One project I’ve been grinding on is my Japanese.  I’ve earned my third badge now, recently, after completing my “Adjectival Expressions 95 Within 10 Minutes” on 22April.  Wheee

Singapore Airlines whacked fares to Japan recently.  We scored three tickets for $398each, so we’ll be going up on 15May and staying through Saturday.  Got a decent rate at the Peninsula.  We’re all set.   It’s going to be great for me, because I’ll get a lot of extra real-world Jap practice, I’ll get to work daily with Kitani Sensei face-to-face, rather than Skype, and then coincidentally I’ll be their for the Tokyo Lingual “school barbecue” at a koen near Shinjuku.   Will be nice to get out of Singapore for a few days.

Spent most of the hot afternoon doing back-dated paperwork.  This evening I decided to re-remember my katakana.  It always drives me nuts to not read it well when I am in Japan (lots of signage is in it).  It only took me about an hour with flashcards to memorize it (there are how many? 45?). It seems quite quick, so I guess some of the neurons I taught long ago didn’t fully-forget after-all.  Sort of like when I use morse code, it somehow comes back through the muck in my head.

I also bought #quakebook for Ling’s Kindle.  (So should everyone else!)

we have reason to believe he may have a nom de guerre, “French Laurence”

I think I realized why this crane is so demented.  Not because the pieces it’s lifting are absurdly heavy (although they probably are), but because the crane has to massively cantilever out over the canal.

Sure, ok, so I switched to my iPod.

Just so happened that the first song up was Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.”  Oh perfect, I though,  just what he asked for.

After a minute, “Dad, can you change this to rock music, not this?”  Led Zeppelin isn’t rock music anymore?

So I flipped ahead randomly, through Barry White (no),  McKoy Turner (definitely No), and others until I landed on Stevie Ray Vaughn song (“Tightrope”).

“Yes!” announced Luke.  That was proper rock music.

So what does this mean?  Led Zepplin is to Luke as Buddy Holly is to me???

Eulogies included:

“He was the kind of guy who could and did get along with everyone,” said Bill Roper, head of Arkansas-based White Revolution.

I’m terrible with faces and, especially, names.  So I am very surprised that I scored slightly above average on the (slightly creepy) Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Listen with audio off, unless you want to hear the typical tedious North American airline passenger commentary-drivel.

Ten minutes from home, I got a call from Ling, “hey we have an owl in the bathroom.”

“huh?” I asked.

“Yeah, there’s an owl in the bathroom.”

“Well how the hell did it get in there?”   I asked, stupidly.  I’m sure it got in there the same way the bats and other creatures have before.

I told her to turn off the lights and close the door and I’d get home.

So I checked it out, sure enough, there’s a pretty decent sized owl sitting on my laundry basket in the bathroom!

So my idea was to catch it like a bird,  toss a sheet on it, or use sheets to corral it till its best option was to fly out the window (Our windows are those awkward push out windows that aren’t very big. I’ve no idea why it came in in the first place.

So as I was trying to carefully  stalk and corral it, while holding the sheet up, it landed on the bathroom sink.  Our maid, Emily (the country girl), simply walked over and picked he/she up!  It didn’t even put up any fight.  It just looked around a bit (it didn’t rotate its head 180d). We were all amazed.  We grabbed these photos, then Country Girl took it to the big bedroom window and it soared right out.  Everyone was impressed with the owl and Emily!

I must say, a damn cool bird.

My PhD biologist friend in Singapore thinks it was a barn owl.  Here are the owls found in Singapore.