partly cloudy with occasional precision

April, month of green leaves, fluffy white clouds, and surprisingly little rain.

Seeing S. must inspire me to write, because I saw her for the first time in six weeks this past Friday (she'd been out of the country), and now here I am, neglecting the homework I should be doing to type into this little window. It was good seeing her; we were both a little awkward at first, but as the afternoon went on we loosened up and start laughing and teasing one another over coffee and a slice of slightly sour peach pie. Every time I take on of these breaks from studying Japanese my fingers forget how to form the characters, but it came back surprisingly quickly. My vocabulary did, too, and S. complimented me on that, which felt nice.

Four weeks from today I will be entirely done with classes (I'm trying to get my undergraduate degree in English Literature) until August, which means I'll have almost three entire months to cultivate myself in whatever way I choose. There are many things I'd like to read, many things I'd like to write, and quite a few things I would like to do. The challenge for me is always to structure my time so that it doesn't vanish in sleep and lazy afternoons of half-heartedly playing computer games. There is nothing wrong with either sleep or games, but I want to do them with intention, because they are the things that my body or mind or heart want and not because I fall into them without meaning to and can't figure out how to escape. I waste too much time in the true sense of wasting it, doing things I don't want or need to do because I cannot figure out what I do want or need. Every vacation has been getting better, more focused, more satisfying; I hope this summer will be better still. Perhaps in this space I'll brainstorm some about things I'd like to do, or might like to do, and see what schemes for arranging my time I can imagine.

One definite scheme: to photograph things (with my newly functional digital camera) and post the photographs here. I bought the cable my camera needed, so now all the pictures from my honeymoon & other travelling are on the computer. I could share them, if I wanted to. Do I? Another thing to muse on.

nihon no hana

Last week S. and I went for a walk downtown and looked at all the flowers. It was warm, in the low 70s, and a lovely day for a walk. We had fun discussing the various flowers, matching S's Japanese names with my English names. I recognise a lot of the flowers from where I grew up, but not many around here.

The tree to the right (taken at random from the Flickr photostream of lithoglyphic, who I know nothing of other than that she takes lovely pictures) is a mokuren, which in English is a saucer magnolia. They're everywhere right now, budding and blooming, shedding thick, waxy petals onto sidewalks and lawns. S. said that they have a beautiful fragrance, but the one we found downtown was too tall for us to sniff -- despite jumping a few times to try to reach the lowest flowers.

Searching the web this evening, I found a wonderful page of photos of Japanese flowers. Now I know what Japanese peach blossoms look like, and the boke (quince) blossoms are lovely.

Maybe by next week I'll have made my camera functional again, and can take some photos before the wind blows all the petals away. There's a white sakura by the church downtown that's so perfect it could be a painting.

why a blog?

I'm really not sure. Maybe it's just a side effect of early spring (here in Northern California it's already starting) -- the sakura are blooming, so are the plum trees, and there are yellow daffodils by the library and white-and-gold ones in front of the houses downtown. There are pink magnolias, too -- I think they're technically called saucer magnolias, but S, my friend from Japan, calls them 'mokuren,' which is a beautiful name. I always feel a lot of energy at this time of the year, the desire to do and make things, even when (like now) I'm so busy with classes that I don't really have any time to make an effort in other areas.

A blog is a nice way to create and express, and a way to be ... public isn't exactly the right word. It's just that there's a difference between expressing myself privately, in a journal, or semi-privately, with my husband and our friends, and trying to describe my life and thoughts and feelings to a wider & unknown audience. Even if nobody reads this (and of course I hope that people will), the feeling behind putting it here is a different one, and seems to satisfy my springtime restlessness, at least a little.

naniiro desu ka?

A first post is rarely a very interesting thing (unless, of course, one spends a lot of time on it), but it has to happen sometime, and is a good way to decide if one likes one's template and so forth.

Expect this space to contain thoughts about books, knitting, cats, marriage, academia, tea, food, coffee, the Japanese language, anime and manga, music, Asian dramas, more books, the seasons, and many other things which I'm not thinking about right now.

I'm not a very pink person, really, but right now I'm waffling between the scribe template (which is a nice parchment colour) and 'Thisaway Rose,' which as one might expect is fairly pink. By the time you read this, you'll probably know which one I picked.