cozy sleepy day

It's raining!  I accidentally left the kitchen window cracked open over night last night, and now I'm sitting at the dining room table with a big bowl of delicious steaming coffee with a lip-smacking swirl of creamy milk in it, listening to the rain sprinkling against the pavement.  I can't believe it's raining!  September in Berkeley actually feels like September is supposed to feel, à mon avis, because it's this weird transition time between the dry season and the rainy season, and it's our Indian summer, so it's usually a mix of genuinely hot days and the usual chilly foggy days, and now we even have rain, so it's like... weather.  A little.  It's great.

Well, I updated my department webpage the other day and am rather proud of it, so I'm going to put a link to it here.  I'm supposed to go into one of our departmental professional development classes this week and talk to them about how I made my webpage, so I thought it would be nice to revamp it.  That, and I went to a meeting about "the academic job search" last week, and one of the more forthcoming (read: snarky) professors in our department was looking at people's webpages and CVs and critiquing them, and it made me think a lot more about the purpose an academic webpage is supposed to serve, which led to many changes.  I still have to finish updating my CV and put it up there, but I'm pretty happy with the format, anyway.

Yesterday was really fun.  So now that I have a piano, I proposed to my friend who had lent me his piano over the summer that we work on a duet together.  There are some really great classical piano duets out there, and that's one thing I've never really done before; the one time I played a duet was when my friend Laurie and I accompanied the school choir back in... 6th grade?... and the piano accompaniment was a duet.  We had such a blast practicing and playing it, and I've been having such a good time just being able to play again, so I thought it could only get better if I brought a friend in on the equation.  Playing music is great, but playing music with other people is even greater, and it's been so very long since I've done that.  So anyway, my friend came over yesterday and we worked on this piece (which has been stuck in my head for several days now) and it was really fun and a little goofy and I learned some new French vocabulary.  (French music vocabulary is just silly, in case you were wondering.)  It's weird to run through a duet for the first time, because you've been practicing the parts separately, and then you sit down to play it with someone else and it's really surprising and distracting.  Like, oh! that's how those parts fit together!  Really fun.

And then we went to a housewarming party for some other friends, and there was a cookout, and lots of good food and great people and a little too much drinking, and then I slept in until 10:30 (!) and woke up feeling like my cold was back full force, but now that I've got some water and some food and some coffee in my system, I feel okay.

(Another nice thing about having someone over yesterday is that I cleaned a little bit, which always makes everything feel nicer and homier!)

So, today.  Today I am not going to play frisbee, because it's raining and I don't feel that good anyway, so I think I'm going to grade some homework, maybe do some reading, and maybe finish knitting my current sweater project while I watch some Six Feet Under.

I've missed the rain.  What a lovely day.