New Year’s Resolutions

Well it’s a new year so we all should be thinking about what we want to accomplish for 2009. I’ve been making a mental list for things I would like work on for myself for the next 365 days. Here’s a brief list of my resolutions for the new year.

1. Be better about energy consumption. This is my big one for 2009. I’m going to work at watching how much energy I use/waste throughout the year. This includes turning off lights when I leave a room, turning off my laptop when I go to work for the day, only have my chargers for my laptop and cell phone plugged in when I’m using them, and turning my Wii all the way off more often.

2. Work at being cleaner. I’m a cluttery person. My apartment is riddled with random papers and receipts and I need to get more organized. This year I’m going to try and be more organized in my personal life.

3. Save 10-15 percent of my paychecks each month. Just a smart thing to do all around. I’ve really enjoyed buying things these past few months, but now it’s time to start putting stuff into savings for things I really want/life’s unexpected surprises.

4. Go to the gym at least four times a week. Saying “lose __ pounds” isn’t much of a goal and it’s totally cliche. My goal is to double my gym visits a week and the pounds will melt away from having a more active lifestyle.

5. Study Japanese more. With me starting Chinese classes in a few weeks through work I want to tie in what I learn from those classes and apply it to further my study of Japanese. P.S. The Chinese characters for “panda” literally translates into “bear-cat” and I think that is the best thing ever.

Well those are my resolutions. What are yours everyone? Blog them and let’s encourage each other to reach our goals for 2009. And as they say in Japan …

明けましておめでとうございます！

Happy New Year

Happy Thanksgiving and updates

Well, I’m back at my parents house in Renton and have been since Saturday. James and I have spent the whole week here to go to a friend’s wedding (with a codename I dare not write on the internet) and we decided to stick around for Thanksgiving. It’s been kind of nich, though I feel like I cheated the working world getting yet another week off for Thanksgiving like I did at WSU. But if it makes the working world feel any better, I had to buy a $130 dress that I’ll never wear again.

I’ve been doing my usual technical voodoo at home for my parents: uploading photos from their digital cameras to the computer (yes they still don’t know how to do this), Adding and Removing programs and defragmenting their dinosaur computer that they got when I was in 9th grade. After my technical witchcraftery was done, James and I spent our days going to downtown Seattle and Renton for fun and shopping. I’ve been taking advantage of the sagging economy and using all the coupons I found in The Seattle Times to get some early Christmas shopping done. I took James to the newly renovated Southcenter Mall and we didn’t get shot so I consider the trip to be a success. On a sad note, some of my mom’s students were at the mall the day of the shooting and they’ve had to bring in trauma counselors to work with the kids.

Work has been fine, we’ve made it through a “rough” period financially and are now back on track. Apparently all the departments are getting budgets and one of the items on the list is a new Mac for me. And not just any Mac this Mac. It’s so beautiful I want to fall asleep next to it.

Also everyone at work is equally stoked that Flash CS4 will come with bidirectional language support. I.E. We can do Arabic Flash presentations. We already were doing Arabic Flash presentations but now I don’t have to do the neat trick I learned that makes the presenations take twice as long to make, but it got us mucho dinero for our efforts.

I’ve been doing a lot of independent study of my Japanese. I’ve busted out my old Level 3 (my current Japanese level) textbooks and have been trying to work my way to understanding my Level 2 (a really freaking hard level) textbooks. I’ve been spending a lot of time brushing up on the basics. I changed my WordPress and Facebook default languages to Japanese (sorry if that’s confused anyone) to get some practice while I’m internetting. I’m also going to be taking some Chinese classes come January, which should also be a lot of fun and I’m hoping the readings will be easy since I already no a lot of the characters.

Well, that’s what’s been going on with me. I’ll try to be better about updating this more so I can keep in touch with everyone.

P.S. Kaci, if you’re reading this, we need to get together and soon. For realsies.

Whoops, that wasn’t Japanese

One of the women at my office is getting married on Saturday so people were passing around a “Congratulations” card for everyone to sign. Eric came up to me and asked if I could write “believe” on the front of the card in Japanese. The Chinese character was already on there and he told me that it was the same character. I didn’t think that was quite right but I was going off of four cups of coffee, three projects to get out before the end of business and the pressure of someone watching that I caved.

I started to copy the character down and as I made my last stroke I remembered the real character. Of course since I had already written the Chinese character and it would have been bad form to cross out what I had written on the top of the card so I just wrote down the correct character next to it and called it good. I figure since I’m the only one who can read Japanese in that office any way that no one will really notice.

At least I hope not …

And for those of you who are wondering here’s how you really write “believe” in Japanese (or literally “you can believe”).

信じれる