Cobbly Post

The weather has been lovely lately. Since winter began unusually early and wasn't particularly eager to end, I am all the more grateful for the deep blue skies and the budding leaves on the trees.

In honour of spring, here are two photos of long since wilted flowers on our balcony. I was going to take a picture of the rather larger amaryllis as well, because it was blooming splendidly until a few days ago, but, as you see, I versäumt it (as the French say).

The following daffodils remind me of a bed of daffodils at UBC. The daffodils there were arranged in a semi-circle and, what with their gaping yellow mouths and their little green arms thrown up in horror, they looked for all the world like witnesses to a crime.

On a completely different note . . . Now that the Japanese course has begun, I've been learning kanji again. I'm being a bit more sloppy about it than before, because I don't really want to memorize all the readings each time, even if it would be better (and easier in the long run) to do so. My current approach consists of learning how to write some words using kanji, then adding these new words (in hiragana) to a slowly growing list, with which I test myself whenever I have the time and inclination.

A handy tool for the testing is the whiteboard that my mother ordered some weeks (months?) ago.

A few remarks: First, the "nigeru" character is there (at the very left, third from the top, beside the problematic "kin" of "kinkyuu"). Second, you'll note that one of the characters near the bottom right has a box around it. That's because I'd forgotten what the left half of it looks like. Third, I didn't write most of the words out completely, because that would have meant writing some characters (like the "sei" in "seiji", "seifu" and "seitou") out several times, and it would have taken up rather more space (especially with the okurigana, which somewhat ruin the aesthetics in any case).