bitter magnet

well this morning i woke up early (6:15am) so i could eat breakfast with joe, cuz he had to leave early. after that i just stuck around the apt for a while and learned 53 more kanji out of James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" book. I swear, I am addicted to it!! I just downloaded the free PDF sample of the book (which contains part one, which has the first 274 kanji). it's really a great book, basically tells you to use a story to each kanji to help remember the meaning. Also, there's this awesome website based on Heisig's method of learning kanji, where you can login and make online flashcards to test you on the kanji you just learned! so far i have reviewed & learned 164 kanji (there are about 2,000 general-use Japanese kanji in total, thus so far i have already covered 8% of the book).

anyways, my goal is to finish that book (learn the meanings of 2,000 kanji) in two months. sound crazy? it is but i figure if i can learn 200 kanji a week (on average) i should be able to cover the whole book in 10 weeks. i just want to get done with it as fast as possible, so that i can then start working on learning the pronounciations and combinations of the various kanji. i need to know about 1,000 kanji to do level 2 of the JLPT in December.

今朝、随分寒かったし、風が強く吹いたし、天気が本当に悪かった。天気予報のウェ
ブサイトによると、気温が７Ｆだった。風による肌寒さと、‐８Ｆだった ！分厚
いコートを着いても大変だった。顔が凍ったみたい！怖かった。

じゃあ、大学院を卒業する後で、カリフォルニアに必ず帰るよ！

どうしてわからない。本当に邪魔です。多分、コンピューターを使すぎているんで
す。今日は、マッサージを受けるので、もっといいなるかもしれません。

幸いに今日は天気がそんなに寒くない。嬉しいですねえ！

note: if the text above shows up as something like $B56@$ or ??? or some other gibberish, please go to your browser viewing options and in the Encoding section select Autodetect -> Japanese. For more details on how to do this, go here.

well, first of all this morning joe surprised me with a vase of tulips with a heart-shaped balloon attached. how sweet!! joe- if you are reading this, i love you! :)

and this morning i finished making my batch of Valentine's Day chocolates. I made about 25 bags (each with 5 chocolates inside). The candies were an assortment of hearts and roses, in white, red, pink and chocolate-colors. Usually i staple the bags closed (so that it looks something like this), but after constructing about 10 bags, my stapler broke and so i had to get creative with folding and using a twist-tie. finally, this morning & afternoon i finished them all handed them out to people in SP and MTL. I hope they like them!

anyway, tonite we are going to Amelia's Trattoria for dinner. since they are having a valentine's day special, it is going to be a 6-course meal. I'm sure it will be really good, but i just hope I don't have to spend the next week trying to work it off. :)

well it would be an understatement to say that a lot of snow fell yesterday. :) the storm pretty much started late saturday night (probably after midnight) and continued on throughout the day on sunday. around noon on sunday joe and i actually ventured out for a little bit, to go to Star Market to return some applesauce (and to also do a bit of shopping). since star market is regularly a 5-minute walk away from SP, we didn't think it would be too bad. but despite going all-out with the cold weather gear (we had nylon sport pants over regular pants, wore ski gloves, and i had a puffer jacket) it was still pretty unbearable. I guess the thing wasn't so much that it was cold rather than it was super windy, and it was hard to take all the snow flying in your face. we did get manage to take some pictures & movies on the way (we felt we had to document this, especially for our families, who live in California & Texas and thus never have the opportunity to see such insanity). :) Below is a pic that Joe took just as we were walking out the door of SP. Pretty, crazy, huh?

i am eating lunch now and i just have to say that i love the yogurt that i made (much tastier than other store-bought ones!) The yogurts sold in American supermarkets (Dannon, Yoplait, Colombo, etc) are waaay too sweet for me, plus they taste too artificial (the kinds in Japan were waay better, in my opinion, but unfortunately I can't have that here).

Anyway, I made the yogurt using Shaw's "Wild Harvest" organic plain soy milk, Yogourmet starter and my EuroCuisine yogurt maker. It is pretty simple to do once you get the hang of it. At first I was sort of worried that it wouldn't turn out well if I used soy milk (especially since commercial soy yogurt SUCKS, in my opinion) but it actually turned out a lot better! I think i'll keep using this from now on, rather than buying regular (cow's milk) yogurt in the store. Plus it'll save me a lot of money, because usually for a quart of yogurt i pay at least $3.29, whereas it will cost me about $1.60-$2.60 per quart if I make my own ($1-$2 for quart of soymilk, plus 60 cents for the starter). Since I usually consume about a quart of yogurt a week, thats a savings of $36-$88 a year! And as an added bonus, soymilk only has 90-100 calories, whereas whole milk yogurt (the only kind i'll eat, since the reduced fat/skim milk ones taste gross) are like 150-160 calories. woo! :)

just found out this morning that MIT Housing is going to restore inward phone access in the dorms, such that we can receive incoming calls via our landline). yay!! :) you see, last semester, they started charging people in the dorms $17 per month (a rip off, if you ask me) for this type of access, and i guess students (as well as parents) got so pissed off about it that Housing quickly decided to revert back to the old system. the thing is, basic local phone service had always come free with the dorms, and the rents in the dorms (at least the graduate ones) were already going up, so the extra fee seemed really unfair. i guess Housing's reasoning was that practically every student had a cell phone, so that it was not very cost efficient to provide a service for free that was almost rarely used. however, i don't think they anticipated getting complaints by irate parents not being able to reach their children just because her/his cell phone was dead (or was lost, etc), or from frustrated students who couldn't take any calls for a week or so because she/he happend to run out of minutes on her/his cell phone. i personally didn't care so much at first, but soon realized that it was indeed a pain to have to use my cell phone for all my calls (i ended up getting a hands-free set so i wouldn't have to strain my arm holding a tiny piece of almost-hot-enough-to-melt plastic next to my ear for, say, 30 minutes). and it was even more of a pain to go and change my info for "local phone number" on my credit cards, bank account, amazon.com account, etc since i would no longer be able to receive calls on my landline. and yeah, i did worry what would happen in case i ever lost my cell phone, or if it decided to go on the fritz for a day or two.

but now, alas, i guess Housing saw the light and decided to make inward calling free again. yay! hopefully all the telemarketers who used to call me on my landline have given up and so i'll start with a clean slate. one can only hope! :)

today around noon we went to the z-center and worked out (an hour of cardio, plus some stretching). i wanted to do some of the treadmill but i was afraid of my knee pain flaring up again. afterwards we got home and rested for a bit, before going to renee & stu's (joe's friends) for a superbowl party. we brought some pasta salad that we had made the day yesterday (it turned out pretty damn good, btw...we were impressed with ourselves. :) ) anyway, there was a *ton* of food there, including pizza, wings, chips & dip, chili, and it was all pretty tasty. oh, and there were brownies as well, and those were pretty amazing. glad i worked out earlier! :)

oh, and as for the actual superbowl game, i actually had fun watching it..i had to ask joe a lot of questions along the way though (i'm still learning!) :) the commercials were pretty entertaining too. my favorites were AmeriQuest (the one in the hospital and then the one on the plane) and the Budweiser (the one with the clydesdale pony tugging that carriage). Oh, and the one where that girl playing football gets tackled (that was hilarious!)

today i went to Star Market to get the deal on the soda & chips...all i had to do was buy 4 12-packs of Pepsi (i got Diet Pepsi and caffeine-free Diet Pepsi) and 4 bags of Tostitos tortilla chips. Each was 4/$10, so i spent $20 in total, but then i got a rebate receipt printed at the register, so i'll get $20 back. so i'll be getting all those sodas and chips for FREE!! woo!! :)