life

Thursday, 22 March, 2007 at 3:09 pm

New layout. I can assure you that I have no clue where the inspiration for it came from. I was just doodling in 452 while he was going over CSS. XD;

Last part on life: Lately I’ve been getting flashes of memory randomly. One I remember, Saturday night Daddy was watching some post-game yakking about a basketball game, and when one commentator said “stood” (or “still,” not quite sure) I saw the exhibit at the L.A. Zoo with the meerkats (?), and how they all stand on the top, and then there’s this cave-y “underground” maze you can wander through.

I think yesterday, I don’t remember what brought it on, but I remembered Jichan and Bachan’s house, the driveway by that tree with the orange fruit things. Persimmon. I remembered it from the perspective of a child, when the yard was bigger and everything.

I’ve heard that your life flashes before your eyes before you die, but I’m sure that’s all in one instant, right? So what does it mean when you get bits and pieces of it over some course of time?

shopping, the end of eras

Sunday, 18 March, 2007 at 10:54 pm

Mum and I went the mall. Payless Shoes, Forever 21, Borders Express, and Hallmark. Forever 21: Mum’s comment sums it up for me. “It reminds me of the 70s.” Not that that’s a bad thing at all, I’m just not a 70s-style sort of person. Yes, I like the clothes, I think they look nice, different, not blah, but will I wear them? Heck no. Now I’m all sad. Anchor Blue closed at Westside Pavilion, and Forever 21 is going in a style direction that I don’t care to follow. Where am I supposed to find clothes???

At Borders Express I saw Nana volume 5 (in plastic wrap o.o!!) but I didn’t have a coupon and I’d already spent $20 on a watch and didn’t want to spend money that is coming dearly at the moment, so I skipped it.

Hallmark still has the giant Snoopy plush. XD I want! It’s $20 even, and ish big and not wearing any accessories (except a collar) or hugging Woodstock, so it looks like an extremely huggable Snoopy, like my Mr. Snoops. Snoops makes me sad, he’s all squished out flat and not very stuff-y and dirty, his fur’s not soft and new. But again, I didn’t want to spend money.

So what do I do today? I went with Mum and Mickey to CompUSA’s clearance sale and spent $56. (How can they be closing?? Noooo, Best Buy and Circuit City suck in the computer department!! CompUSA was my saving grace! And Fry’s drives me up the wall, it seems so dirty or unkempt or something.) I bought a mousepad with a frog on it ($7), a Tetris game for Windows/Mac ($15), DVD-Rs ($15), and an 80 pack of slim jewel cases ($17). Yes I am insane what the heck am I going to do with 80 of them I don’t think I’ve ever needed to use even 10 of them in my entire life so far.

I’d even told myself to not buy anything with my credit card this month, because the past few months I’ve had $50+ bills every single time. So somehow my debit card is exempt from my spending ban? Grrr. I guess I’ll just have to work extra long hours this summer. (Since my cousin says the guy is swamped with work, I guess I definitely have a job with him again. *crosses fingers and knocks on wood* I haven’t even really bought clothes in a year! Where’d all my money go? *cough Borders and its ebil membership cough*

Mickey wanted a mouse and numeric keypad for the laptop he’s buying in a little while, but ended up buying a controller for the racing game he’s getting, since CompUSA didn’t have what he liked. XD Mum bought a mouse for the old computer (so Mickey doesn’t have to buy a mouse anymore; he’ll just take the one from his current computer) and a 100 gig external harddrive. :O I’m a spoiled brat. I was looking at them because lately I’ve wanted to backup my laptop AND my desktop, and if my desktop serves as my laptop’s backup, where is my desktop’s backup? Plus, it’s really annoying being on my laptop and having certain files I want that are on my desktop. I hate to fire up the desktop just to get a few files. So now files will be central on the external harddrive and I can move stuff off my laptop!

all things Japanese

Saturday, 10 February, 2007 at 3:24 am

I don’t want to go to sleep (despite it being almost 3 in the morning >_<), but I don’t really have the mental capacity to do much of anything, so I’ll just ramble on here for a bit. (Nice statement, no? “I don’t want to think, so I’ll just write in my blog.” :x)

Last Saturday I was home, and Mum and I went to Mitsuwa. Mostly she needed some groceries, and I also wanted gyouza so I could use up the ramen broth packets she bought for me.

While we were in the market area this song came on over the sound system that sounded extremely familiar to me. I said, “Hey, I have this song. It’s Utada Hikaru, ‘Colors.'” Do you know how rare it is for something like that to happen? One, I don’t have many Japanese songs on my computer (or many that I listen to often). Two, what are the chances that I’d have a song that is popular enough to be played in a Japanese store in America? So that was fun.

We ended up buying … well, sad to say I was very self-centered and didn’t notice what Mum bought. I just know she bought dashi because she said she needed it. Oh, she bought kamaboko too. I remember that because it was the normal kind with the clear packaging so you can see that it’s the normal kind, and she said it was probably just New Year’s causing it to be sold out.

Anyway. I bought (with Mum’s money) gyouza and this product that they had free samples of. It’s some ramen, not really the instant noodle type, although it’s similar, but a fancier version. We bought the miso ramen one. It was in the freezer section. The instructions say cook the (frozen) noodles in boiling water for 2 minutes, then in the bowl place the broth and mix with 1–1½ cups boiled water, then when the noodles are done drain them and put them in the bowl. Similar to instant noodles, no? It has 123% the daily recommended value of sodium. ACK! It’s pretty good though. I think I’ll water down the broth more next time though.

I seriously feel like going to a Japanese restaurant. But I don’t have the stomach for what I want. *ticks off on fingers* Unagi donburi, sushi (specifically the eel sushi from Ozeki’s with the eel sauce *grin*), ramen, teriyaki chicken (specifically from that one place at the outlet mall)…hee. Too bad I’m living on a student’s budget. *snerk*

After the groceries I slipped over to the bookstore to look for Kera, but they sold out again. :( I guess it’s really really really popular now. (Darn!) Mum offered to buy it for me whenever it comes in, but I told her she didn’t have to bother herself with it.

Next I looked for any Anna Tsuchiya music, but they didn’t have any. boo. I looked on Amazon; they have her album for $35 as an import. Better than Tommy heavenly6, I had to buy from the marketplace for her album, but not so good because it’s $35! (I think the Tommy heavenly6 album was $25 or something? Not expensive. Maybe it was $15, I don’t remember.)

That was my Japanese excursion, which refreshes me after being in SLO for so long. hahaha.

Now I guess I should go to sleep. bah.

friend or foe?

Thursday, 1 February, 2007 at 6:16 pm

I guess the release date for the last Harry Potter book was announced recently. (Yeah, I saw J.K. Rowling on the news but I wasn’t really paying attention, hey it was the 7 a.m. hour, so I didn’t really comprehend what they were talking about.)

I got an e-mail about it from Borders today, and in it they had this promo sticker thing. [Borders ad for a free sticker with book reservation. Two different stickers, both with the Harry Potter and Borders logos on the bottom, one in purple reading “trust Snape” and the other in orange reading “Snape is a very bad man.”] I thought, that’s pretty good marketing.

Let me explain something. It seems like when I take a class, I suddenly find instances to apply it in real life. During my stat class, or maybe soon after, I took great interest in the polls for presidential outcome. “This poll has a 3% margin of error.” me: “Well that sucks.” Or my Bindery and Finishing class. I started staring at junk mail ads if they were fancier than just slips of paper; I looked more closely at all the books I read, wondering how many signatures were used, what kind of impositioning was used. How about my Consumer Packaging class? (Which involved a bit of marketing.) I found the Microsoft iPod redesign hilarious.

Now? I’m in a Marketing and Sales (for Print) class. Last week I just saw an hour-long show on the Discovery channel about the iPod, which talked some about, yup, the marketing strategy. Sometime in the past week I’ve seen commercials for Blockbuster’s new offering: get movies in the mail just like Netflix, but also have the ability to return the DVD to a store and get a new movie instantly. New market!

Back to the Snape sticker. Who could have thought up that idea? Seriously, books are preordered all the time, and not much advertising goes into it. How many people are going to reserve at Borders over Barnes & Noble or any other bookstore just for the sticker? Brilliant. (I would, except for the fear of looking stupid if I’m wrong. *snrk*)

posting…New Year’s weekend

Monday, 8 January, 2007 at 11:22 am

I’ve been a lazy blogger. Bad me. Umm, lessee…

December 27th, Wednesday, took my car in for 30,000 mile maintenance. The service area’s computers were out, and we (Daddy and I) waited an hour then found out the computers were back on but they didn’t tell us. -.-

My car didn’t get worked on until 2 in the afternoon, and so my car wasn’t ready until the next day. Argh. I woke up at nine to see if the car was ready but they didn’t call so I called them, then got put on hold for about 5 minutes before I was disconnected. (It’s a very busy place with not so good channels of communication open with the customers.) So then Daddy Hidek and I went in the van to pick up Noelle Tadash and SM00 for the weekend.

Friday we (everyone, Mum Daddy Hidek Noelle Tadash SM00 me) went to Mitsuwa in Torrance. Mmm, good udon. *grin* Everyone else (except Daddy, he didn’t get anything) had ramen.

Went to the bookstore. I bought the Paradise Kiss manga series in some special large(r) format. I don’t know what it is, I can’t read the Japanese on it, but I do know it’s an inch or so larger on the sides. Then we went to Fry’s, but Mum Daddy and I stayed in the car. They had the Wii but you had to buy 5 games with it. o.O Odd.

Oh yeah, it turns out my car was ready at 10 on Thursday. They must have called right after we stepped out the door. ;.; We went to pick it up at 3 but their computers were down again so we couldn’t pay with credit card. ARGH. So we left then came back at 5 to pick up my car.

Hidek rented Talladega Nights from Blockbuster, we watched that Thursday/Friday night, I don’t remember. We thought it was really funny. ^_^;; Daddy and I (and Mickey, some) watched practically all the extras. I really liked it. But this movie had less, er, guest roles? (drivers from NASCAR) than Cars did. :/ I thought that was kinda boring. But I guess they didn’t really fit into the story.

Erm, I don’t remember, one day we watched Shimotsuma Monogatari (English title: Kamikaze Girls) and Dark Water. Was it Saturday? And we watched Talladega Nights on Friday? It was weird, ’cause after watching Dark Water, that night SM00 went into the hallway and she came out saying water was dripping from the smoke alarm. O.o! The girl was coming to haunt us! But it turned out that the toilet upstairs flooded, and leaked downstairs. ehehe That night the boys and I played Texas Hold’em. Then SM00 joined us to play the boardgame Payday. (1994 edition. Apparently, the old version didn’t have the lottery. o.o But that part is so fun! XD)

Sunday we went to their house to make mochi. (Gee, I can’t say “pound mochi” can I?)

Monday, New Year’s, that was fun. I actually got to see the whole Rose Parade for once. o.o I think last year I was too nervous about school to sit down and watch television. And all the years before, we always went to a relative’s house to celebrate and not much tv watching got done. I guess I missed out on the Stephanie Edwards and Bob Eubanks era. :( I remember her, but I never really watched so I don’t know how she did the parade.

Tuesday Daddy, Hidek and I went to Borders. I returned the Nana manga that had the security device with the dried up glue that was pulling out the paper and got a $20 journal for only $1.73 with the return and my holiday savings. woohoo! Then I went with Daddy to Barnes and Noble. Why? I dunno. Just felt like going out, maybe I felt like looking at their journals and date books.

Wednesday Mum and I went out shopping.

Thursday I watched a lot of Monk season 3.

Friday, I don’t remember. o.O Saturday all the relatives got together at Noelle’s house for New Year’s. We left our house at 9 like we planned (shocking; maybe everyone was hungry, haha) and got to Noelle’s house around 10. Had good ozoni. XD Hidek bought Wario Ware, so we played that. I made wonton with Daddy helping. Then the boys played NASCAR I don’t remember which one, for the Gamecube. Then we had dinner. Yummm. I’ve got some leftovers sitting in the fridge for dinner sometime this week. XD

Sunday packed up my stuff. Pretty much all I did was watch tv. Drove up to school. Unpacked stuff.