There are more buds than last year, but so far only one is showing a little red.
Today I stopped in at a little park in time to see a rather gruesome drama involving a mynah (I think) and its overly large lunch, which was still alive.
I think it was a cicada. It's strange, though. I haven't seen or heard any kumazemi yet. That's what it looks like to me, but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps it's some other large insect.
We're heading into our final two or three weeks of semester now, and I have been feeling bad about not posting more, especially since I have had some entertaining classes this semester. But that swine flu week off messed things up a bit. I had a lovely week off at the time, doing almost nothing, but since then it has all been madness. What has made things especially mental is that instead of making up the classes, we were permitted to give our students an extra homework assignment. I did this (as did every other teacher I know) but all those homework assignments have come in at once. This is mostly due to my own bad planning, but partly due to students to whom I had given an earlier deadline not handing in their homework on time. I have also been giving end-of-semester tests, so marking tests and grading assignments has kept me pretty much without the time or energy to write.
It is possible that my schedule this year has made it a bit harder to write, too. Last year I had a hideous schedule, but several times a week I could stay up late without causing meltdown the next day. That's when I wrote my blog. This year, however, I have to get up at five o'clock three days a week. This has not been too bad, I must say, but mostly because I have managed to change my routine so that I am usually in bed by ten at the latest. So I have been doing very well in terms of having energy for work, but blogging has suffered.
Also, my Palm (with portable keyboard) died. I now have an iPod Touch, but with no external keyboard I do not like typing on it for anything longer than short memos. It is too slow.
Why can't the iPod have an external keyboard? That would make it PERFECT.
I just added a new blog to my blogroll, and discovered while doing so that it is at least a year since I changed my blogroll at all. This means that there are probably a few bad links in there, for which I offer a sincere but meaningless apology. My bad housekeeping skills apparently extend to the virtual world. What a sad thing to learn about myself.
But you will be pleased to hear that this discovery has goaded me into action. I have decisively added 'clean up my blogroll' to my current 'to-do' list, and will get to it sometime in the next year or so, if I don't lose the list first.
It has been a while, hasn't it? I have not stopped blogging, however. I have been blogging like mad. The only problem is that the blogging is happening inside my head, and hasn't made it to the screen for a while. Something happens and I think, "Oh, I'll write about that when I get home." If I am already home, I think, "Oh, I'll write about that later."
'Later' comes, and I sit here wondering what it on earth I thought was worth writing about. Was I going to tell you the brilliant idea of wearing a surgical mask at night when you have a cold in the winter, so that the air around your nose and mouth doesn't get so dry? This does work well, I've found (at least in Japan, where the air is ridiculously dry in winter), except for the morning I woke up and the mask had slipped up over my eyes. I thought for a panicky moment I had gone blind. It was an odd sort of blindness, though. My world had not gone black; it had gone white. Freaky!
But that wasn't really worth writing about. There were some work incidents, but classes finished on Monday and it's Thursday now, which means I have had time to forget almost everything.
Was I going to write about Christmas? But Christmas was today (well, yesterday, now), and I didn't go to the flea market like I usually do. The cold I caught is dragging on and on (it's been almost two weeks) and I didn't have the energy. Also, it was raining, and I thought the market would probably be cancelled anyway. It wasn't, but by the time the sun came out it was too late to change my mind.
In the evening I met a friend at the Hilton for the Christmas buffet. That was lovely. There was only the two of us this year, and it was a chance to catch up while stuffing our faces. The Man did not come, but a small piece of stollen accidentally dropped into my bag while I was eating dessert, and I decided to take it home for him. He likes stollen.
That means that this Christmas I have launched a new career as a criminal, and in the process turned The Man into a receiver of stollen goods.
Merry Christmas!
I will post again soon. I've been busy, and when I haven't been busy, uninspired. And when I was inspired, it was about something I couldn't post here because it wasn't my story to tell.
But I'll be back!
(Just not tonight. It's bedtime.)
This summer I have not been blogging much, have I? I can't think of any reasons for this – or rather, I can, but they are excuses rather than reasons. One excuse is that it's too hot, and I can't be bothered doing anything much so there is nothing much to write about. Another is that I have actually been doing quite a lot, because I have written my first ever paper for publication in a scholarly journal, or at least a pseudo-scholarly journal, and submitted it, even. Now I just have to wait until they reject it before sending it off again to some more established scholarly journal. Or maybe they'll accept it. Who knows?
But anyway, it is an excuse I'm offering for not blogging. I have been writing OTHER stuff. Actually, I finished it a week ago, but never mind that.
I say 'pseudo-scholarly' journal because this particular journal just started last year and doesn't have any sort of reputation yet. It is an in-house publication at one of the universities where I work part-time. It is peer-reviewed, however (in-house publications often aren't) and looking at the previous issues (there are only two) the standard seems to be reasonable without being particularly wonderful. I had thought about submitting elsewhere first, but there are people at that place I want to impress. My NEXT paper will go elsewhere.
In any case, they do have SOME standards – another part-timer who submitted last year got his paper rejected. They told him it wasn't relevant enough. Considering what they have already published it must have been pretty damned irrelevant, but still, I took note of this when I wrote my paper. Mine is MORE relevant than most of what they've published, and easier to read. Some of those papers read like nobody bothered to edit them much. My paper, at its longest, was about fifteen pages, but reading it through I realized it was a bit sloppy and needed tightening up. I then tightened it up so drastically it ended up being only seven pages. My paper is so tight it SQUEAKS.
Now I am worried they will reject it because it is too short. Maybe they LIKE long, somewhat rambling papers.
Actually, my paper started off being one I wrote for my MA several years ago. I was going to just submit it as is – after all, I got a 'high distinction' for it. Surely that would be good enough? But then I decided it needed some more recent references, so started a little research, to update things. Then I got sidetracked, and added great chunks about something related to the original argument but not quite on topic. Then I decided the sort-of-related stuff was actually more interesting, found some more research about it, added more, and changed the argument. That meant I had to change the introduction and conclusion to fit the new content. Then I removed the bits that were too much about the original topic and not really related to the new introduction and conclusion. Finally I went through and did the tightening-up thing, thus removing almost all that was left of the original content.
It felt a lot easier than writing a paper from scratch, but I can't say I understand why.
Next week The Man and I are boarding a plane for Malaysia once again, where we will be for the next three weeks or so. We had been talking about going somewhere different this summer, but he is still not feeling a hundred percent so we decided a relaxing holiday in a familiar place would be the best medicine. We are looking forward to some time at the beach.
Just thinking about the food we're going to eat is making my mouth water already.
My favicon (the little icon up in the address bar) went missing from my blog, and when I looked into it I discovered that the site where it had been hosted has now gone. This was a bit annoying, as I was quite fond of that favicon, so I have just wasted several hours figuring out how to make a new one and host it somewhere safer.
I am SO proud of myself. I could have used a favicon generator, of which there are several on the web, but I didn't. I made my own. AND I figured out what code to use and where to put it, after a great deal of trial and (mostly) error.
It's actually a lot easier than my tortuous progress made it seem. Once I had it all figured out, it was a piece of cake. It was figuring it out that took so long. And now I can change the favicon easily anytime I want to BECAUSE I KNOW HOW.
How clever I am.
Have you ever kept a diary? If so, why? How long did you last? What sort of things did you write in it? Did you write in it every day? Only when something interesting happened, or did you write EVERYTHING in it? How much did 'everything' include?
If you did (or do) keep a diary, how is keeping a diary different from blogging? (Aside from the public/private thing, of course – which is HUGE, I know.)
Something I just read (in a passed-on New Yorker) has got me thinking about this.
I have won an award!
Isn't it pretty?
Apparently I had the Best Idea for a Non-Threatening Religious Movement, AND I am the most likely to be made into a chicklit move about the power of loving every day (cue music).
(Please ignore the bit down the bottom, where it says that it was as though the awards were given to whomever asked for them. I did not ask for these. If I had been consulted, I would have asked for the most exciting duck award. Maybe next year.)
I just deleted a 50,000 word comment. (Can 50,000 words be called a 'comment'?) Blogger had to send it to me in two emails instead of one. It was an amazingly incomprehensible diatribe from a person who did not know how to punctuate or spell, and who evidently has far too much time on his (or her) hands.
My definition of 'normal' is fairly elastic, but it only stretches so far. That 'comment' had already reached my limit about twenty or thirty words in, at which point Anonymous had already mentioned god, homosexuality! reincarnation and circumcision. Skimming further down I noticed the abject situation, damnation, pro football, Noahs flood, hypersexuality, numerous references to the Final Prophet, and - the only bit I stopped briefly for - preditory Italians in clone hosts.
Preditory Italians in clone hosts?
That will teach me to use Faith as a blog entry title!
I have been tagged for a meme. I do not know why Tinyhands used a C for me. Why did I get a C? Should I have tried harder?
Anyway, here we go. Five reasons why I blog.
1. Because I can't stop. (Although I do seem able to pause, sometimes.)
2. For the comments and connections. Classrooms are very isolating. My readers keep me sane. (Really!)
3. To let off steam. Blogging is more fun than bashing my head against a wall.
4. At times my job seems utterly pointless. Some days, writing about it IS the point.
5. Life is full of funny bits.
I don't know how many people I am supposed to tag, so I'll just pick a few.
Carrie, RadioactiveJam, Paula, Styleygeek, Kenju, Maria and, um, anybody else who wants to.
