Wheeee! Birdies!
May. 5th, 2003 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melredcapThe cute little black and white birds are back, hopping and swooping all around wherever there's standing water - I guess they're after the gnats. (GOOD birds! I hate those tiny bugs, they get in my hair, and as for mosquitos...) They look a little bit like monks in black-and-white medieval robes, I think; there are white feathers down their sides and down the edges of their tails that you can only see when they open their wings and fan out their tails to fly, so they look like they're wearing a long black tabard over a white under-robe. There are swallows with black tails, wings and heads, and brick-red bodies, swooping after bigger bugs. There are sparrows, of course, a pair of which were seriously considering setting up house on my balcony until they saw me move, and tonight there were amazing quantities of tiny bats zooming around! (At least... we're pretty sure they're bats... it's a bit hard to get a good look at them. Still, they were definitely zooming too fast and flapping too hard to be the megamoths.) The bit of waste land outside my window is alive with cheeping noises all day, plus frogs croaking and ducks quacking from the runoff pond - one of the ducks must have their equivalent of ADD, I swear, because once he gets started he just waks continuously for about five minutes before he stops to catch his breath. (I swear, if he wakes up at 2am again I'm going down there with the emergency torch and my Jo...) And there's a bird I haven't identified yet, that sounds like a bored child with a recorder. Every so often there's a lazy, breathy 'toot toot' and then nothing from that direction for about half an hour...
The usual culprits are still around, of course, the tonbi hawks and HUGE crows (or ravens - I'm leaning towards identifying them as 'ravens' actually, I think they're too big to be crows). Despite the warning signs plastered up all over campus, I haven't actually seen a tonbi attack anyone for their lunch yet, and I'm seriously considering eating a sandwich outside in a tempting manner so I can find out if they really will go for it. Or maybe just leaving a sausage somewhere and watching it... I'm not COMPLETELY stupid, after all, and those birdies are BIG. They don't look so large when they're hovering on the updraughts watching for some unsuspecting lunch-eating person to steal from, but when one comes down to perch on top of a streetlight or swoops past a bridge six feet away from you as you walk across, you realise that they have about a six-foot wingspan! And there are so many of them - what are they eating?! Maybe they mob primary schools at lunchtime, or carry off medium-sized dogs...
I still don't have a printout of my full results from last semester (sheesh!), but I asked if they were available yet and got told the rest of mine. *drumroll please...*
C-2 level Japanese: A
C Kanji: A
Reading Comprehension: A
Seven classes, straight 'A's! WOO-HOO! (Mel does the Dance of Academic Triumph for a while)
...*ahem* 'scuse me. I'm happy here, okay?
Anyway, to reward myself, I went past the hyakuen shop (everything for 100 yen, about $1.50 Australian or $1 US) and bought a little plastic planter and some potting mix, and got mini sunflower seeds from Jusco. I paid about 350 yen in total, I have a chance at growing cool pretty things on my balcony, and if I kill them (which is what I usually do to potplants that I don't keep at work) it's no big tragedy. I think I have a fairly good chance at keeping them alive, though - I haven't killed my hanging basket of ivy yet, even though I bought it about five months ago, or the garlic that I planted after it sprouted, and also there's the tiny pot of wild strawberries I got from Jusco for 99 yen two weeks ago. Seven little sprouts popped up yesterday and today! So maybe my black thumb is wearing off a bit?
The pot of strawberries (and the big tupperware container containing nine tadpoles that I do NOT officially have, okay, because we aren't allowed any pets here) is sitting on top of my new little bookshelf. I filled up the bookshelf over the desk with manga, you see - amaaaazingly cheap second-hand, so it didn't cost much to do! - and needed somewhere to keep my textbooks and calligraphy supplies, so that I could move them off the top of the desk and my computer back ON. So I bought a cheap little do-it-yourself bookshelf from Jusco and gave myself a massive blister on my thumb, putting it together with a cheap screwdriver I borrowed from the dorm office. It's a darn good bookshelf, though, so I don't care, and the blister's fine now. ^_^ It makes sense that things like bookshelves and storage boxes would be cheap here - the vast majority of Japan's population live in what Australians would consider tiny houses or apartments, after all, so they need good storage stuff, and there's a lot of competition to supply it to them. *happy sigh* Finally, I'm in a country where a small, plain, new three-shelf bookshelf is $15, NOT $50!!!
Oh... speaking of the tadpoles I don't have... if I did have any, which I don't, they would be very cute, and would have teeny little legs now. And because there would be nine of them, and they would still be alive (unlike the first lot of tadpoles somebody *else* didn't try to keep in their dorm room), I would regard them as undying and call them the Nazgul. But we aren't allowed to keep pets here, so of course nothing like that has happened.
Heh.
Well... I'd better finish my homework, I guess. Ooh! Speaking of homework, I've made a good start at translating 'DebiDebi' ('Devil and Devil') for my Independent Research class! I still haven't met my supervisor, but at least I know who she's going to be! *yaaaaay!* (Before anyone decides to tell me that there's at least one fan translation of 'DebiDebi' online... I know. Don't send me the URL, 'cause I won't look at it. This translation project is going to be allllll my own work, thanks!)
Okay... off to write up my 'Interview a Japanese Person' homework to present in class tomorrow (blah!). More in about a week!
The usual culprits are still around, of course, the tonbi hawks and HUGE crows (or ravens - I'm leaning towards identifying them as 'ravens' actually, I think they're too big to be crows). Despite the warning signs plastered up all over campus, I haven't actually seen a tonbi attack anyone for their lunch yet, and I'm seriously considering eating a sandwich outside in a tempting manner so I can find out if they really will go for it. Or maybe just leaving a sausage somewhere and watching it... I'm not COMPLETELY stupid, after all, and those birdies are BIG. They don't look so large when they're hovering on the updraughts watching for some unsuspecting lunch-eating person to steal from, but when one comes down to perch on top of a streetlight or swoops past a bridge six feet away from you as you walk across, you realise that they have about a six-foot wingspan! And there are so many of them - what are they eating?! Maybe they mob primary schools at lunchtime, or carry off medium-sized dogs...
I still don't have a printout of my full results from last semester (sheesh!), but I asked if they were available yet and got told the rest of mine. *drumroll please...*
C-2 level Japanese: A
C Kanji: A
Reading Comprehension: A
Seven classes, straight 'A's! WOO-HOO! (Mel does the Dance of Academic Triumph for a while)
...*ahem* 'scuse me. I'm happy here, okay?
Anyway, to reward myself, I went past the hyakuen shop (everything for 100 yen, about $1.50 Australian or $1 US) and bought a little plastic planter and some potting mix, and got mini sunflower seeds from Jusco. I paid about 350 yen in total, I have a chance at growing cool pretty things on my balcony, and if I kill them (which is what I usually do to potplants that I don't keep at work) it's no big tragedy. I think I have a fairly good chance at keeping them alive, though - I haven't killed my hanging basket of ivy yet, even though I bought it about five months ago, or the garlic that I planted after it sprouted, and also there's the tiny pot of wild strawberries I got from Jusco for 99 yen two weeks ago. Seven little sprouts popped up yesterday and today! So maybe my black thumb is wearing off a bit?
The pot of strawberries (and the big tupperware container containing nine tadpoles that I do NOT officially have, okay, because we aren't allowed any pets here) is sitting on top of my new little bookshelf. I filled up the bookshelf over the desk with manga, you see - amaaaazingly cheap second-hand, so it didn't cost much to do! - and needed somewhere to keep my textbooks and calligraphy supplies, so that I could move them off the top of the desk and my computer back ON. So I bought a cheap little do-it-yourself bookshelf from Jusco and gave myself a massive blister on my thumb, putting it together with a cheap screwdriver I borrowed from the dorm office. It's a darn good bookshelf, though, so I don't care, and the blister's fine now. ^_^ It makes sense that things like bookshelves and storage boxes would be cheap here - the vast majority of Japan's population live in what Australians would consider tiny houses or apartments, after all, so they need good storage stuff, and there's a lot of competition to supply it to them. *happy sigh* Finally, I'm in a country where a small, plain, new three-shelf bookshelf is $15, NOT $50!!!
Oh... speaking of the tadpoles I don't have... if I did have any, which I don't, they would be very cute, and would have teeny little legs now. And because there would be nine of them, and they would still be alive (unlike the first lot of tadpoles somebody *else* didn't try to keep in their dorm room), I would regard them as undying and call them the Nazgul. But we aren't allowed to keep pets here, so of course nothing like that has happened.
Heh.
Well... I'd better finish my homework, I guess. Ooh! Speaking of homework, I've made a good start at translating 'DebiDebi' ('Devil and Devil') for my Independent Research class! I still haven't met my supervisor, but at least I know who she's going to be! *yaaaaay!* (Before anyone decides to tell me that there's at least one fan translation of 'DebiDebi' online... I know. Don't send me the URL, 'cause I won't look at it. This translation project is going to be allllll my own work, thanks!)
Okay... off to write up my 'Interview a Japanese Person' homework to present in class tomorrow (blah!). More in about a week!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 09:38 am (UTC)arigatou~!
And that icon is WAY cool. O_O
no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 11:38 am (UTC)Immortal-non-there Nazgul tadpoles! wheee!!
... I suppose this would be a BAD time to tell you that debi debi is officially translated in french ? :P we already have the first book... *tries to look inocent*
No problem
Re: No problem
Date: 2003-05-05 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
btw, sorry a thousand times about yesterday night. do you want me to get you anything to make up for the noise everyone made??
no subject
Date: 2003-05-07 11:20 pm (UTC)*POOF* Saruki pops out of nowhere in a shower of purple glitter.
Date: 2003-07-02 11:30 pm (UTC)Eheh... ^^;;; I'm sane on Saturdays, I swear!
Anyway! I'm adding you to my friends list... Maybe you'll add me back! *hinthint* Ahem.
Oh, and by the way, congrats on the grades!
-Saruki