hey all,
Very excellent weekend. I finished watching Shutter Island and chatted with a friend Saturday morning, and then headed up to Tokyo to meet up with Michi. We didn't see each other at all last weekend, as I worked on Saturday and we both had colds. So this weekend was the first time we'd gotten to spend more than 2 hours together in two weeks.
We made a decent dinner of vegetable soup and yakisoba (fried noodles), and talked about A Song of Ice and Fire,the first book of which she is now about half way through...This actually makes me really jealous. In English I can get through one of these books in a couple of days, given enough time to read each day. But it has taken me the better part of 5 months to get through the first book in Japanese, and she's gotten through half in about a month.
Anyway, we also got around to the topic of baby names, somehow. No, that's not a hint or clue, but especially with my economic situation seeming to improve it is a topic that's come up. The funny thing is that we came back to A Song of Ice and Fire for this as well: there are actual attested fans of the series who've named a son or daughter after a character from Mr. Martin's excellent fantasy series, and if I had a daughter, I couldn't think of a better name than Daenerys or Dany for short.
Today we went indoor rock climbing, as there was a typhoon yesterday and the weather was still not too great today. We both did pretty well. Michi has been going bouldering after work almost every night this month, and she even took a private lesson outdoors earlier , like I did when I first started climbing. She can now climb some 5.10a's and 5.10b's, but her reach is a little short and sometimes her weak left hand holds her back. Still, it took me 5 years to reach the 5.10a mark, so who am I judge? I didn't break any records, but I did a couple 5.10a's and 5.10b, and finished with two 5.10d's. I almost completed a third, but I smashed my knee trying to pull myself over the last ledge at the end, and that really took the fight out of me.
I've been watching talks on TED recently, and I thought I'd share two here.The first is really brilliant, and the second is pretty interesting.
Cheers,
