praying for cloudy skies
Aug. 21st, 2020 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiDaily life: Negative: Really bad headache yesterday afternoon, of the “must lie down and groan for a while” as opposed to “able to work through it” kind; however, it did go away after a few hours, unlike the usual ones. Maybe the heat and the storm predicted for today. Also some sad extended family stuff, not really affecting me personally but still yet another piece of 2020 awfulness.
Positive: I have a new computer! I normally switch between two laptops, a Mac and a PC unimaginatively named Rin-chan and Mado-chan; I’m a Mac person by choice, but I need Trados for some of my work and it doesn’t play nicely with Macs, so I go back and forth. Rin-chan the Mac is, like me, middle-aged and suffering from hot flashes, but unlike me (knock wood) can be replaced with an updated model, so that’s what I’ve done. Rin-chan II (actually V or something, I guess) now has Office and Norton and so on installed, with a lot of “which mail address did I use again, and what the fuck password did I pick?” in the process, so I can move my data in and get started whenever I feel like it, with the current Rin-chan as backup; this is reassuring. (Even so, why is there no app that just switches over your current setup and data and everything to the new computer, from software to bookmarks, updating as necessary? I would pay for it, I swear.)
Music: For reasons, my husband and I have been swapping bits of music lately; he gets my dad’s piano jazz, Zhu Yilong songs (“This guy has very lovable eyes, doesn’t he?”), and Late Romantic orchestral stuff (“Oh yeah, this is the music from Gin’ei-den, I remember now”), while I get Mr.Children and Spitz. The former in particular is the formative band of my husband’s generation; it’s not quite my kind of music but there’s a warmth and acceptance that I really like.
Books: Just started rereading The Koshien That Wasn’t, about the high school baseball tournament in the summer of 1942, under wartime rules. So very much like this year, in the attempt to have something when normality is out of reach, so I decided now was the time to reread. Reminded that in Imperial Japan there were teams from Taiwan and (in other years) "Manchurian" China competing... . At least the kids who didn't get to play this year aren't being sent off to war afterward, small favors.
Chinese: Slow and steady. As much as I've been resisting it, I probably need to get serious about listening practice; when I go back to review the Duolingo tree, maybe I should start doing that, I've been sticking to reading/writing only. Word that struck me as weird this week: 戒指, ring, "binding/disciplining the finger," that's a lot of subtext from a Japanese perspective, we just say 指輪, finger circle.
Writing: Just past 70K, with eight scenes left in the outline, so I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between 80 and 90K, more or less as planned. I didn't plan chapter breaks in advance, just stuck them in where they seemed called for, so I'm satisfied that it seems likely to shake out neatly into twenty chapters and an epilogue. Still struggling with magical and political logistics, aargh.
Be safe and well.
Positive: I have a new computer! I normally switch between two laptops, a Mac and a PC unimaginatively named Rin-chan and Mado-chan; I’m a Mac person by choice, but I need Trados for some of my work and it doesn’t play nicely with Macs, so I go back and forth. Rin-chan the Mac is, like me, middle-aged and suffering from hot flashes, but unlike me (knock wood) can be replaced with an updated model, so that’s what I’ve done. Rin-chan II (actually V or something, I guess) now has Office and Norton and so on installed, with a lot of “which mail address did I use again, and what the fuck password did I pick?” in the process, so I can move my data in and get started whenever I feel like it, with the current Rin-chan as backup; this is reassuring. (Even so, why is there no app that just switches over your current setup and data and everything to the new computer, from software to bookmarks, updating as necessary? I would pay for it, I swear.)
Music: For reasons, my husband and I have been swapping bits of music lately; he gets my dad’s piano jazz, Zhu Yilong songs (“This guy has very lovable eyes, doesn’t he?”), and Late Romantic orchestral stuff (“Oh yeah, this is the music from Gin’ei-den, I remember now”), while I get Mr.Children and Spitz. The former in particular is the formative band of my husband’s generation; it’s not quite my kind of music but there’s a warmth and acceptance that I really like.
Books: Just started rereading The Koshien That Wasn’t, about the high school baseball tournament in the summer of 1942, under wartime rules. So very much like this year, in the attempt to have something when normality is out of reach, so I decided now was the time to reread. Reminded that in Imperial Japan there were teams from Taiwan and (in other years) "Manchurian" China competing... . At least the kids who didn't get to play this year aren't being sent off to war afterward, small favors.
Chinese: Slow and steady. As much as I've been resisting it, I probably need to get serious about listening practice; when I go back to review the Duolingo tree, maybe I should start doing that, I've been sticking to reading/writing only. Word that struck me as weird this week: 戒指, ring, "binding/disciplining the finger," that's a lot of subtext from a Japanese perspective, we just say 指輪, finger circle.
Writing: Just past 70K, with eight scenes left in the outline, so I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between 80 and 90K, more or less as planned. I didn't plan chapter breaks in advance, just stuck them in where they seemed called for, so I'm satisfied that it seems likely to shake out neatly into twenty chapters and an epilogue. Still struggling with magical and political logistics, aargh.
Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-21 05:33 am (UTC)Hee! *high fives you* Good luck with setup and making friends with Rin-chan II. I hope it all goes smoothly.
Listening practice is so hard. *sympathy*
Wow, that's so awesome! Go you!! *\o/*
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 04:18 am (UTC)Listening practice is so hard! Seriously! Half the reason I chose Japanese instead of Chinese way back when was because of the damn tones, and now I've condemned myself to them anyway, sigh. Still, it's fun.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 05:57 am (UTC)I do know!
Hee! That's why I was prepared to plunge into Korean. *clings to it and its logical phonetic alphabet* ;-)
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 11:15 am (UTC)All due respect to Sejong Taewang, but you know the funny thing, when I was first studying Japanese I thought "they have a phonetic alphabet (hiragana), why can't they use it all the time instead of characters!" And then years later when I started picking up Korean, all I could think was "they have all this character-based vocabulary, why don't they just use the characters instead of putting everything into Hangul!". Weird perspective changes ;) I will grant that Hangul is by FAR the most practically constructed of the East Asian writing systems, though.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 09:17 pm (UTC)Ha! I can imagine.
Sometimes I write Māori words in Hangeul -- I think its compactness makes it easier to remember them somehow. Or maybe the "not-English" space in my brain is mostly full of (the idea of) Korean: if I watch a French film these days, I keep expecting them to say "괜찮아?" instead of "Ça va?"
no subject
Date: 2020-08-24 01:13 am (UTC)Hangul is ideal for taking notes, I used to use bits of it when I had to take notes at work even though nobody was speaking Korean, it's so much faster.
Or maybe the "not-English" space in my brain is mostly full of (the idea of) Korean
Absolutely! It's like the language-switching mechanism in my brain is physical and mechanical; I can't just go from English to Chinese, for instance, more often than not my brain has to work through English --> Japanese --> Chinese before it gets to the language space I want to be in.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-21 07:30 am (UTC)Even so, why is there no app that just switches over your current setup and data and everything to the new computer, from software to bookmarks, updating as necessary? I would pay for it, I swear.
That would be wonderful and very helpful, and I would absolutely pay for something like that, too. :D
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-21 03:06 pm (UTC)why is there no app that just switches over your current setup and data and everything to the new computer
I have NO IDEA. This is perfectly possible, and was so even in the late 80s and 90s when I was working in a campus computer lab. Every Sunday morning we wiped all the lab computers with a program (on a floppy disk!) that would then reinstall the original version, via our servers (ah, the early days of ethernet). I don't understand why this isn't a thing we can do now between our home computers.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 04:20 am (UTC)thanks <3 I was introduced to ice pillows...what are they called in English, you know, you keep it in the freezer and take it out at bedtime and wrap it in a towel to use as a pillow. Very soothing.
I don't understand why this isn't a thing we can do now between our home computers.
If you have the programming skills (I sure don't), please feel free to invent it and get rich? WOULD BUY.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 06:13 pm (UTC)I feel like I should know how to transfer things from one computer to the next, but despite this having been necessary already over a dozen times, I never actually thought to look for a tool to do that. Hmmm. It's easy under Unix-related systems, btw. /o\ (So that probably means it should be easy on Mac oses as well, but I don't have one of those.) Windows is the only one that sucks, as usual. (I still use it.)
(“This guy has very lovable eyes, doesn’t he?”)
Heeeeee. This guy is very lovable in general. <3
no subject
Date: 2020-08-24 01:10 am (UTC)Heeeeee. This guy is very lovable in general. <3
No argument. Given that I married a straight man who doesn't speak Chinese, I figure this reaction of his means I have made good choices in both husbands and extracurricular crushes ;)