I really like having mail to look forward to. ^^

( Cut for images )

I also got my certificate for passing the N1 of the JLPT last week! I don't think I mentioned passing it before on LJ, but I did, somehow. Even after looking at the results online, I half-wondered if it was some kind of mistake and I didn't actual pass, but I have the certificate now and the official paper report.

Another big thing this week is, with the release of the Johnny's calendars, getting contact from CDJapan that they need to upgrade shipping for my order of Kisumai and Ebi's calendars (presumably because Kisumai's calendar is HUGE). >_< The shipping was just way more than I was willing to pay, so I decided to let the order be canceled and order through YesAsia instead, because even with YA's high-ish prices for the calendars, it's still less than paying for EMS shipping. But I'm a little worried because YA listed the availability for Ebi's calendar as "ships within 21 days" and I now have experience of YA's availability being... weird... sometimes. Let's just hope this all goes well and I can get both the calendars I want.

Christmas was good. I spent it at home. I keep getting caught up in hanging out with my family and not doing things I thought I would do. Ah well. Starting tomorrow I'll be going with my family to visit my older brother's house. Our grandparents will be visiting as well. Anyway, I'll probably be less active on the internet this weekend.

I got a new external harddrive for Christmas! I asked for a 500 gig or so one, but my parents got my a 1.5 TB one instead, lol. It's going to be useful since my other external has been close to full since like, this summer. >_<

Speaking of this summer, the translation I was going to post next has been one I've been working on since the summer... All that's left is the editing, but I haven't gotten around to doing it, and it'd be hard to do while I'm visiting family. But "気が合う", that's rough to translate. T_T

Before I post, I like to check how long it's been since I last posted, and yeah... It's probably because I don't do anything. I was telling someone on Monday that I don't really do anything and spend most of my time sitting in my room and watching dramas or stuff. But it's probably also because I end up feeling really busy. I purposely took a light course load this semester, but part of the reason for that was because I knew one of my classes came with a heavy work load...

And the other reason I took a light course load is because I'm taking the JLPT this year. N2. I was studying a little today with another person, and she brought up Japanese folk songs which reminded me that I had never heard the Japanese national anthem before. So I looked it up.

This was a while ago, but I pre-ordered Arashi's upcoming album. I saw the jacket covers the other day and thought that I liked the cover for the version I didn't order better. Ah well.

It's been even longer since I posted any translations because of being busy with school and actually having people I can hang out with and all that, but I have been working on some, slowly. Next week, we have a midterm/fall break at our school, so I will post a couple of translations I'm pretty close to finished on during that period. Now you can hold me to that, lol.

So, the Japanese classes, I've been through, tend not to cover onomatopoeia much. By which I mean hardly ever. So when I came across it when I'm reading something I tend to not know or only vaguely know what most of them mean, which means I have to look up onomatopoeia all the time. And since onomatopoeia is used so commonly in Japanese, it's something I get more and more aware of.

So of course, I look it up when I really need to know the meaning, but so many aren't really in dictionaries. If they're not in dictionaries, then I resort to googling it which is my solution to all words/phrases which I can't find in dictionaries or which dictionaries explain inadequately. (It's especially useful for words or phrases specific to certain dialects.) But then sometimes I can't even figure it out by googling it. That is where I am now.

The next method I'm trying is asking on a FB status and hoping Japanese friends know what it is, but the first person to comment says she doesn't know either. This is not looking good.

This evening, I got started looking at Perfume videos on youtube, and found this cool fanvideo. Sometimes when I'm watching Perfume videos on youtube, I end up watching a bunch of Perfume videos. Perfume's great~ ♥

Yay! Semester completed. Break time is now! Okay, so I've already been home for close to two days, but Saturday evening and Sunday I was spending time with my family. Today is the first day I get to be home alone at all.

The end of the semester seems to have gone okay, but I'll wait until grades are out to say for certain. There were a few interesting things that happened in the last days of class. In Latin class, our professor gave us this wonderful quote: "If you're going to be a filthy manwhore, at least go to a prostitute." For context, he was talking about a certain incident involving Cato the Elder. Also, because he was only here for a semester, he gave us all handshakes on the last day. It was kinda sad, since he was a really fun and really good professor. In Japanese class, our professor showed us this video, which I had already seen before because one of my friends showed it to me. It was still especially funny, though, because she keep saying 「違う、違う」 throughout the video. And in Greek class, in the very last class, our professor was talking about some job interview he had and was saying that he would pretend to be Italian and speak with a ridiculous Italian accent, which led to him running around the classroom while singing the Mario song. He also did the song that plays when Mario gets an invincibility star.

On Wednesday last week, I learned about the sale on CDJapan and bought the P3 and P4 2011 calendar and Arashi's All the Best 1999-2009 album. So of course THE NEXT DAY preorders go up for the Scene tour dvd. :/ I still preordered it from YesAsia, of course. (I had a coupon to use ^_^) Well, my order from CDJapan is arriving tomorrow! Since I picked the FedEx shipping option because it was the fastest and was surprisingly, less expensive than some of the other shipping options, I got a recorded message from them today telling me that it should be coming tomorrow (which I already knew from the tracking). And on the way home, my parents took me to Mitsuwa! I ate katsudon and bought more magazines. <3

So one of my friends lent me a book, Clockwork Angels, during Thanksgiving Break, and since I didn't have time to read it all before leaving for winter break, she's letting me borrow it over break too. I was reading more of it yesterday, and I think I especially love the dialogue. I'm getting close to halfway through it, and it's a big book, so I'll probably finish it quickly. She also recommended some Harry Potter fanfiction for me to read. I don't read much in that fandom usually, so it should be interesting, lol.

So I had a moment of freaking out over something that really shouldn't freak me out just now.

I had been doing the thing where I pace around thinking about things because I'm restless and think all the time when I was shocked to realize that I had been thinking about imaginary, hypothetical conversations in Japanese.

Two weeks since that intensive course and it still affects my daily life. I should be happy about this, but I'm too busy being freaked out. It might be partially that I feel like I'm not good enough at Japanese yet that I should be imagining up hypothetical conversations like that, but 　if I think about potentially talking to a Japanese person enough, it only makes sense that I should be speaking in Japanese.

Or something.

Just now, I watched the first episode of Sengoku Basara Two. Less than a minute in, I was totally engrossed. They pretty much put everything wonderful about Sengoku Basara into this episode. The music was spot on and enhanced the overall experience, the animation was beautiful, and the manliness was set to the max. I could tell that they were pulling out all the stops. (And for good reasons.) The only thing that disappointed me was that it seemed to me slightly less ho-yay filled than the previous season. Who knows, maybe they're trying to be more subtle this season. (HA, like subtle is in Sengoku Basara's vocabulary.) I know that part of why it was so awesome is because it was the first episode, but I still really hope they can keep this great momentum going throughout the season.

( slight spoilers )

Over the weekend, I watched the first episode of Shiki, and it seems to be going well so far. Considering the source material, the developers would have to seriously mess up for me to dislike it. I'll see as the story gets a chance to move on to the characters who aren't annoying. Although she might have actually been more annoying in the manga, I don't remember well.

My mom let me know that the Arashi Anniversary 5x10 Tour DVDs arrived today. <3 Lol, it's kinda weird, I asked her to email me, but she posted on my wall on FB instead. Whatever, she let me know. And in slightly less than 4 weeks, I will actually be able to watch them.

Speaking of which, I am over halfway done with this language program I'm doing. Still a long way to go, and we're starting to learn keigo. Learning verb forms isn't really a scary thing for me, but I'm mostly afraid of messing up when to use what form. T_T I may never understand how textbook writers decide what order to teach things in. If keigo's so important, why is it that it takes so long for us to get to learning it? And I'm still upset about not knowing Japanese grammatical terms. I don't even know how to speak properly about what I'm learning!

Just now I was listening to an Arashi, heard some saxophone, and suddenly got a little bit sad. AIBA!!! T_T

So yeah, I decided to give up on that hiatus. I'll still not be around much, but I realized I'd rather spend a little time checking lj daily than a lot of time checking it all at once on the weekends. I promise I'll still be a good student and go back to hiatus if I'm having trouble, but there's random stuff I feel I can only really ramble on about on lj, so, I'm here to ramble.

( Warning, the following contains some Japanese words and phrases w/out any explanation, although if you ask me, I'll probably just explain it. Also, rambling. )

Okay yeah, I'm being a bad student. BACK TO HOMEWORK.

Oh also, in case anyone was curious, I got caught up with KHR. The future arc was sure filled with... I don't even know. That was weird and a little convoluted and really weird. The actual villains were also kind of uninteresting compared to other villains in the series, too. But the other characters who appeared in that arc were pretty cool. Whatever, I'm glad it's over anyway, the new characters in the current arc seem fairly interesting.

OKAY, GOOD STUDENT TIME IS NOW, I SWEAR.

I was doing my Japanese homework yesterday, and after I had finished, I decided to look ahead a few pages to see what I would be doing in the near future. I ended up finding something that made me love the people who wrote this workbook a little.

It asks us to translate the following into Japanese: "Spock (スポック) is smarter than Kirk (カーク）."

<3 Trekkies wrote our workbook, lol. Hmmm, judging by the names, the people who made this seem to be most, if not all female. ;)