rain and wet feet

It rained most of today. Now that I'm over my cold, I decided to leave the house, first for lunch with Eric Ow on Telegraph and then to study in my office, which didn't work quite as successfully as I had hoped, because I was really sleepy for some reason and my feet had gotten cold and wet. I did get my overdue books returned to the library, though. I used to really like the rain when I lived in Los Gatos, but after living in places where people don't like rain, I've come to dislike it. Still, there is something very fitting about Christmas and then New Year's happening at this time of rebirth in nature. If I were more artistic, I would make holiday cards with fresh green grass and mushrooms sprouting out of rotten logs and newts crawling on the forest floor, and send them to all my perplexed friends in other places.

I was amused to notice today online that the weather is essentially the same right now here in Berkeley as it is in Ōtsu and Cambridge (in the 40's and 50's F, with rain likely over the next few days).

It's looking increasingly likely that I will be moving to Moorea in French Polynesia for my third year of graduate school, to do a full Year of Fieldwork. I already know who my roommates will be, and one of them has located a house that will be vacated in August on the island between the airport and the ferry terminal, for a rent considerably less than I am paying in Berkeley right now. I would have thought that rent would be expensive in French Polynesia just like everything else is, but I guess there is enough land and not enough people who want to live on Moorea to make it still affordable. Rent in Papeete, though, is apparently as expensive as it is in moderately expensive parts of the Bay Area.