Feeling Ventilated and Powerless!

[elfs]

I left work yesterday feeling uncomfortably ventilated. The zipper on my pants had lost a tooth, high on the fly, and I was more exposed than one might regard as healthy or decorous. It was most embarassing. Dammit, these pants are only a few months new; there's no reason for them to have failed in this manner. And the two sewing books I consulted both agree: repairing a zipper failure like this is nothing for a novice. A tailor would cost more than the pants!

As I drove over to Yamaarashi's home, I finished my Japanese lessons for the day and, since I had them, I put the Russian Lessons 1 & 2 into the CD player. Dammit, that's a hard language! I can't roll my 'r's that way and there's just this disconnect between the words and their storage in my brain. I think it's because I can read kana but not cyrillic; my brain is reassured that there's a written form of Japanese I can store words under, whereas I have no such familiarity with Russian. Maybe I should stick to the Indo-European languages instead.

We got home and I discovered that not only was I ventilated, I was powerless. A line had fallen three blocks away and the transformer had blown under the load. I changed my pants. I had been looking forward to a homey dinner with the kids, but instead we headed out to a restaurant, since there was no power. Since it has now been more than two weeks since her surgery, we took Yamaarashi-chan and Kouryou-chan to Kidopolis, where they had a wonderful evening in the kid equivalent of a hamster maze. Yamaarashi-chan was apparently thrilled to be allowed to run around without someone telling her to "slow down!"

Someone pointed out to me that one of the problems with the home page at Pendowright was that it shows that it was "last updated" some time in 2002. Well, that's true, of the home page. I guess what I need is a prominent display somewhere on the home page of, say, "the last five stories added," along with their dates.

Comments

Japanese

[hackerz81.livejournal.com]

Elf- I frequent your site pretty regularly...I'm just about done w/ the 'Journal Entries', not yet but close. I always take the time to read your LJ entries when I am here, and today your entry caught my eye and interest. Learning to speak and read Japanese is something I have alway wanted to do, and I have seen you make references to it several times in you LJ I figured I would ask you. What is the best(easiest) program or CD or whatever to learn by? I would like something that would teach me, not nessisarily(sp?) the proper or professional language, but teach me the way a young Japanese person would speak. Say someone in their early to mind 20's...since I am on 22. Thanks alot man, I really enjoy your site and your skills as a writer. L8tr.

Re: Japanese

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Okay, here's what I would do: go to your library, get a library card, and borrow a Japanese On CD set. That's what I'm doing. The set I used is the Pimsleur Japanese Speak & Learn 1; the short course is 8 half-hour lessons, which you can do in four weeks if that's what your library allows. Pick two half-hours every week where you're alone-- in your car, in the bathtub, wherever-- and play the lesson.

The long courses are $240, and that's for 30 half-hour lessons. There are three courses, so you could spend $720 for the whole set. Or you could rely on the library, which is what I've been doing.

If you run out of time before they have to go back (and usually they do; the French course is overbooked about a year in advance right now so you start getting calls the first day the set is late), there are, um, other ways of preserving those future lessons.

After that, watch a lot of anime. Ren-AI, which is usually not to everyone's taste, is more formal and "educational" than the action adventure stuff; what they speak in Ghost In The Shell or Wolf's Rain is a lot more gutteral, and a lot less accessible, than what you'll hear in Kanon or Stellvia. But it's all a matter of taste.

As for reading, I can't recommend strongly enough the kana editions of Japanese for Busy People. The Romaji (Japanese written with English letters) version will help if you need speaking help (but that's what the Pimsleur is for) and you'll go through it faster, but you won't learn to read with it. And once you start reading and need to look up Kanji on a regular basis, the Halpern Kodanshi Kanji Learner's Dictionary, with the specialized for westerners SKIP method of looking up characters, is indispensible. Don't try to start reading until you've finished at least ten lessons, though; you need an ear for the language's cadence and basic grammar before you start trying to read it.

A suggestion

[(Anonymous)]

Hi there :)
I've been a fan for years.
I'd like to suggest that you open a mailing list for story notification and important news. It could reduce hosting transfer use, maintain the group of active readers, and give you a useful resource if you end up going to a stronger contributions plan in the future.

Cheers - Tim

Zipper

[tonyawinter.livejournal.com]

If you don't tell anyone I did it, I'll fix it for you.
I hate doing alterations, and so I tell people that I don't...
Think of it as a contribution to you as a writer. :)

Wardrobe malfunction!

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

What about velcro or buttons (well I guess that might be as difficult as a zipper replacement) as alternative means of fly-fastening? It does suck to have perfectly good clothes become unusable for such a trivial reason.

A tip on trilling your "r" or "l" sounds: the lead-in/out needs to set up the trill on a liquida. If you listen to a native Russian speaker render English words, they will almost always pronounce an "el/il" sound as a throaty "e-al", and stuff a very rapid "d" (dental stop) before an "r" sound to set up the trill. "Trill" is actually a good example of both "t-drr-ea-al". Get a Russki native speaker with a terribly strong accent to try to say that, and emulate his/her pronunciation. I used to have a Russian co-worker, this made it easy for me to observe an analyze his pronunciations over time, that helps the most.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Damn, I wish I'd thought of the phrase "Wardrobe Malfunction" before typing.