Archive for May, 2009
on looking French and reading for grown-ups
I’ve concluded that something about my current hairstyle (actually my current unwieldy growing out stage and attempts not to have it stick out too far or in funny directions) must look French, at least in bad light. I suppose femmes Francais d’un age certain do tend to have shorter hair. I wasn’t too surprised when [...]
corporate gobble
Crap. Athleta is becomng part of what it refers to as the “Gap Inc. family of brands”. Much as I like Gap clothing, I’m not thrilled about this, because I liked having them as a more quirky independent kind of place. Also, Gap doesn’t ship overseas either, so no benefit there for me. Though as [...]
argh
11:00 PM: I decide not to turn on the dehumidifer we’ve been using, out of curiosity to see if it really makes that big a difference to the A/C. 4:15 AM: I wake up briefly, notice the air conditioner is dripping quite a lot of condensation into its drip pan, and it sounds like its [...]
eek!
I’ve always kind of liked the look of lots of eyeliner, only not on me. This is why.(I think you need big eyes and big lips for black eyeliner and red lips to look right. I have small features.) On the other hand, goth Hallowe’en costumes are easy for me.
your assignment for today:
Convey the message “If you spend NT$300 more [~US$10] you can get a VIP card worth 10% discount,” using only a calculator and body language. Yeah, me neither. But the clerk at Burt’s Bees managed it, after we established that I speak only a few words of Chinese and she speaks scarcely more English. People [...]
YA recs
I’ve been reading a lot of young adult books lately. I love them at any time, because I think they are not afraid to address essentials that adult books dance around, but I also notice that the more going on in my life, the more I tend to read simpler or less grim books – [...]
out of the sense-dep chamber
It’s astonishing how traumatic a couple of hours without the internet can be, especially when it’s due to an unpaid bill, not just an outage. (Very easy to make mistakes when you can’t actually read your bills. It wasn’t clear if we mislaid this one or it got lost in the mail. I got my [...]
Hmm.
It’s 10:45 and I’ve just gotten home from the bar. (Dry-land dragon-boat practice – more useful than you’d think, but not enough to count as exercise. Up at 6 tomorrow to work out or take a rest day after only one workout day? Hmmm
progress
The mirroring worked, yay! But the posts showed up with comments disabled on the other sites. I’ve now changed the settings so they should be allowed – after all the whole point of my being on LJ and DW was that I like the community and conversation there.
second try at cross-posting
First one didn’t work, not sure why. I think this is a new record for me in Taiwan: *four* social engagements in a week. Three are with the same people, though: one regular monthly dinner, one indoor dragonboat practice, one real dragonboat practice. The fourth is my boss’s wife coming over so I can demonstrate [...]