of other people interested in the same random shit, rather than pacing up and down the rows in a classroom, proctoring a state standardized test for which all of my students were going to cruise in at below-basic. God, I'm glad I'm not a teacher anymore.

I decided to write a bit before all the crammed-in knowledge falls out of my head. Because it wasn't all heteroskedacticity and simultaneity and other terms I put up here because they sound impressively nonsensical. During the second half of the class we basically read a bunch of studies and talked about issues in the research design, strengths and weaknesses, and what we could actually conclude from them.

Some of the more interesting ones:

1. Examining outcomes for twins when one has a child in her teens and the other doesn't, to determine the impact of teen pregnancy on education, earnings, and various other outcomes. Conclusion: bearing a child as a teen is more a symptom of a bad situation than a cause.

2. Comparing employment rates in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before and after New Jersey raised its minimum wage. Conclusion: raising the minimum wage actually increases the employment rate. (We talked about this effect in economics, too, actually--it's because a higher minimum reduces the incentive for firms to underemploy. I could draw you a neat little graph.)

3. Assigning families to various levels of health insurance and watching them over time to determine if paying higher premiums has negative health effects. This is about as close to a real experiment as you get in public policy, and you probably couldn't get away with it today. This was done in the 70s, when health care spending was beginning to increase, and found that there weren't significant negative consequences for those who had to pay for most of their own care--except for the poor, who were helped quite a bit by inexpensive care. The study was quite influential, as average copayments skyrocketed after its release in the early 80s.

My favorite was another quasi-experiment (as opposed to just playing around with data sets). In order to test for discrimination in the labor market, the authors constructed fake resumes, sent them out in response to job listings in Boston and Chicago, and tallied the number of call-backs received for each one. The only difference was the name on the resume. Based on birth records, they identified the names most often given to only one race, assuming that the names would reliably signal race to potential employers.

White names: Emily, Anne, Jill, Allison, Sarah, Meredith, Laurie, Carrie, Kristen, and (topping the charts) Molly--99.9% of babies named Molly are white. And boys: Neil, Geoffrey, Brett, Brendan, Greg, Todd, Matthew, Jay, and Brad
Black names: Aisha, Keisha, Tamika, Lakisha, Tanisha, Latoya, Kenya, Latonya, and Ebony Boys: Rasheed, Tremayne, Kareem, Darnell, Tyrone, Jamal, Hakim, Leroy, and Jermaine

The results showed that white names were significantly more likely to get call-backs (something like 11% vs 6% for black names). When they tweaked the quality of the resumes, they found that better qualifications also helped white names more than they helped black names--i.e. the gap widened. Of course it's limited: it's technically identifying discrimination against black names, not people, and it can't measure actual job offers, or starting salaries, or other things tied up in labor market discrimination. But I thought the study was interesting and the design very creative.

So that's my ode to Quant. There's actually a decent chance I'll sign up for more of this punishment next year. Who knew I'd like it so much?

:: Leslie H - 2:12 PM - ::

It's Really Almost Over

That's right, Leslie's Stressful Season 2006 is drawing to a close. This morning, my IPA group gave the last of our stellar "K-8 Schools Analysis" presentation to rave reviews and then milled around our favorite pizza joint from 10-11, waiting for them to open and serve us our celebratory pitchers of beer. Tomorrow I will take my first final exam (let's not talk about it), on Monday I will take my last and turn in my "30-page" term paper--I've completely run out of things to say at page 18, but I'm sure I'll think of something. On Tuesday our group will meet again to cobble together the first-draft chunks of our final report. On Wednesday I have NO PLANS and will make NO PLANS other than to test the limits of my ability to sit on our couch and watch television. And Thursday my mom comes into town, which will finally force Bryan and I to get on the ball! about this whole wedding-planning thing (update: no progress, although I am getting a little better at not spinning my training ring around on counters at bars and dropping it into floor vents).

Our fab IPA team waxed a little nostalgic today over our Thursday a.m. Heinekens, and I've just got to say that I have never been a part of a better group. We were lucky in our project--well-defined scope, at least some useful data from the school district, and certainly relevant and interesting to the client and to us--but I think most of our positive experience was due to the combination of people. The five of us had very complimentary skills, learned a lot from each other, and just had a great time. We spent a looot of time together this semester, evidently earning a reputation among other groups for almost excessive meetings and raucous, inappropriate laughter in quiet rooms. If I had been part of any other group, I definitely would have hated us. While we couldn't make a single car trip without getting lost and wandering aimlessly around--really, not one--we used the time well by singing the theme song to DuckTales and debating the plot differences between Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the Movies vs the Cartoon. We gave nicknames to everyone we worked with in the school district, which actually got us in trouble when one of our members was leaving a message for a Board member and accidentally used one of them--and then explained, awkwardly, that it was our "pet name" for the head of the district cabinet.

I plan to spend the next 6-8 hours figuring out the important differences between OLS regressions vs a fixed-effect model, a difference-in-difference estimation, and a two-stage least squares regression using instrumental variables, plus reading essentially the cliff's notes version of a dozen reports I didn't get around to actually reading on time (i.e. before the class in which we discussed them). I'm REALLY looking forward to it.

:: Leslie H - 1:39 PM - ::