Arkansas Weather

Ugh.  You have to love (hate) Arkansas weather.  There will be around 30 degrees F (about 18 degrees C) difference between the highs and lows for the next week or so (and have been for the last week).  It's warm in the afternoons when I head to work, but I have to take my heavy coat with me, because by the time I head for home the temperature is hovering just above freezing.  Joy.

In other news, I picked the last of my watermelons and gave them to my friend in order to foil my watermelon thief.  I had been saving a particularly large one but it was stolen out of my yard a couple weeks ago.  Last week another (my smallest) was taken.  I had two left, hidden in some high grass that had grown around them, so I picked them before my thief could come back and take a closer look around.  Honestly, some people are just beyond belief.  Either grow it yourself or go to the store!

Let There Be Pirates!

I've pretty much given up on the Yonaguni story. It just refused to go anywhere. Horror is officially not my genre.  Instead I've been editing Viral r/Evolution and Capriciousness' New PaN.  I've added quite a bit to the end of Capriciousness and therein lie the pirates. ^^  I've got to keep it under 10k for the International Aeon Award, but that shouldn't be too hard.  I have about 6k right now and my main character (Erin) is getting all settled into his new life on board (he's a flirtatious thing ^^).  It's going to be good.  I just need to wrap it up in the next week or so, force feed it to my friend for critique then pay the 7 Euro entry fee.  I hope to have Viral's edits done in the next few days, then I'll be sending it off for its first rejection letter. >.<  I shouldn't say that, but let's face it, it's a bit long.  I like it, but I fear getting lots of tl;dr type comments from people...actually I already have! *sigh*  But, but, but, it's all necessary! *sob*

I still think Capriciousness may yet turn into a book.  We'll see.

Doctor Who Theme (Tim Minchin with BBC Orchestra)

Never Slow Down

There's this new-ish site called audioboo where you post audio clips.  It's kinda like twitter, only with sound.  It's free and one of my absolute favorite musicians, SJ Tucker (aka s00j) led me over there.  This is her reading a poem.

listen to ‘Manifesto: Never Slow Down’ on Audioboo

And while I'm at it, she has a new online "album" of 2 songs...

Better

I still don't have anything on my Yonaguni story yet, but at least my head no longer feels like it's going to explode with every miniscule little movement I make.  It's time I stopped trying to plan it out and just start writing and see what happens.  Wish me luck.

Bleh

I'm stuck and stuffy and achy and generally yucky, so here's a Japanese cat video.

As far as translation goes it's the 12 months of the year and a holiday or item associated with each. January is Oshigatsu (New Year's), February is a snowman, March is Girl's Day, April is the start of the school year, May is Children's (more accurately boy's) Day, June is the rainy season, July is the beach, August is the summer festivals, September is the Moon Festival, October is Halloween, November is autumn of reading and December is Christmas.

And here's an old favorite.

Tonkatsu Sauce Recipe

If you go to The Anime Blog and search for recipes you'll find a recipe for tonkatsu sauce, which those of us in more rural areas will find hard to come by.  This sauce has to sit for a while, so I thought I should make up a bunch so I wouldn't have to do it when it came time to make my yakisoba later.  I did a 4X recipe and it fits perfectly into a 44oz ketchup bottle I emptied out in the process of making it.  (It doesn't take that much ketchup. ^^  That bottle was nearly empty anyway.)

Here's the 4X recipe

Tonkatsu Sauce

1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp ground cloves
2/3 cup each of the following:
sugar
rice wine
rice wine vinegar
Worcestershire sauce
soy sauce
yellow mustard
1 cup ketchup

Mix it all up in a big bowl (I put the dry stuff in first, then all the thinner liquids to dissolve the sugar, then I did the mustard and ketchup, which also got broken up by the other, thinner liquids), use a funnel to pour it into a 44 oz bottle, screw the lid on tight and shake the dickens out of it.  Stick it in the fridge and you'll have all the tonkatsu sauce you should need for lots of yakisoba and any other Japanese dish that calls for it.

Thank you Rachel of The Anime Blog for all the recipes!

Hmmm

Well, the netbook showed up yesterday, even though the tracker said it wouldn't.  USPS left it in the usual hiding spot and ran while I slept.  It's functional, though typing on the tiny little keyboard is challenging.  If nothing else, the apostrophe is in the wrong place.  I haven't managed to put Ubuntu onto it yet.  There is a forum thread over there 121 pages long on the subject.  The method required is technical enough that I may never attempt it.

There is one thing it can do that no other computer I've ever had could do . . . it fits in my purse!

For now, at least, I'll work with the extremely basic (Blogger's interface has more formatting options!) WordPad that's pre-installed on it.  It uses .txt files, and I can go back and forth between it and OpenOffice on my laptop (though I would prefer something that used .odt as OpenOffice and the Writer program that is part of Ubuntu does).

Poor little thing can't handle modern Flash at all, and can't be updated, which means no YouTube.  Of course that's why I wanted to change the OS.  Thankfully, I knew from the start that it was a super basic little thing.  (What do you expect for $60?)  I bought it for writing at work without pencil and paper, that's all, and it can do that, if only just.

Grrr

I've gone from this....

...to this.

Why? Because USPS is a tease.  The tracking has said I'd get my new netbook today...until today came and now they say it will be tomorrow.  Somehow it took it 6 hrs to make a 1.5 hr journey.  Now I work in distribution, so I understand...really.  It's just that they went and got my hopes up. *pout*  The worst part is that my work week starts tonight at midnight for my half shift (6 hours as opposed to the 12 I work Fri-Sun), so I would have had time to mess around with it if it came today.  When it comes tomorrow, I will be asleep (or should be).  I know full well that I'll be up and messing around with it before work. *sigh*

All that being said, I should finally go to sleep instead of staying awake waiting for something that's not going to show.  I do still have work tonight.  I'm going to throw my work clothes in the wash and do just that.

From Wikipedia: Urashima Taro

I got lazy and found the Wiki entry for the story instead of finding the Japanese language one floating around in my library somewhere.

The following is a direct cut and paste.  Love the pics. ^^

One day a young fisherman named Urashima Tarō is fishing when he notices a group of children torturing a small turtle. Tarō saves it and lets it to go back to the sea. The next day, a huge turtle approaches him and tells him that the small turtle he had saved is the daughter of the Emperor of the Sea, Ryūjin, who wants to see him to thank him. The turtle magically gives Tarō gills and brings him to the bottom of the sea, to the Palace of the Dragon God (Ryūgū-jō). There he meets the Emperor and the small turtle, who was now a lovely princess, Otohime.

Urashima Tarō illustration by Edmund Dulac

Tarō stays there with her for a few days, but soon wants to go back to his village and see his aging mother, so he asks Otohime permission to leave. The princess says she is sorry to see him go, but wishes him well and gives him a mysterious box called tamatebako which will protect him from harm but which she tells him never to open. Tarō grabs the box, jumps on the back of the same turtle that had brought him there, and soon is at the seashore.

When he goes home, everything has changed. His home is gone, his mother has vanished, and the people he knew are nowhere to be seen. He asks if anybody knows a man called Urashima Tarō. They answer that they had heard someone of that name had vanished at sea long ago. He discovers that 300 years have passed since the day he left for the bottom of the sea. Struck by grief, he absent-mindedly opens the box the princess had given him, from which bursts forth a cloud of white smoke. He is suddenly aged, his beard long and white, and his back bent. From the sea comes the sad, sweet voice of the princess: "I told you not to open that box. In it was your old age ..."

Variations

As always with folklore, there are many different versions of this extremely famous story. In one, for example, there were three drawers in the box. After he turned into an old man he found a mirror, then took the body of a crane when touched by a crane feather from the last box, in another he ate a magic pill that gave him the ability to breathe underwater. In another version, he is swept away by a storm before he can rescue the turtle. Also, there is a version in which he dies in the process of aging (his body turns into dust), as no one can live 300 years.

Commemoration

Statue of Urashima Tarō in Mitoyo, Kagawa

A shrine on the western coast of the Tango Peninsula in northern Kyoto Prefecture, named Urashima Jinja, contains an old document describing a man, Urashimako, who left his land in 478 A.D. and visited a land where people never die. He returned in 825 A.D. with a Tamatebako. Ten days later he opened the box, and a cloud of white smoke was released, turning Urashimako into an old man.

Later that year, after hearing the story, Emperor Junna ordered Ono no Takamura to build a shrine to commemorate Urashimako's strange voyage, and to house the Tamatebako and the spirit of Urashimako.