Casual dining

[elfs]

Last night, Omaha and I took the kids to Kidopolis, this huge indoor playground near the big Southcenter Mall. Since it was cold and wet out, the place was full of screaming, giggling children and their exasperated parents, all looking for a break. We were hoping to also see the kestrel that sometimes hangs out near the freeway, but he (she?) wasn't there today. We've seen it overhead a couple of times, and once it was just standing there on a stanchion by the side of the road-- very majestic, menacing and unblinking. But, not on a cold and wet night like that.

Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan ran about the place, tearing it up. Yamaarashi-chan is very distractable; she'll sometimes just break off a conversation in the middle to talk about something else. I'm hoping she grows out of it, since it's something I used to do, according to my mother, and I grew out of (mostly) too. I must be getting old-- I used to be willing to go up there with the kids and follow them around, but this time I was content to just sit and read my book and watch them play themselves.

It's funny-- one of the women there confessed to me that her son was "really three but I told them two," since two and under gets in free. I'm not sure why people do that-- confess, I mean-- except maybe they feel they have to get it off their chest, confirm with someone else that what they did was okay.

I didn't do anything but nod knowingly. But, y'know, it's never occurred to me to do something like that. I'm not sure why not, except that I don't want to set a bad example to my kids. Even a three year old knows when she being lied to or about. Even little lies are, well, wrong.

Tonight, stopped by the bookstore and burned some more of that really deep well of credit I racked up a while back and bought the Star Trek novel Memory Prime. I'd heard it was one of the few AI novels in the TOS line, and I wanted to read it and see how the authors dealt with it. It goes into my very deep stack of to-reads. Right now I'm about three quarters of the way through Honor Harrington 6: Honor Among Enemies

I'm also plunging ahead on the Fragility Journal Entries series. I had made a few attempts at it earlier and they weren't coming together. I'm hoping with some different characterizations, I'll be able to get something to jell.

And, we've got home-made pizza in the oven. It's just me and Kouryou-chan tonight, and life doesn't get much better than a father and daughter with pizza and (root) beer, cookies, pencils, papers, and erasers for dessert.

Today's Japanese word is KURU: To come. It's an irregular verb, declined:kite, konai, kimasu. I haven't found the kanji in my dictionary yet, so I don't know how to draw the glyph.

And, sigh, I drank too damned much pop today. Stuff'll rot my stomach if I let it.

Comments

Kuru

[(Anonymous)]

I hope this helps

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=6765&useutf8=false

(Who is also styding japanise)

Re: Kuru

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I guess I should have clarified. I have access to Edict under Emacs, so I do have a kanji dictionary, and japanesewords provides the Kanji. I didn't have the stroke order so I couldn't put into my notes the Kanji in a way that would make sense to me later. It also confused the heck out of my Kanji lookup program in my palm.

Memory Prime

[happy-hacker.livejournal.com]

I read Memory Prime some years ago. It's actually quite good, if memory serves. Let's see, trivial I can give you that doesn't spoil anything: Memory Prime is the replacement for Memory Alpha, the base destroyed in the TOS episode "Lights of Zetar." There aren't any Klingons, which is good because I tend to find them annoying (and done to death). I think that's all I can say without spoiling. The book does tend to focus on Spock, which is always a positive thing, IMHO. Anyway. Enjoy.

-Jim