Busy day yesterday. From 10 to 3 I was at the second training session for the literacy tutors. I talked with one of the coordinators and what I'm going to start out doing is volunteering in the computer lab for a couple hours on Wednesday evenings. They've got various programs for people learning English or learning to read there and they need volunteers to help teach people how to use them. So that will be a good thing to do.

After that, I went down to Santa Cruz for Jim's birthday and music party. That was fun -- I needed a good music fix. I played for about 5 hours, and even though I kept switching to progressively less painful instruments (mandolin to banjo to fiddle) my hands were feeling pretty battered by the time I was done. Even now, the tips of my fingers are complaining about typing. But it was worth it. I did a lot of Irish tunes and a couple really fun Cape Breton sets with Jim on piano.

Today was my last day at Verifia. Part of me is glad to be done, but part of me is nervous, of course. I just have to hope that this is a good move and everything will work out. A few people from work took me out to lunch before I left. I was hoping for something auspicious in my fortune cookie, but all I got was "Ignorance never settles arguments." Oh well.

My student for tonight had to reschedule so I'm not doing that tonight. Speaking of students, though, I've lost a couple recently. My mandolin student had to stop because life was taking over her music time (which is usually less fun than the reverse) and one of my new theory students decided to cancel when she realized how far Palo Alto is from Oakland. So that's too bad. I'm having a nice night at home, though. I'm listening to my Talisman CDs that I haven't heard for a while and I'm writing some thank you letters to give to a few people at work, since it'll be my last day tomorrow. I'm also working on typing up my piano composition from last quarter, which is kind of tricky, since there are some funny notation thing in it. But maybe I'll get that done and put it up here with my other compositions.

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Happy Birthday Jim!

The Menlo Park library has a literacy tutoring program that I've been wanting to join for a while. Every few months they have a series of three training sessions that are required for volunteers and one started tonight. So I went to the first one to see what it's like. I'm a little leery of committing to something like this right now, since I don't know what's going to be happening with me job-wise. But I would like to do it at some point, so I figured I could at least go to the training sessions. They said, though, that right now they don't have a lot of students available, so I guess it might be a little while before I could start anyway. So we'll see what works out.

I just got back from the freshman orientation a cappella concert. No, I'm not trying to be a freshman again, but I have some friends in Testimony who invited me to hear them sing. (Awesome solo, Kari! Excellent directing, Tina! Well sung, everyone!) It was all extremely fun. I hadn't heard much of the a cappella groups at Stanford for a while, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. All the groups look so different now, from the way I remember them. That's the problem with student groups, I guess -- the people keep changing. But they all sounded good. Talisman is definitely the one I would have auditioned for as a freshman, if I could sing or something. Fleet Street was last and did their same "Pray to the God of Partial Credit" routine that I remember from my freshman year -- that was really fun to see again.

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Happy Birthday Gia! Happy Birthday Jac! Neither of you are probably reading this, but oh well. Happy birthday anyway.