Blast from the past!

Today, the internet brought me back two of my all-time favorite childhood time wasters which I thought I'd lost forever. First, on Facebook, I saw a link to Tetris. No big deal, right? There's eight million tetris games on the internet. No. This is the 1989 Tetris which I have literally played to the point of my Game Boy's batteries exploding. Complete with Russian dancers, rocket ships, and no mercy.

That made me think of this incredibly awesome, yet obscure game I used to play on my Game Boy that I foolishly traded in to get a Game Boy Color, thinking I would never want to play it again. Lies. I wanted to play it the second I traded it in and ever since. It's been years of me wanting to find this game again, but I always forgot the title, and would eventually find it again. Luckily, I have a very dedicated nerd husband who went through every obscure Game Boy Game, going only off of "It has a space ship and you have to shoot sh*t but it's like a puzzle." And amazingly, he found an online port of the NES version. May I present: Quarth.

Want to play? Yes you do. You can find Tetris here, and Quarth here. Enjoy.

Sometimes a person just needs to vent.

I know I've posted everything that's been going on in my life on Facebook, but it's almost two in the morning and for some reason I'm still awake, so I thought that I would put down everything in a blog post and go to bed. Because people have a lot of friends on Facebook, and sometime my updates get lost. In no particular order:

Health- right now, I'm in the middle of week 2 healing up from my surgery. I had an ovary removed because it got taken over by a benign fibroma. It made me very ill, and as much as I am sore, I am feeling much better and am looking forward to when I'm completely healed so that I can start exercising again. My muscles are killing me from a lack of activity followed by a burst of activity. I can't even take a shower for too long before my back starts hurting. Stupid fibromyalgia.

School- I got accept to UH Manoa (yay!) and just got the "well, we got more money from you, so I guess you're serious about coming, have a course catalog" package, and now I have to get the health form filled out, which shouldn't be that bad. But it's a new thing, and of course I'm nervous. Namely about having to drive to Honolulu every morning. It's not fun. That and I have no idea what courses to take. Jay assures me that someone will tell me, but I don't even know if I want to stick with prelaw. I haven't even started college yet and I'm thinking about changing my major.

Etsy- I've started leaning towards beading more on Etsy, but have ended up getting more business in person, maybe it's because I'm cute, but I just bought some more supplies thanks to my mom, and hope to sell some stuff, because I feel bad about Jay buying frivolous things for me, as much as he can afford them, because I'm used to being able to afford my own stuff. As much as this will change when I start going to school and will be getting a government paycheck again, I want to do my bit. I'm trying to do some graphic design work done too, but there are so many graphic design artists on Etsy, I am definitely doing more for people I know.

That's about all the ranting I'm going to do for now because anyone who reads this knows all this already, and I should probably try again to sleep. I'm not having a bout of insomnia or stressed out or anything, it's actually quite stupid in that my husband's erratic breathing patterns jar me awake. It could be because I'm a little tense.

Happy Birthday Jay!

May you have many more! <3

Introducing...

Seamus "Flopsy" McGee!

For all the Fencers Out There

As with all sports, it's a good idea to do some training on your own to keep your body in good condition and improve your skill. Here is a good workout laid out by Colin, the leader of our local salle, Salle Honolulu. Anybody in the Oahu/Hawaii area or avid fencers who will be visiting long enough to get the itch to practice, feel free to contact me for more info. Without further ado;

follow the classic pro boxing championship model: 15 3-minute rounds
with one-minute rests between each
start out simple and add one move per round
end simple: the last round is just lunging and recovering

example:
round one: advancing & retreating (varying speed and size of steps;
also include stutter-steps and body feints)
round two: add lunging (varying size of lunge and type of recover -
backward, forward, scissors)
round three: add another footwork move
and so on.

when you run out of footwork moves, add bladework moves
when you run out of moves, change from one round to the next by
visualizing (imagine an opponent), or change what you're visualizing
(imagine a different opponent)

when you fence bouts in your head, imagine winning close bouts and
come-from-behind bouts

This is also a good workout for non-fencers to build stamina and agility!

Lisez et Repetez

I'm really addicted to StumbleUpon, and came upon this page, which interested me in a dorky, linguistic way. And it made a point. Most students, including myself in middle school, when given a passage to read and questions to answer, will translate the passage first and then answer questions. This is fantastic if you're training to translate passages, but does not mark true fluency in the language (in my opinion.)

So what is true fluency? I believe it's when you can converse in a different language with no hesitations. This means there is no time to translate into English and back; imagine how awkward that conversation would be with all those pauses! If this becomes easy, as it does in most advanced classroom/immersion settings; why doesn't this extend into reading passages? I believe it's the structure of the assignments. Sure, the source material is in the target language, but the questions? The discussion afterwards?

In my opinion, if the questions of the assignment are in English, I am forced to translate. If the questions are in the target language, there needs to be no change in mindset. This still leaves room for completing the assignment without real understanding of the text- with a few simple vocab. words, you can copy and paste the answers. The burden, therefore, lies on the teacher. To make sure you understand the fine nuances of the language that disappears during translation and to increace fluency, what better way than to discuss it in the same language?

As much as I hated the language school for doing *everything* in the language we were trying to learn, it taught us more quickly (albeit in a 'sink or swim' method) and made sure that we understood written texts and not just mastered the use of a dictionary.

There. I just regurgitated an article for you all. Discuss.

Friday the 13th- Fun for the Whole Family! Mmm-hmm!

I like going to movies at the right time. For example, seeing Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th. It's just cool. Anyways, I do this, and am totally enjoying the experience. Sure, there are people talking, but it's a cheesy slasher flick. There were two people, however, that both annoyed me so much I couldn't decided who was more annoying. So, I will leave it up to you, dear readers.

Person #1: Sat directly behind us and started to make grunty noises. You know the ones. "Mm. Mmm mmm. Unh unh. Uh. " This doesn't seem annoying, but I trust you, it was. If you have experienced a Grunter, you know.

Person #2: Sat to the left of us. Decided a movie about marijuana, boobs, and violent, bloody, deaths was the perfect one to bring their *clearly* under five year old daughter to. This is clearly more morally reprehensible than Person #1, but is it more annoying? No. Unless you factor in the fact that said daughter kept crying that she was scared and asking what was going on, only to be told by her mother and father to be quiet. The cherry on the top was every time there was nudity or sex (which happened quite often) the kid's mother would very loudly shout "don't look! don't look!" Maybe I want to look, which is why I bought tickets to this movie. Maybe you should have hired a babysitter instead of taking your still potty-training toddler to a rated-R movie about someone who kills people.

Question: which is more annoying to sit next to, and why?