Promiseland

[Fetian]

I have done fuckall all day and I'm going to continue doing fuckall

Last night I started playing Hollow Knight again with a fresh save and got up to beating Hornet again, which was fun. So I'll get back to playing that in a little bit, I think

[Fetian]

Haven't heard from dad, and I can't help but feel that no news is not in fact good news in this instance

[Fetian]

Apparently the court date got postponed and he's been ordered to attend an AA meeting before it happens. He of course does not sound enthused about that but god I hope it helps him, and maybe showing he's willing to try something like that will get the court to go a little easier on him.

[Fetian]

I have opinions about AA, but he does need help of some kind and if that's what's available,

[Fetian]

Very vivid dreams last night, and woke up every few hours. And actually woke up with a nasty sinus headache that I think has passed now. I wonder if I'm getting sick

ash and I did some yard work, as planned, and the yard is looking better. Blocked off the Ivy path into my rose garden, pulled some weeds, turned the leaves, moved much of the leaves in my patio space onto actual plantable areas instead of on top of concrete (so many worms!). I have a hose running over my trellis so I can try getting it back in the ground -- we're not sure how it happened but some time over winter it just kind of, popped up and out. Extremely weird!

Start of next month I'm going to try getting a bunch of marigold seed packets, see if I can get those going. I have an alert set up for when the rose I want comes in season, we'll see if I can afford it when it does.

For a while now I've been having issues with my steam deck that I've been putting off dealing with because I knew dealing with it would probably involve reimaging the OS and losing everything I've customised about it including all my files, but it's finally getting to the point where it's more of an inconvenience to ignore it than to do something about it, so I'm doing something about it. Day before yesterday I copied all my files on it to the backup drive, and yesterday I started copying all the files on a USB stick over to dropbox so I can use it in the reimaging process. It's taking forever for some reason but should be done today, I hope. Let me just also shout out some kudos to steam's customer support for being like 'try this, and if that doesn't work, try this' -- what a revolution not making me wait for another step if the first process fails!! Super appreciate that!

ash has a Breathing Space thing taking up his early afternoon but then when he's done we're going to play a board game. In the meantime I'm going to sit down after all that yard work and let my joints rest. Have some soda, play some video game, watch some youtube. The usual

[Fetian]

Got the trellis back in the ground and did some trimming of the rose bushes to encourage their spring growth. The Joseph's Coat already has aphids, but I can't do anything about it right this minute, unfortunately

[Fetian]

Class done! It was a rough one today -- we started with some more kosoado review, then split off into groups to do another 'ask how much x item cost, of a list of items split between two pages' exercise, and again the professor split us up into groups of more-than-two-people which made things (in my opinion) needlessly complicated. Again people had some issues understanding the task, but we did figure it out, except that then we had enough time to do like two or three of the questions before the breakout rooms expired. So! When we came back the professor decided to functionally do the same exercise with the entire class at once, and singled me out to play the part of the second person for the entire exercise! So the class would be asking me 'how much is x item?' and I had to say the number in japanese, which is a weak point of mine but I did manage to struggle through it. I believe I'm always at the top of her list of students in zoom, because she spontaneously singles me out a lot, which I normally don't mind and in fact don't particularly mind in this instance either, it's just a little strange to have not swapped to different students throughout the exercise.

Like we did with the next exercise, where she would have a student ask 'whose x is this?' and the class as a whole answer 'x belongs to y'. We also did an exercise where a student would ask a different student, who had a camera on, 'how much did [thing visible on your webcam] cost?' and the person asked would answer. Lastly we started on learning the も particle ("also").

It was altogether pretty brain-intensive! I definitely have some weak points I need to work on -- I forget to use honorifics a lot when naming people, and obviously I need to work on numbers. I am proud of myself, though -- I'm a little over a month into the class and I'm still paying attention and doing the work. I did get my first assignment back a couple days ago that didn't have a perfect score -- I misspelled ゼロゼロ as just ゼゼ, because I'm having trouble convincing my brain that numbers can be more than one character long, which is a little weird but not that weird. I'm just used to writing 00 in the contexts we're using numbers in.

Gonna do the homework in a minute, and then there's a quiz on Wednesday that I want to study for, but it's explicitly open book and in fact seems to be about the textbook. The example question she showed us was something like 'Page 35 gives three possible pronunciations for the number '4''. And like, there are three possible pronunciations for '4' (よん、し、よ) but if that information isn't on page 35 then the answer would need to be 'false', you dig.

When I was done with class I came back to Oz playing in my room which was very heartening to see, she seems to be having a pretty good day. I gave her her pill and then went for a walk around the pool, which I want to start doing daily again. I really wanted to keep it up through winter, but managing the cats and all of their health and interpersonal issues took up basically all of my spoons throughout the entire season. Things seem somewhat calmed down now so I can hopefully get that part of my brain back.

Of course I say that and then Cael's going to start attacking Oz regularly again or something.

I woke up with another sinus headache today, it's probably allergies. I might set up the air purifier to run overnight as well as all day, or I might just suffer through it for a while. I also think I probably need to get the humidifier ready, though we're supposed to get more rain soon so it's not quite urgent.

Alright --- homework. Tomorrow anki deck.

[Fetian]

Six pages of homework done! And checked against the answer book to make sure I didn't make a dumb mistake somewhere (I did in fact make a couple of dumb mistakes but they've been corrected). One page had me very confused, it has 'Answer these questions in Japanese' and then questions like 'Is American?' (subject omitted because a reading of 'Are you American?' or 'Is he American?' or 'Am I American?' are all equally valid and dependant on context) which I interpreted as 'Answer these questions about yourself: Are you American?' etc. Except the last question is 'How much does the Japanese book cost?' which ... which Japanese book? So I started worrying that it was referring to a page in the book with diagrams, or it was another listening exercise or something, and the answer book has the answer to that first question as 'No, is not American. Is Chinese' which made me more worried that it was referring to a specific person and not me! But I emailed the professor and she said it was fine to answer the questions about myself, so. I have done that, and just found a random instance of a Japanese book with a price listed in the textbook (I considered answering in how much the Genki textbook costs but I don't feel like looking that up).

Anyway, homework all done. It is getting more difficult! Especially the listening exercises, are an actual exercise for my ability to comprehend audio.

[Fetian]

Went back and changed my answer to the rough price of the textbook (used) converted into yen (¥４５００, about. Shit, I could add 'about' to that. I might do that tomorrow.)

[Fetian]

Class done and quiz done! I got two questions wrong, one of which I missed because I read it too fast and thought it was asking me if 6 is = zero and not the actual question, which was 6-6=0; the other one was similar to this:

There was one tricky question ("おかさん (okasan) = mother", mother is おかあさん (okaasan)) that had me stressed it was a typo and would mark me wrong for saying it was false, but it was in fact a trick and I got 20/20

I need to record some arcadia things today, and there's some textbook pages I want to review before class tomorrow, but aside from that I don't have anything else on my plate. First next step is going to be to eat lunch

Where the question was something like 'because the chart says いもうとさん is じゅうろくさい, it's grammatically correct to say that いもとうさん は じゅうろくさい です', and the change from いもうと (correct) to いもとう (incorrect) had me mark it false. Apparently that one was a typo.

Whatever, it's still a passing grade, and the actual quiz results are hidden aside from your score so I don't want to be like 'Um actually I got this wrong because of a mistake you made' when it's possible that I actually got a completely different question wrong by my own error. The teacher also seemed to not be in a great mood today, just kind of vaguely sad

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As for the class itself, we did some work on making negatives (how to say something isn't something, 私はにほんじんじゃないです, (watashi wa nihonjin ja nai desu) I am not Japanese), then did a little studying katakana, which was a surprise -- I thought we weren't covering that in this class.

There was much less 'consult the book' stuff on the test than I was lead to believe, only maybe three questions like that? Possibly only two? One of which was the one shown as an example so like, already had the answer for it anyway.

Doesn't look like there's any new work there to do, so I guess I'll go have lunch and then add some stuff to anki. Then just hang out for the rest of the afternoon