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.

happiness a-splode

Too bad I said I'd give it back when he comes back...

I'm having trouble typing right now because I've literally played the piano for 6 of the last 16 hours.  It's kind of starting to feel like acute carpal tunnel syndrome, so I should probably cool it for a while, but I just can't stop.  Ohmygodit'ssogood.

My friend Florian left for France this morning, so that makes me kind of sad, but I get to babysit his piano while he's gone, so that makes me ecstatic.  It's actually a really nice, full sized keyboard with weighted keys and everything, so it sounds and plays a lot like a real piano.  I went and picked it up from his house last night, got it home around 10:00, and played the darn thing until 1:15 in the morning.  I just kept going, "Mmmmmmm maybe one more song."  And then 10 or 15 minutes would go by, and I wasn't ready to stop, so I'd find another one.  I even downloaded some sheet music online and I can already play it fairly well, and I was just re-figuring out the chord progression to "Ice Cream" by Sarah McLachlan.  I actually came home from campus around noon instead of doing work because I was so tired from lack of sleep and couldn't stop thinking about playing the piano anyway, so I thought I might as well throw in the towel and play some more.  But it's getting to the point where my fingers aren't responding very well and my wrists hurt a little, so it looks like 6 out of 16 consecutive hours is approximately my limit.  (For now.)

So what does a sleepy, hand-crampy girl do at 2:00 on a beautiful, sunny Friday afternoon?  Eat a bowl of cereal, for one thing.  And blog.  And once that's done, I think I'll actually do some cleaning around here, since the little piles of dog hair and unopened mail and dirty laundry are getting a little ridiculous.

I had a pretty excellent week, all things considered.  I got comments back on my qualifying paper from both of my readers, and they were pretty good.  I've got some semi-major revisions to make, but nothing I wasn't expecting, and now I have some guidance as to how to go about making them.  I met with my advisor yesterday, and as always, it was a pretty great meeting.  And actually, I met with my new advisor today - I recently asked the other professor reading my paper if she would be willing to be the co-director of my dissertation along with advisor #1, so I officially have two thesis advisors now, and I am also officially starting to use the phrase "my dissertation".  Yikes.  I hope I don't regret the "two advisors" thing - I know people have enough trouble trying to get a dissertation approved by one professor, let alone two of them.  The thing is, ultimately it's going to be a much better dissertation, and it's going to make me a better researcher, and I know that, and that's why I did it.  But I'm also trying to be realistic about it and remember to not freak out when I'm trying to please two very smart people who are telling me different, perhaps sometimes conflicting, things.  Hop là, c'est parti!  Too late to turn back now!

I bought my plane tickets for Seattle this week, too.  I'm going to Seattle for a conference during the last week of May, and I'm pretty excited about it.  I don't know what exactly I'm putting on my poster for that conference yet, but I've never been to Seattle, and I have some friends there now, so I'll have fun one way or another!  (But I think the conference itself is going to be pretty great too.)

Well jeez.  I'm pretty sleepy and spacing out, so I might do some laundry and even (gasp!) get out the vacuum.  Unless I get distracted by my new piano again.  Which I'm going to do right... about... now....