I suspect that I'm not the only one hearing about
this news story and hearing Tom Lehrer singing
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park in my head.
You know how you sometimes get a song stuck in your head? Yesterday, I had a phrase stuck in my mind, without any music. It was "Happiness is a warm gun", which I think is a Beatles lyric, but I can't remember from which song. Except that my mind pronounced "happiness" as if it were "a penis", making the phrase "A penis is a warm gun". Which, oddly enough, makes sense[1].
Have shifted away from doing weight-based exercises in favor of walking around the neighborhood. I imagine that when the cold weather hits, I'll go back to staying indoors and doing weights.
Have finished, by and large, my editing of lecture notes, quizzes, quiz keys, and other class material for the Chemistry in the Health Sciences course I taught last spring and am scheduled to teach this coming spring. Still mulling over adding some more material to the syllabus.
After promising pictures of
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hoya99 and my trip to Japan, I finally managed to finish (last month) the uploading, changing of dates and titles, and describing some 190 of the 460 pictures into the new Flickr account I created to hold them. Then I looked around and realized the time it had taken and wondered if anybody still wanted to see them. Here's your chance to let me know.
Pre-wedding planning is proceeding. No dates have been set, but details are slowly coming together. Going dress shopping with one or both my parents this weekend[2]. It is very surreal to me to try on a dress and wonder if this one might be "the one".
In light of that, the folding of the 1001 cranes is proceeding apace. It is a Zen experience for me. Repetitively folding the same folds over and over, which might be a boring sort of thing, kinda sends me into a strange state of serenity. The finished cranes, reposing in a plastic bin, look somewhat like an Escher print, being a repeating patter of blue and silver[3].
Have purchased a reference book showing all 1900+ "everyday" kanji; that is, the ones that everyone in Japan is supposed to be familiar with, plus the 200+ name kanji, with stroke order and meaning and have started on an ambitious attempt to start teaching them to myself. In that light, I need to pick up a good, comprehensive, Japanese-English dictionary. I was told once that it takes at least 5 years of effort to become fluent in Japanese, including the kanji, so here I go. We'll see how good I am in 5 years. *grin*
Some of you are probably scratching your heads wrt to me and Japan, but it's perfectly true that I was interested in Japan, the country, culture, people, language, customs, well before I met
hoya99. I took an elementary Japanese class in college because I needed the credit and I had a lot of other heavy lab courses so I wanted something fun. Which is what got me into anime, not the (more usual) other way around. It also got me into sushi, which (like most Westerners) I had thought rather disgusting until I tried it[4]. So now my interest comes as something of a bonus.
[1] And gives you an idea as to what living inside my head is like[5].
[2] My dad is invited but hasn't said for sure if he's coming or not.
[3] Have not broken out the cream paper yet.
[4] "Slimy" raw fish; which is actually not slimy at all. Yum!
[5] IOW, scary.
