mereilin

Finally had a collision place look at the car and confirm what we already suspected -- the cost to repair the damage would be more than twice what the car was worth. The towing company kindly accepted the title in exchange for the $300 in storage fees we racked up while we were trying to figure out what we should do. We still had to pay for the tow, but there's a chance AAA will reimburse it since we weren't given an opportunity to call them.

So we're back more or less where we were in August, with one functioning car. There's a scooter, but it's really too cold to use it and Jon never took that last step to get his operator's license.

There are days I still want to crawl into a hole and die, but there are more days when the sun is shining. Today was another laundry day, not quite as cold as the last one, sunny with a brisk wind.

Tonight it snowed.

Bring it.

I replaced the drum belt a couple of weeks ago and was very delighted when the dryer tumbled for the first time in six months. I did a celebratory load of whites, but when I put them into the dryer it made a funny buzzing noise that stopped after a few minutes and repeated intermittently while the clothes tumbled ... and the dryer didn't get warm.

I went back to the repair website and got instructions on how to check the fuse, which is fine. Everything else that could be causing the dryer not to heat is located behind the drum, so I've been back to using the clothesline. Today, however, the sun had barely climbed above the treeline just south of our house by 12:30 this afternoon, and there are still six more weeks until the shortest day of the year.

I fucking hate November.

Anyway, I guess I have to suck it up go and figure out if my dryer is fixable, because we sure don't have $500 to buy a new one. I suppose I could hit the laundromat for the winter, or rig up a drying apparatus on the back porch to use when there's too much snow on the ground. I'm told that many if not most people in Japan hang their clothes to dry all year. I haven't checked the weather patterns to see if this is even a reasonable comparison, but I suspect it's not.

Anyway, by the time I was done putting the wet clothes on the line today I could hardly move my frozen fingers, and I know it's at least 50 degrees out there today. It's going to get a LOT colder before it gets warmer again.

Speaking of Japan, language study continues sporadically. I'm mostly listening a lot, watching Japanese films and anime and random YouTube videos. Listening to music is helping a lot, especially when I can find the kanji lyrics. Some words I recognize when I hear them, and some I recognize when I see them, and I'm continually surprised by how much I understand. Of course I haven't seen a huge variety of subject matter in the lyrics I've seen so far, but vocabulary is vocabulary!

Okay. Time to fix the dryer.

Stressed about money. Stressed about the kids having troubles in school. Still wasting time studying a language I'll never have to speak.

There's three paragraphs of self-involved bullshit you didn't have to read.

You're welcome.

Current Mood: depressed

And because things aren't shitty enough right now, my husband's debit card got compromised this week. Someone charged almost $400 on it, completely cleaning out our checking account, and it could be 10 days before it's all sorted out.

I feel so violated.

When I told her I was studying Japanese, my mother-in-law gave me an old (vintage 1993) Japanese magazine she had lying around the house. The other day I sat down and really tried to read it. Of course I don't know enough kanji to be really literate in any case, but even the characters I know fairly well and can write consistently recognizably were painfully hard to decipher. I felt like a preschooler, sounding out words s-l-o-w-l-y and most of the time not even recognizing what they mean. It gave me a whole new perspective on literacy. It also gave me a headache.

I have to figure out where in this house I left my kanji book, because it's pretty obvious at this point that someone has put something on top of it and until I figure out what that is I will never see it again.

The same thing happened to the flip folder my son needs for marching band, and I completely lost my shit yesterday as a result of it. Well, that and the fact that I'm chronically under-rested and my kids don't listen to me. I'm so tired of fighting with them to get out of bed every morning and they have seriously had fewer than 10 school days this year so far.

The next 170 need to get better or I am going to completely lose it.

Sadie's been to the assistant principal's office twice already. I got an email from her teacher that she insists on disinfecting her work area before she will even consider getting ready to work, which is ridiculous because hello, she lives in this house. I told her if she had a perfectly good immune system, and that if she feels like compulsively cleaning I can set her up with PLENTY of stuff to do around here. And the best part of Sadie's sense of humor is that I was able to say to her, "Your teacher thinks it's weird. The other kids think it's weird. Knock it off."

So we'll see where that goes.

Dan meanwhile has been trying school unmedicated for the first time since second grade. The feedback from his teachers supports my opinion that the medicine he'd been taking isn't doing much to help him. I don't know whether there is anything better out there, but he's definitely not going back on the old one after the anxiety episode at camp in July. His pediatrician says she's out of her league and recommends a psychiatrist.

I need a damn psychiatrist. Or something.

Which I hope means something like "summer is ending."

School starts tomorrow. It's been raining pretty steadily most of the weekend and I'm having trouble motivating myself to do anything. Stuff remains undone -- I haven't figured out what to do about my son's ADHD medication for school. He hasn't had his dose adjusted since before he gained 20 pounds, and he's been off medication all summer except for the one week at camp when he apparently had an anxiety attack.

Frankly, I'd rather see inattentiveness than anxiety, but then I don't have to deal with him at school all day.

In other news, I'm learning how to fix a rust hole in a car with bondo putty. Let me be clear that I am under no delusions that I am in fact learning the correct way to make this repair; my entire goal is to end up with something solid that doesn't look too horrific.

So far, this is going pretty well, but I keep thinking I can make up for application imperfections with extra sanding despite repeated evidence to the contrary. And then I keep fussing with it even though I just said I don't care what it looks like because I totally lied and I actually do care that it looks like a kindergarten play-dough project. Even though I have already more than achieved my stated objective.

I just sprayed some sandable primer on it and walked away. It's not beautiful, but it's whole, and since it's not currently pouring (even though it looks as if it will any second) it might even dry.

In other news I'm kind of stalling with the Japanese. I'm careful about the words I choose in English because I want to express myself just so (even if it may sometimes be pretentious). Of course I can't expect to be eloquent in a language I barely understand, but it's just like the imperfect bondo patch. I want it to be something it can't be -- and really has no business being. Absolute beginner, both in Japanese and in auto body repair. I know it's ridiculous to expect perfection, but I'm still dissatisfied.

This probably says a lot about why I'm so damned unhappy so much of the time.

Current Mood: thoughtful

So today I learned how to set my keyboard to Japanese input. Now I have to keep an eye on the toolbar and make sure it's set to "English" when I want to type stuff. Basically it works the same way the input does when I type in the Google Translate box and it changes what I typed into Japanese characters. Unlike Google Translate (obviously) it doesn't automatically give me the English meaning of what I typed so the potential for embarrassing mistakes is VAST.

However, I do feel like I've made another tentative step forward in learning this language.

今日本語を勉強する。

Whee, it's probably lousy but I typed it myself, instead of copy and pasting! Now I just need to boost my vocabulary.

My youngest aunt and uncle (my grandfather's two youngest kids who are actually younger than I am) are arranging to have Granddad's memorial service live streamed online for out of state family members. Considering how many of us just made the trip less than two weeks ago, I'm touched that they're taking the trouble to do this -- especially when I remind myself these are two young people who just lost their father.My uncle, the youngest, just turned 34.

The service will be Sunday afternoon. It's a seven hour drive for me without traffic, probably another $150 in gas, and Dan's first cross country practice is the following morning at 7:30. Also, I've made that drive five times since Christmas (I counted on my fingers to make sure because even I couldn't believe it).

All things considered, I think I'll clear the afternoon for the live stream and send a memorial donation to the hospice. At least I got to see him again before he died.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Music: cars passing

And... I need to look at it when I have a lot more time to devote to studying than I have today.

We spent the afternoon with my mother-in-law yesterday and she was pleased and surprised that I'm learning to read Japanese. She confessed that of the 6000 or so kanji she knew when she left Japan (in the 1940s) she can remember only a handful and often has trouble reading the letters her old classmates send her.

She did recognize the ones I've learned (perhaps reinforcing their basicness). I suppose I should pick her brain a bit while I still can. We're fortunate that she's still so lucid and independent at 90, and I know she'd like to see more of the kids.

On the other hand, she likes English so much better than Japanese. She's been away from it long enough to be objective about how complex all the levels of politeness are, and how ridiculously difficult it is to write and read with kanji.

In 11 days, he would have been 99, so it was a good long run. He was well enough to attend the reunion just 9 days before he died. It's so wonderful that he had one more chance to see so many of his progeny.

I guess I'll be making another drive to PA.

Current Mood: numb

Yesterday for a couple of glorious hours I had the house ALL TO MYSELF. My husband went out with his siblings to finish cleaning out their late father's apartment, Sadie went to a friend's house for a movie date, and Dan left for a bike ride. I should of course have spent that time getting a jump on my Tuesday deadline, but the sun was shining and the house was quiet and I just couldn't force myself to do it.

Then Dan came home from his ride, and his friend Lindsey came with him, and the two of them spent the entire afternoon watching videos together on the Chromebook. Just before Sadie came home, her friend Jenny (Lindsey's sister) showed up on her bike, and from the time Sadie got home at 5:00 there were four of them in the living room watching videos.

Around suppertime I texted the girls' parents to ask if they wouldn't come and hang out for the evening since we already had their kids; they had some stuff they needed to finish before Monday but came over to drop off pizzas and drinks... and the kids hung out together and had pizza and microwave mug brownies until 9:30 when Jon finally got home with the car.

So yeah... I really should have used that time in the morning. But I think the fact that I didn't was the main reason I didn't mind the noise and disorder of the two extra kids all evening.

I've been mostly working this morning, and I do have this evening and all day tomorrow, so it should be okay.

In an hour or so we're all driving down to visit Jon's mother. I haven't had occasion to mention to her that I'm studying Japanese (she's a native speaker). More than trying to speak, I'm interested in having her look at my kana scribblings to see if they're actually recognizable to anyone besides myself.

And I splurged and ordered a book online called Remembering the Kanji. It got mixed reviews; some people said it was a silly parlor trick that didn't help anyone learn the language, and other people said it was the most brilliant thing they'd ever seen. I was sold when I read the preview chapter online. The premise is that if you can learn to recognize the pictures independently of learning the vocabulary -- by assigning them an English meaning that's similar in concept to the Japanese reading -- then when you encounter them again with the appropriate vocabulary you can just substitute the reading. The author noted that native Chinese speakers would do this as a matter of course, as the kanji are really Chinese characters to begin with. They just have to learn to read them differently.

So. The book should be here next week; I guess I'll be finding out for myself!

After Dan spent the night sneezing and wheezing and slamming in and out of his bedroom to the bathroom to blow his nose (even though I offered him a box of tissues to keep by his bed), we spent a good part of the morning attacking his room. We've been kind of ignoring it for some time now, but it's evidently becoming a health hazard. A week ago we had to bring him to the pediatrician because literally could not catch a breath. They gave him a freaking inhaler.

So. We took everything out of his bed; put the sheets, blankets and mattress pad in the laundry with hot water and vinegar; vacuumed both sides of his mattress and every nook and cranny of the loft bed structure; wiped down the bed slats, walls, furniture and fixtures with a damp cloth; and fired up an air purifier. Much to my surprise, Dan had no problem with dad tackling the floor area and throwing things away. He also agreed to part with some of his favorite childhood toys (most notably the marble rail and the Hot Wheels racing tracks) without batting an eyelash.

We probably have another few hours' worth of work before the room could be called really clean, but I think he can probably sleep there tonight without sacrificing his ability to breathe. Next on the list is Sadie's personal disaster. And then, you know, the rest of the whole house because nuts don't fall far from the tree.

On a related note, I look forward to laundry days now in a way I could not have imagined possible before I started exclusively using the clothesline in the backyard. I am officially going to be very sad when the weather turns, and not just because that means I'm going to have to figure out how to fix the dryer. Every morning that it's sunny I pick up every item of dirty clothing I can find, and even if it's a small load I'll run it through the washer just to be able to stand outside in the sunshine for 10 minutes hanging it on the line. Ah, small pleasures.

I've noticed sometimes when I meet a friend's family that I understand my friend a whole lot better. In the context of the people closest to them, everything about them suddenly makes sense.

In much the same way, I found the part of me that makes sense this past weekend. Even though we had just made our annual PA trip a month earlier, we got in the car again on Thursday and drove eight hours to spend a long weekend in PA for a reunion of my mother's family. My 99 year old grandfather was there. All four of my mother's brothers were there (two full, two half) as well as her half sister and all but three of my cousins (one from Minnesota that I've never met, the one who's working on Martha's Vineyard this summer, and my youngest aunt's oldest daughter who was spending the weekend with her father). My brother and his wife drove out from New Jersey with their two boys. It was actually a little surreal to see the Massachusetts relatives in PA for a change.

Some I had seen recently. Some I hadn't seen in years. My great-aunt and my great-niece were both in the same room.

It was totally worth the drive.

I feel whole.

I discovered something amazing today when I was trying to follow kanji lyrics to a Japanese song I was listening to. For the handful of kanji I recognize, I have an immediate, visceral understanding of the meaning of the word -- even if I'm not sure how to pronounce the kanji, which 99 percent of the time is the case. This is ridiculously exciting to me and definitely encourages me to continue this experiment.

Also I just found out the public library has links to free language learning software, so there's something else to try.

Current Mood: accomplished

In an hour, my ride is coming to take me to a concert I do NOT want to perform in. I knew several months ago when it was scheduled that I wasn't going to want to perform on this date, but I didn't want to be the asshole who caused the whole group to miss a gig because there were no other dates available and we frankly weren't offered that many gigs this summer. This does not change the fact that I'm NOT IN THE MOOD to put on some sparkly bullshit and sing songs that haven't been popular since 1950 on a 90-plus degree afternoon that is guaranteed to fade into a mosquito-filled evening.

We got back last night from a very trying week of "vacation" during which my 78-year-old father broke out in hives all over his body and felt like shit for three days, dad and mom bickered MUCH more than usual, my sister flipped out at my mother because she doesn't like the way mom runs her restaurant, my nephew came within about an inch of being run over by a fire truck during the parade, and I worked A LOT. In the kitchen, in the dish room, in the bar, and -- when I probably should have been sleeping -- on some transcription work that I picked up during "vacation" to try to offset all the money it cost us to do this.

Some good things happened on the trip, and maybe I'll write about those later, but mostly I'm filled with apprehension that I don't have time to write about because now my ride is coming in 45 minutes and I have to take a shower and find something to wear. To do this stupid concert that I don't want to do.

Current Mood: discontent

My husband is a butthead (she says with love). I borrowed a set of Japanese language CDs from the library. I learned the kana first; now I need some vocabulary so I can start to make sense of the kanji.

So here I am, dutifully repeating "Nihon-go-ga wakarimas-ka" (do you understand Japanese) and various other phrases of similarly dubious usefulness, and trying to imitate the speakers on the CD. It's a very round "ah" sound, and I've heard the inflection is important. What is butthead doing while I'm trying to study?

Quoting Hermione Granger: "It's not levio-SAH. It's levi-OH-sa."

Yes. That "ah" sound.

Thanks for your support, honey.

Anyway, since I learned the kana first, I'm using it to take lesson notes. I can't always hear the difference between G and K or D and T, and I usually mess up the diphthongs ("ou" or "ai" and so on), but I'm doing the best I can and checking it with Google Translate (which automatically changes romaji into kana or kanji and gives me hilarious mistranslations until I spell something right).

I should go do some work, now. Does it count that I listen to the CDs in the kitchen while I'm cooking dinner or washing dishes?

Aw yeah. :)

Every day that is wet and dreary seems a little bit worse than it otherwise might, but today has been particularly difficult. I had to pull my son home from a school activity he really wanted to participate in because his grades continue to tank. Now he's failing all five core classes, and he even dropped from his A+ in band to an A-. Small stuff there, but telling. Anything that required actual effort outside of the classroom did not get done.

When I got to the school to pick him up he had shut off his phone and disappeared. Since it's been pouring all day I figured he didn't leave the school building, but it's a big school and I could hear him starting to fall apart when I hung up with him. He did come when a teacher paged him, though, and came home sullen but without too much drama.

He's working on algebra now. There are two weeks of school left for him to salvage passing grades for the term. I've told him flat out I want him to repeat the grade if he can't do it -- not to punish him particularly, but because once he hits grade 9 that stuff stays on his transcript. If he hasn't got the hang of how to be a good student by the end of grade 8, I don't have much hope for his getting into a decent college.

The pity of it is that he's ridiculously bright. It's killing me to see him fail, but until he owns it nothing will change.

Current Mood: disappointed

So I kind of randomly decided to learn Japanese.

I don't have a really good reason why but it seems to be related to an anime I started watching. This reason makes me feel like a stupid teenager, but there it is. Also I'm kind of addicted to point and click "escape the room" games, which are often made by Japanese developers and sometimes not translated.

On a less geeky note, my mother-in-law is Japanese. She never taught her kids the language because she was totally into assimilating the American culture (also it was immediately post WWII when she moved to the U.S.), although my husband told me last night that she did try to teach him how to write the characters (without much success, because why bother to write in a language you can't speak?).

I'm foolishly proud of myself right now, because I got my "Japanese word of the day" email -- the one that gives me a random Japanese word and asks me to guess what it is. When it's something written in kanji it's hopeless; I haven't started figuring out any of that yet. But I have sorted out hiragana and katakana, so when I saw the katakana characters I knew it had a good chance of being a "foreign" word (and likely English). Still, I had to painstakingly sound out the kana like a preschooler trying to read C-A-T. But when I put it together and recognized the sounds, and clicked the link for the picture and saw that I was right? Let's just say I haven't had my eyes light up from reading a damned word in a lot of years -- and it was such an unexpected source of joy. (It was バイオリン -- violin -- if anyone cares to know.)

My husband patiently looks at my chicken-scratch kana practice and doesn't make fun of me. Last night he gave me random Japanese words to write out for him, which was kind of fun. His vocabulary is limited to the usual obvious Japanese words that most Americans have heard, like "kimono" and "arigato" -- I was surprised how many words I could recognize once I learned the kana. I'll probably lose interest before I develop any sort of fluency, but right now it's still kind of fun.

Right. Back to doing the mom thing, now.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Traffic and the lady across the street yelling at someone

I was going to write, but I don't feel like it. So I will sum up.

Son is failing three core classes. He failed two last term.

School doesn't require him to repeat the grade. We might.

He's also SO grounded, but I don't know if it's going to make any difference.

I need three more sunny days to get laundry caught up, but I made a start.

While I was in the basement doing laundry I realized that the chest freezer was unplugged. We blew a fuse a couple of months ago and my cousin was testing the circuits and I had forgotten to plug it back in.

The freezer was not empty.

When I opened the freezer, flies swarmed into my house from six counties.

Bleach, baking soda, flyswatters, tears.

At least it's defrosted now.

Also the laundry room is cleaner than it's possibly ever been and will soon be cleaner yet.

Daughter is alienating her soccer team. Thank god the season is almost over, but I really had hoped she would make some friends. :(

So. Very. Tired.

Found out today he's failing science. Already knew he was failing algebra (close to passing but not close enough) and very egregiously failing English. I don't know how to get him to care enough to do something about his appalling study and homework habits. For years he's been pushing off my efforts to help, saying he's got it under control.

I do not think this means what he thinks it means.

Current Mood: irritated

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mereilin

December 2018

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Time to fix the dryer for real now.

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Stuff. And also things.

夏が終わる

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Technology is an amazing thing.

the book arrived!

So long, Granddad. :(

Sometimes the best you can do is to keep things from getting worse.

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Japanese studies continue.

Do Not Want

Japanese studies continue.

Today is hard.

I swear, I honestly (sometimes) do things besides whine about my kids

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I want to kill my firstborn. That's normal, right?

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December 2018

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