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.

It’s been a while

Yes it’s been a few days, but I’ve been out living my life instead of inside sheltering my eyes from the sunlight so if you have a problem with it … then we’re still cool, keep reading, K? Since we left off I have been doing more work on my apartment, treating my cat more like a human who happens to chase laser pens with enthusiasm and working my ass off.

On the work side, I’ve been working on Flash on the side. I’ve taken home some Flash projects that we have had to work on and have been trying to recreate them. I’ve also been taking little tutorials that I can find on the net, but it’s so frustrating. I’m also going to see if I can sign up to take a Portuguese class since that lagnuage is – in my opinion – visually the sexiest of all the Latin languages. If you don’t believe me, here is the character that made me decide that:

ç

If you don’t think the cedilla is something visually appealing there’s something wrong with you. I know it appears in French and a number of other languages, but the way that Portuguese pairs it a thing of beauty.  I particularly like when it forms the suffix “çao.”

In personal stuff, long-distance relationships suck. That’s all I can say. It’s just hard not getting to see the one you love every day. It recently sucked when I got sick again and this was the first time I was alone when I was sick. It sucks because all I wanted to do was sleep and have someone make me soup and make it all better, but no. I had to make my own damn soup.

Oh and my kidneys failed again. More harsh antibiotics please.

Aside from those two things I’ve been acclimating to life in Spokane. I’m starting to learn where the bars are and am actually starting to remember them after I go to them. I’ve mostly been hanging out with people from work and going dancing or drinking or karaoke-ing. If I have several beers and several Sambuca shots later, I will forget the words to “Baby Got Back” and I will make an ass of myself.

Oh and I got a MySpace again, so prove my worth to the internet community and make me your MySpace friend.

My job gets extra classy

I had an “I miss the Evergreen” moment today. This morning everyone was in a flighty mood and people were saying things that were totally off the wall. It made me miss the quote board.

Here are a few of the things that made everyone stop and stare today.

“If someone called me a harlot, I would feel really special.” ~ Me
“Do animals have teats?” ~ Heather
“I think sex offenders are just misunderstood.” ~ Tucker

Today I got to help with some analysis work for a Web site we’re going to be translating for work. While some of the Web translation and international design has been for Xbox and Amazon this site really takes the cake.

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