Entries this day: About_Yesterday_and_Today Kamakura_Cow Oops_Ami again_Ami_oops foodage gaffe_by_Ami's_teacher late_dream zzz_final_thoughts_before_bed

About Yesterday and Today

Y: I might have found Nim on Facebook. I sent him a link to the Castle wiki.

female train driver!  First I've ever seen...

Yoshio and I get the entire Foote family to ourselves because of traffic.

Yoshio and Genny check out the Castle Entrance on the wiki.

Chance and I dominated Taboo!

Haunted house brainstorm featured Abraham Lincoln.

Home, ceareal, 4chan, reapeat, sleep.

T: Nim!!!!!!

U Cow with Ulrike to Kamakura!

TJ Bike, train to Helma's for ISIS 10.

Computer conked. Wrote with cellie.

Shibuya at 8:30 means way early to Helma's.

Mmmm. not so early...

Kamakura Cow

1:22pm JST Monday 15 September 2008 (day 14054)

This morning on my way out, I saw Ulrike. She's going to Kamakura today. I was like, "oh, the same place as we went [to the beach (on her first weekend here)]," and she was like, "oh really?"

"Yeah, so you can tell them, 'yeah; I've alrady been here.' hahaha"

I bid her farewell, headed down the stairwell, and then Cow asked if he could go as well. Ver'well, so I asked her, and she agreed to take Cow and take pictures.

Oops Ami

1:13pm JST Monday 15 September 2008 (day 14054)

Got a call from Ami just as I was finishing writing about ISIS session from today. Actually just writig about the warm tingly feeling I get after large emotional releases. I asked Helma for her thoughts on it, and she said it's rlelated to the eheric body and she went on to describe some other aspects that I've temporarily misplaced in my brain.

Anyway, Ami called and d'oh! She's in my room, as in, expecting me to be there. Welp; I forogt my power supply and chose to pick it up after ISIS, which went a little bit long as Helma was telling me about some other stuff she's got going o, plus invited me to help her model doing ISIS at the Circle of Light meeting this weekend.

So now I'm on the train (1:15 LTD EXP from Shibuya which I'll take to Musashi Kosugi, where TJ Bike is waiting.

again Ami oops

7:30pm JST Monday 15 September 2008 (day 14054)

Oh man. I got home and snuggled up with Ami who was snoozingly waiting for me to arrive from Shibuya. Awake enough to remember later, but not enough to really remember, I remembered later she asked me to meet her at 6:30 at Foodium for some grocery-oriented shopping. I zonked out while she went to her English lesson and was rudely awakened by Ami saying, "what time is it?" I was like, "pssshh I don't know. You're the one turning on the light waking me up; what time is it?" (I didn't say that, but I would have thought it had I been awake) Oh snap I forgot to meet her at 6:30 at Foodium. She's *already* been gone 3 hours and I never even woke up.

foodage

1:15am JST Tuesday 16 September 2008 (day 14055)

By way of a makeup, I made mashed potatoes for Ami, who doesn't make mashed potatoes like Ma used to make back home. Ami cooks them in the microwave, and the mashing results in like potato glue instead of light and fluffy potatoes.

So I chopped them up and boiled them, then mashed them up. Exact same potato glue. WTF? How does Ma make mashed potatoes? I thought the microwave wasn't cooking them correctly. Now, granted, I didn't use enough water and they were sorta sticky in the pot by the end, but I don't think that was the difference. Hmmmmm.

Anyway, we ate potatoes and ramen, and Ami made two lunches for my lunches tomorrow and Wednesday.

gaffe by Ami's teacher

Upstairs to check out her lesson notes from her teacher. I found like seven errors in the notes, from missing articles and missed tense in a single sentence, "I filled water bottle by poured water into it," "sometime" spelled as one word in a phrase like, "she spent sometime studying," and this gem, "she've = she have been" with "has" crossed out under "have"

I was like, "WTF? This isn't even a word!" Now granted this teacher is from Australia, but I'm pretty sure Australian English does *not* include "she've." I think this girl has been trained in grammar even less than me, and is just going by what she thinks it sounds like in her memory.

Cripes.

So I related to Ami this story of when I came home from first day of my sophomore year in high school, which featured a class in Spanish. (Fourth period with Mrs Sherman.) I showed my dad the new Spanish I learned, and he said, "nope that's wrong, the correct Spanish is blah blah blah," and I was like, "WTF? Since when did you know more Spanish than my Spanish teacher?" and I'm sure that was a big reason I lost interest in studying Spanish.

"Now, it may be that my Spanish teacher didn't know Spanish. It may be that my dad didn't know Spanish. It may be that I had misremembered the Spanish my teacher had given us. I don't know; I don't speak Spanish. But, I *do* speak English, and this is flat wrong"

Ami pointed out that the phrases "I filled water bottle" and "poured water into it" were written separately, and then connected with "by," as that preposition was the teaching point. Now, yes, there's a missing article, but she wasn't studying that.

So we basically agreed that I would get to go over the notes to make corrections before Ami studies them in earnest. Not sure how well that's going to go, but Ami likes her teacher and I'm glad she's studying again.

One other error I remember: the words "of, by, to, at, in, from, " etc were labeled as "particals," which is wrong in two ways. They are prepositions in English, and the closest equivalent part of speech in Japanese (for which Ami doesn't even know the name in English, so it's not helpful to write it down) is "particles," single characters which identify how the main words relate to each other in the sentence.

I couldn't think of a good example where changing a particle would change the meaning of the sentence, while still resulting in sentences that might be spoken, but certainly there are some.

1:59am JST

Woah. I just looked up particles on wikipedia, and there are *tons* more than I thought! I thought they were just single (or occassionally pairs of) characters like, で、も、を、に、と, から、 まで、 etc, but there's something like 100 particles listed, including a three character one that I thought was a word I didn't quite grasp yet. ばかり、

late dream

12:51am JST Tuesday 16 September 2008 (day 14055)

Going down an escalator to the 15th floor, I could feel the motion going down, but we were already on the 7th floor, then 6th, 5th, etcth, and then the numbers started over again at like 75th 74th, 73rd, down down down and skipped some numbers; it was like buildings had been stacked upon each other.

On the way down, I wanted to see outside, but even though this elevator was so cool that it could connect multiple buildings, it had no windows. Then I noticed it *did* have windows, but they were crudely blocked off with sheets of black rubber rivitted down on four corners of the window, so I could slightly see out. If Only I could have climbed on the thin hand rail, I could have seen through the exposed window *above* the rubber sheet. I didn't know if I'd be in trouble for doing so, and the floor indicator changed from 38 or so to PHOTO, which perhaps meant they were going to take my photo soon (and see me on the rail), so I ended up not seeing out the elevator window.

I did, however, finally reach the 15th floor and got out in a room that had a large rescessed area for couches and then along the walls a facade of a house, where kids could play. I looked through some pictures I had taken of JC with my cellphone. I was surprised to find I had taken so many, and I was flipping through them backwards, looking at the details being exactly the same, but he had been in the facade play area, poking around and exploring. I saw him in the kitchen area, digging through some cans of food in the pantry. Then a few pictures later (previous) he was in the dish washer. I was like "wha?" and flipped through the pictures in forward order. He climbed into the dish washer, and then vanished into the back and emerged from the pantry!

I laughed at the hilarity, but then realized of course it should be that way. It's for little kids; they don't want kids to get trapped in the dish washer. I walked back behind the facade to find a large walkway where parents could easily collect kids who would have otherwise vanished into the facade.

zzz final thoughts before bed

3:40am JST Tuesday 16 September 2008 (day 14055)

I've been reading news and such on my other computer. For some reason, my computer with better emacs settings (this one (white MacBook)) farks on occassion so that the mouse doesn't work until I log off and back on. So I can't turn on the airport to get internet connection going.

!) From above top secret, read an article regarding Hurricane Ike damage in Galveston *not* being shown on news. Basically people wondering why there's only scant coverage of the west side of Galveston Island. Conspiracy? Why did FEMA take over the cell network? Why put a biocontainment lab on this hurricane-prone island?

@) Holy crap Merril Lynch bought by Bank of America, and Lehman Brothers down the crapper. WTF?

3) Palin wants war war and more war.

$) gasoline price gouging in Kentucky

%) I have to leave the house at 9am to meet Tariq on time in Hamamatsucho