Meh on the sleep front

I turned the lights out at 11 (yeah, go me!) and even skipped C-drama watching for sleep and then – I woke up an hour before my alarm and couldn’t fall back asleep. I closed my eyes again and stayed in bed for another 40 minutes but no dice.

I wrote morning pages, did yoga but had to skip meditation again. There was breakfast and a wood fire and a shower and then dishes. There was also a note from my mother-in-law telling us that my husband’s aunt will meet us Saturday at noon for lunch. I mean, we might have had plans, but okay.

I’m actually looking forward to it, even the boy will show up. But as he said, this will be a day-destroying event.

I did feel better than expected with the lack of sleep at first but kept losing time all through the day. Whoops, another thirty minutes gone and I didn’t realize.

I went to the health food store and helped a little with making lunch. Husband told me to please not cut the fennel too small so I went a bit overboard in the other direction:

I did a load of wool things, mostly socks, promised to hang them up between lunch and teaching and promptly forgot. I did remember three hours later when I had a break between students. My last student canceled and I spent the whole time sitting there starting at screens. I also finished the excellent „Violets and Violence“ by M. Kato. I can’t wait for book 4 but it will take some time.

I also started „The Watchmaker of Filegree Street“ because there is a book club on the Discord server of the German NaNoWriMo forum but now I’m unsure about the rules. Do I start it now or should I wait? And if I start it now how many books will I read before I finally read „A Court of Thorns and Roses“? I’m really curious about that one because everybody is reading it and I did like the beginning but it wasn’t really pulling me in. Also, I am currently all about M/M romance. Purely for research reasons, of course. Though I don’t really need more research to tell that the 140,000 word slice-of-life instalove M/M romance I wrote that is completely without angst or breakup doesn’t really hit the tropes. On the other hand, I do happen to enjoy that kind of story. Where the protagonists sit around, talk over food and kiss. Sigh.

I still don’t have a grip on the couple for the second book in the series, though. And should probably not think about them either because I should be proofreading Urban Fantasy. Where people sit around talking over food. Interspersed with vague magical somethings.

Anyways. There were dishes and reading and silly iPad games and tea and an episode of „Love Me, Love My Voice“ where people sit around and talk about food after cooking, interspersed with people staring longingly at each other and making music. See, there are many reviews calling that series boring but I’m really loving it. (I also love that I can actually understand the title (did I already talk about this?) in Chinese. It’s “很想, 很想你” or „Really, really miss you“.)

Oh, and speaking of Chinese, one of my students has a ‚Cobra Kai‘-hoodie and was wearing it a week ago. (What is ‚Cobra Kai‘ you ask? Well, remember the ‚Karate Kid‘ movies? It’s a new series picking up decades later. About karate which will become important later.) That hoodie has Chinese characters on the sleeves and since I might be a little obsessed with Chinese I, of course, tried reading them and, also of course, failed. I just couldn’t figure them out. I looked at them for a bit, talked to him about it (no worries, my students all know that I’m a bit weird), googled a little and couldn’t figure it out. I thought they might spell something that means ‚kung fu‘ but they looked nothing like ”功夫“ which is how you spell ‚kung fu‘ in Chinese. Or rather ‚gong fu‘ but that is due to the system of transliterating Chinese changing in the 50s.

Apparently, my brain was still mulling the whole thing over six days later because that was when it suddenly went, „I know what the first character on this hoodie was!“ And it gave me „空“ and I was all „haha, someone just put some random characters on a sweater without knowing the meaning”. Because I thought it had spelled „空夫“ which would be ‚kong fu‘ but is not a word as far as I know.

Now, I got lucky, the student was wearing the same sweater again a week later and I had to realize that the second character was not „夫“ but „手“ which looks very different but I forgive myself because I had to read it sideways on a scrunched up sleeve in a sort of calligraphy script and then remember it for six days but also, it actually did say „空手“ and also while in Chinese this is ‚kong shou‘ in Japanese it is pronounced – ‚karate‘. And, that was the moment when I remembered that the movie and series was all about karate which is, um, Japanese. Not Chinese. And those characters mean ‚empty‘ and ‚hand‘. As in fighting with empty hands. Duh.

Also, Japanese is very weird.

And also, my brain still doesn’t have a grip on time as I’m writing this. As you know, when I’m tired or exhausted I can’t shut up.

I’d tell my overactive brain to go play with itself but that usually means it keeps forgetting and messing up things. So I guess I’ll see how much focus it gives me today.