barreling through

it smells like rain and
maybe a new beginning
is this really fall?

*****

Oh my goodness, I am so excited about today.  I'm serious, I feel like there are endless possibilities, and they're all magnificently boring, and it's the greatest thing.  My plan is to get caught up on some of the most important things missing from my life for the past 3 weeks.  By this I mean: drinking tea, listening to NPR, playing the piano, going grocery shopping, cooking, taking a nap, watching Six Feet Under, doing laundry, and maybe even reading something that doesn't have to do with phonotactic probability.

I turned in an incomplete version of my dissertation prospectus yesterday.  I still have a lot to add to it, but the structure is there, and that's the most important part.  Now I'm taking the day off (mostly, probably).  It seems like everyone had a really rough week this week.  Thankfully I ran into F in the hallway yesterday around 5:00 (I was admittedly trying to run into him, by going by his office) and we booked it over to Jupiter for a beer.  I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it was probably the greatest beer I've ever had.  We sat upstairs by the window, overlooking downtown Berkeley in the fall twilight, and munched on olives and mused on life.  After a while at Jupiter, we headed to the Albatross and met up with a small group of people who also had a rough week, and we somehow stayed out until 1:00 am or so.  We were a little haggard and pathetic, I think... it seemed like most of us were at least partially falling asleep at some point... but it was so nice to be with friends, laughing and not thinking or stressing about getting my paper done.  It's definitely close enough that I can take today and tomorrow off, I think.  Then I'll work on it all day Sunday and Monday, and it'll be done for real.  Done.

I had a glorious run in the rain just now.  Absolutely beautiful.  Not particularly far, but it was so nice to get out of the house, get some blood flowing, and just feel wonderfully, primally alive.  When I sit at my computer all week, reading and writing and thinking, I start to get antsy and dissatisfied.  People were not made for sitting at computers all day, and some part of my caveman brain knows that and gets grumpy if I suppress it for too long.  Anyway, I woke up around 7:15 this morning, because apparently I have accidentally retrained myself that hey, 5 1/2 hours of sleep is probably enough.  (It is not.  But I digress.)  And I just had to go.  So me and the dogs did a little loop up and around campus, and it started drizzling about a mile in, but it was this nice, soft, spring rain that makes everything smell fresh and dirt-y and new.  By "dirt-y", I mean it literally smells like soil, and I love that.  Then I came home and actually cooked myself breakfast and made some tea, instead of subsisting on coffee and baked goods, as I have been for about two weeks now.  I turned on NPR and sat down and ate my eggs and it was good.

You know what it is time for?  Piano.  And then a nice warm shower, and then lazing about in flannel pants and my Illinois hoodie, watching Six Feet Under until the rain lets up.  Then there will be groceries and listening to music and cooking, and (nearly) all will be right with the world.

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.

Rain, rain, go away...

Ok, Northern California. I get it. You rain a lot. I know my impressions of you have been unjustly skewed because I arrived here during a drought year, but now that it's been raining for the past four days, I believe you. The "wet season" does exist after all. You win. Rainy winters. Ok. Can you cut it out now?

Seriously. It's been raining for a few days now, and I'm kind of ready for a break from it, but I feel bad saying that because we really, really need the rain. This is the first time it's actually rained for more than a few hours at once since we've been here! And once we hit March/April, it probably won't really rain again until November. So I should just suck it up and deal with it and stop being so selfish. But I had to take the bus to the grocery store in the rain today because we were almost completely out of food and I couldn't put it off any longer, and it was pretty nul. Plus, the department's hosting a linguistics conference this weekend (did I mention that before?), so I've been forced to be out and about and my pants and socks and shoes get all wet, and then I'm cold all day.

Waah, waah, waah, I know. Here are some good things about my life.

I got to see George yesterday! For anyone reading this who has no idea who I'm talking about or why I'm so excited he's in town, George (and Matt and Dan) are my best friends from studying abroad in France, and I miss them all terribly. George is doing a graduate program in French literature at UC Irvine right now, and he and his friend drove up here Friday night to visit San Francisco. So I met them in the city yesterday for lunch, and then we went to Ghirardelli Square and got massive ice cream sundaes drenched with chocolate that we couldn't finish. It was drizzling in the city too, but we hiked up a HUGE hill and stopped at the top and looked out across the Bay. Alcatraz was right in front of us, and I pointed out the clock tower on campus waaaay in the distance, in the Berkeley hills, and the clouds were beautiful. We don't usually get interesting clouds here; most days, the sky is either completely blue or completely flat gray. Sometimes we get white little wisps of cirro-nimbus clouds drifting across the sky, but very rarely do we have the big, marshmallowy cumulus clouds we had yesterday. And the colors were great too - grays, blues, purples, and even pinks as the sun was setting.

So we stood on the side of the hill in the rain for a few minutes, looking at the landscape, and then we walked down Lombard Street ("the Crookedest Street in the World") to their hotel, so they could give me a ride back to BART (the train back to Berkeley). We weren't on the crooked side of Lombard Street, though; we walked down the other side, which is perfectly straight, but still not boring. It's still on some kind of crazy 45 degree angle or something.

I don't know what else to say. We don't have class tomorrow, but our conference is still going on, so I have to go to that in the afternoon. I hope the rain will let up in the morning so I can run with my dogs. Then I'll take a hot shower, drink some tea, and enjoy my warm house while I get some work done before I head in to campus.

Sounds good to me.

Excited

Today is a great day so far!  Here is why:

1) While running with the dogs this morning, we got caught in pounding hail.  No joke.  It was honestly laughable, it was so ridiculous.  Just out of nowhere - sunny when we left the house, 30 minutes later we're getting pummeled with hard rain and ice chips.  Bizarre.  Then by the time we were soaked to the bone and I was bright pink, it let up and there were blue skies again.  So we kept running.

2) I ran into Tera on campus this morning!  I noticed her right away because she looked so cute in her bright blue jacket with her pretty red hair!  We might do something this weekend, but she's always so busy and I have a lot to do this weekend, too... but if that doesn't work out, I was still really glad to see her.

3) I have another potential experiment in the works.  Maybe.  So the Illinois conference didn't work out, because I decided not to pursue that syntax project I told you about, for now at least.  But today I went in to be a pilot subject in a experiment one of our 5th year grad students is working on, and afterwards I stayed and talked to him about it, and we came up with some good ideas.  He doesn't really have time to do it, though, so I might jump in and partially take over.  Maybe.

4) I have another potential experiment in the works.  Maybe.  This is not the same one as #3.  My experimental phonetics class is really, really fun, and we're starting a new unit next week that I'm excited about.  I have a cool idea for an experiment for that class, too, so if I get my act together, I may get to run my VERY OWN subjects for that one.

5) The fact that these potential experiments have got me so excited, even though they're just cute little ones that aren't going to be earth-shatteringly interesting or anything, makes me happy about being in grad school, and makes me happy about going into academia.  Sometimes when I have a lot of work, I start to think "Ugh, is this really what I want to do with my life?" but other times, I get so excited that I know this is the right place for me.  I also really enjoy the flexibility of having an academic life - I always have work to do, so I'm never bored, but really, I can do it whenever I want.  This works really well when Roger's working full time, because I can run errands and do fun things interspersed throughout the day (get groceries at noon, get coffee with friends at 2:00, whatever fits my class schedule), then walk the dogs, cozy up with a cup of tea and read.  As long as I don't let the workload stress me out, it really is a pretty awesome life.

6) It will be an even awesomer life if I get a fellowship from the federal government for next year!  I'm starting to get anxious to hear back from the two I applied for, but I probably won't hear for another month.  If I don't get either of them, I'll be teaching next year, and that's exciting too!

Life is good.

Oh! and 7) George is getting into town tonight, and we might meet up for lunch or dinner tomorrow and/or Sunday.

Well, time to get some reading done on this gray, chilly, drizzly, cozy day.