regeneration

I turned the radio on this morning and caught the tail end of Billy Joel’s song ‘Movin’ Out’. Great song.

Today I ordered some CDs from a band named Bon Voyage. It’s a unique Japanese band that I found via happy accident earlier this year, and they will be my first Japanese music CDs! Yay!

I’ve been watching the anime Azumanga Daioh. It’s a comedy about high school girls, and it’s really funny. I downloaded it from KAA, and might buy the DVDs later. The great thing about KAA (it stands for ‘Kick A** Anime’) is that they soft-sub all of their titles, so I can leave the subs off if I want to, which I do.

I watch all my anime and TV series with subtitles turned off or covered up with Notepad windows, because I want to be able to pick up the Japanese words. Sure, most of it I don’t understand yet, but I am picking up a word here and there, and sentence structure will become obvious as time goes on. I think it helps.

Someone named Kitsune visited my blog this morning and left some very encouraging (and timely) words. They have a good article on the state of modern anime fansubbing.

I’m going to keep at this Japanese thing. I’m 500 kanji into the book so far, and looking forward to getting to the end so I can start working on sentences. I am estimating that I will be done with the book by the end of August at the latest, though I want to push it and try to be done with it by the end of July. We shall see!

I have a bunch of pictures of the family that I need to upload. Here’s one from my birthday lunch this year. We went to a local restaurant called Ted’s Montana Grill. They gave the kids Wikki Stix, these wax-covered yarn craft things, and I made flowers out of them. They were a big hit with the girls:

Next weekend, Beautiful Wife and I are going away for the weekend to a nice hotel for our wedding anniversary! We’re going to see Prince Caspian and then P.F. Chang’s for dinner. It will be VERY nice to get away, even if it’s only for one night. :)