Low humidity=good hair day; Sara Bareilles' song Gravity

I just checked the current local humidity and dewpoint at 11:29 PM: 52 and 49, respectively... Meanwhile in Raleigh, NC (my former locale): 84 and 66. I actually got cold while outside with Marie before sunset. It's amazing how different 67 in Raleigh feels compared to here! The dewpoints in Raleigh never dip below 60 during the summer. My curly hair is loving this stretch of super-low humidity and dewpoints :-) Today was one of those good hair days that comes out of nowhere. Good hair days are few and far between for us curlies, so I enjoyed it all I could even though the only outing I made was to go grocery shopping. BTW, in addition to the low humidity, I've been doing two things differently: adding honey to my leave-in and adding gel after briefly plopping (not before).

On STYTCD, there will be new pairings Wednesday. Instead of going into all of that, I'll just say that I'm curious to see what happens this week. Last week's Mia Michaels dance is still in my mind, and I've managed to watch it a couple times each day. It's addictive, pun intended.

The Sara Bareilles song Gravity, which was used in Mia's dance, is so haunting and beautiful. It was a perfect match for Mia's choreography. I thought I'd share two different videos of it here. This link will take you to the music video, and here is a video from Sara herself with just her and the piano. This isn't the first time I've been impressed by Sara Bareilles. She did a beautiful song with Ingrid Michaelson called Winter Song that I found while reading someone's MySpace page. Recently, I found out that her most popular song, which I didn't care for until now, turns out to be written in response to her record label trying to pressure material out of her: "I'm not gonna write you a love song cause you asked for one, cause you need one..."

Last, but not least: I CAN TRILL/ROLL MY R'S COMPLETELY NOW. Not especially exciting to everyone else, but it is to me! It was only a few weeks ago that I finally figured out how to roll my double R's for speaking Italian. Then two or three nights ago, I had another mini breakthrough and could finally trill for several seconds without much effort or thought. Woohoo! I've been driving everyone in my household batty with my trilling. It's funny I never learned how to do this while playing the flute. But then again, I didn't need to because I was taught to use just my diaphragm to do flutter tongue (different from double or triple tonguing), kinda like lightly laughing super, super fast. It's like whistling, but to demarcate the notes you use your diaphragm muscle and not your tongue. Well... I can now cross off rolling my R's from my list of impossible feats. Yay!