Ahh the life of a grad student: Go home from campus at midnight, get to sleep at 2:15am, get up at 7:15am, get to campus again. That's what they mean by early to bed, right? Because somewhere around 1am it stops being late.

The scary part is that's more sleep than I've gotten any other night in the last week, except for Sunday, when I slept in until 11, making a deposit in the sleep bank. I think funds are getting low, but judging by how I'm alert, happy, chai in hand and early for my 8:30 class, I guess my check didn't bounce today. Or maybe I'm just overdrawn...

So it was so cold last night that I carpooled a couple of fellow students home after one of my project's group meeting. I offered Kerry a ride home and she said she'd be fine walking, but 5 minutes later she IMed me back and took me up on the offer. Seems she went outside and discovered just how cold it really was outside.

So it was about 38 degrees (err, Fahrenheit) at around 11:30 last night, clod enough to make your ears burn a bit. This is about as cold as it'll usually get during sane hours in the Bay Area. Every once in a while you'll get ice on the windshield in the morning, but that's just a message sent from a nocturnal place most of us Friscans witness evidence of, but never actually experience.

Yeah, 38 degrees. A stone's toss from freezing. Great. The funny part is go ahead and drop that stone to 32 degrees, and you'll have the average high in February here. Yep. Half the days it doesn't even get that warm! (Yes, I know I'm amusing a bunch of you who grew up with this stuff and live with it every winter. ("Snow? Falling from the sky??") But I'm not going to let the jadedness of others ruin it for me. I cherish my incredulity, however banal it may be to others.

Okay, now I've squandered my earliness, but the day already has a positive spin, and my iPod is churning up nothing but favorites this morning (all hail the 5-star smart-playlist). I hope your morning feels at least half as good as mine does.