There have been myths about the moon. People have thought that sleeping outside under the full moon would make you go crazy, and there are some creatures, like werewolves, associated with the moon. Words have come from the moon, too, like the words lunatic and lunacy.

I fear that my mother may have some problem with her eyes or mind. On Thursday night, we went outside to look at the sky and try to spot the moon because of an astronomy lab I need to do for my science class. After walking around my backyard and looking in different directions, I finally found the moon. It looked rather unusual; The white, sunlit crescent shape was on the bottom of the moon, not on the left or right (which I had expected).

My mom was staring at the moon rather strangely, and later on, she asked me, "Did you see other white things? Not the part at the bottom?" I said no, I had not. I wonder if perhaps her eyes were going bad or if she was hallucinating. (Well, people do see things in the moon, like animals and men and things like that) Nearsighted people don't usually see funny things when they don't have their glasses on, do they? Is this a result of old age or stress?

Time really is passing, after all, and my parents aren't getting any younger - nor is my aunt's family. Once a week or every other week, my mom and her younger sister will talk over the phone or on Skype. This week my aunt talked a little about her son and his birthday party. She and my mom also discussed their countries' policies about retirement and things like that. (She lives in France, and things work differently there.) I guess after years of working, you're counting off the days (more like years) until you get to settle down.

My cousin has already turned ten years old. And I myself will be going on to high school next year. How did this time pass so fast? It feels like so long ago now, the time when my aunt, uncle, and cousins came to our house for a while. Back then, things were really different. I had still been in elementary school, and there wasn't that much to worry about it. In fact, probably the only thing that bothered me at all was the annoying behavior of my cousins. Both of them were rather picky, if you ask me. One of my cousins wanted to eat ramen noodles, so we cooked her some (I think it was just one of those Maruchan ramen packs, where you get a pack of dried doodles and you put them in hot water), but she didn't eat that much. (I hope her appetite has improved. I know her brother has quite the healthy appetite. He even ate more than I did at a pizza place, which is impressive.) At the time she was quite prone to crying when something upset her, though the last time I saw her she was a bit better in that regard (I suppose people do mature somewhat with age).

Well, my pet fish have been aging too, and so there aren't that many of them left. We used to have guppies, once upon a time, but they are all long dead. Now there are only two fish in the smaller tank. We have three fish in the other tank. The big tank, where the three koi are, is by far the most dangerous. If you open the tank, you will see the lid is only propped up on one side, and even that part is unstable. So there has to be another person standing by to hold up the lid AND hold up the black part under the lid that fits in a slot directly over the water and fish.

I was feeding the fish the other night, with my mom holding up the lid. My mom said that I was dropping the food in the wrong place since it ended up landing on one of the fake plants, and the fish have really bad eyesight (and don't have much brains either) so they don't notice the food. I got some kind of fish tank cleaning rod and was going to use it to poke the fake plants so the food would fall down onto the bottom of the tank, where the fish would have an easier time getting to it. Unfortunately, my mom tried to reach for the rod I was holding and in the process lost her grip on the lid of the tank, so it crashed down and bonked us both on the head.

For a while my head was sore, but as I am accustomed to such injuries, I soon forgot about it. However, my mom was still having a headache later on. I wonder if this is a result of old age. Since you can't really make new brain cells, and you're weaker in general, it's harder when you do get injured. I hope it won't give my mother any permanent head damage. But I fear it is already affecting her. She forgot that I would be staying late after school to take a French test and panicked, thinking some tragedy had befallen me. (Luckily, nothing of the sort had happened.) I probably should have reminded her in the morning, but still, I would have thought she'd remembered. This is a very bad sign indeed. If she can't remember something her only child has to do...Imagine if she had a lot of them, like seven children.

Labels: age, appetite, brain damage, cousins, crescent, danger, eyesight, fish, france, illusion, lid, memory, moon, picky, ramen, relatives, retirement, tank, time, young

I have a different PE teacher now because of the trimester change. I had him last year, in the third trimester, so I am familiar with him. I thought I would be fine again, but last year, when I first started off, I was really tired from his class, and the same thing is happening this year. I'm started to get used to it, but it'll probably take a while before I'm completely accustomed to the hard work again (this teacher isn't mean or anything, it's just that we do more extreme stuff in his class than the teacher I had the trimester before).

When we run a regular, four-lap mile around the track, it's called a Smile Mile in his class. Since we do regular exercises before running the mile, I'm always tired out when it's time to run the mile. So my times have become slow again - I got 8:28, when my recent times last trimester were nearly 30 seconds faster. So I am not too pleased with that, because even when I try to run fast it still isn't enough, what with shoulder and gut cramps...

But then there are times when I am angry at myself for having a weak-minded attitude. I should definitely try my best. You can never say you're already good enough, you have to keep trying. I have to continue to do my best until I run this whole mile smiling. It's not like I dislike running. This year I have discovered that I like to run, as long as there is not a huge amount of pressure on me.

After all, I was able to help someone else just a little bit last trimester. If you want to improve your time or keep a steady pace, then look for someone who runs faster than you, but not too much faster. You could just follow them the whole time, and it might make your time better. One of the students in my class last trimester ran with me to improve her time (with my permission :p ). My strategy for running is to start out with a slow pace, then speed up gradually or maintain the pace, and in the last lap, I try to spend all my energy and sprint to the finish. It's just what works for me. Some folks prefer to sprint on the first lap instead.

My classmate said her time got a bit better this trimester, and it's kind of nice to feel like you've done something. "A good deed is a reward in itself" or whatever the saying was...Not that I built a house for low income people or something. (My dad did, but then he got sick, probably because he was sweating and he wasn't dressed for the cold, or something, and then my whole family got sick.)

Speaking of the cold weather, the squirrels are making their preparations. I think squirrels are hibernating animals, so they have been eating like crazy to prepare for sleeping until springtime. They robbed my backyard of fruits, like the figs and the persimmons. And now the squirrels that live near me are chubby as can be.

I wonder if that added weight means they can't run as fast. Some time ago, I saw a squirrel on the road. It was pretty gruesome, as the squirrel was actually sort of flattened, it smelled a bit funny, and there was some blood. The squirrel must've been hit by a car. Ouch, what a painful way to die.

It seems squirrels elsewhere don't have as much to eat. The squirrels at my piano teacher's apartment were more normal-looking. Probably they have to work hard for their food, instead of having fruit practically at their doorstep, waiting to be picked.

Oh yes, and I just heard recently that my cousins will both be taking piano class. Originally my younger cousin wanted to learn piano, but then her brother decided he wanted to learn too. So now they have a piano and will be taking lessons. They're already having lessons that are an hour long...My mom said to my aunt that it's not good to do that, as young folks have a short attention span. I mean, when I started out piano, I only had half-hour lessons with the teacher, and my lessons are still only forty-five minutes long.

Labels: car accident, cousins, death, exercise, fruit, hibernation, house, improvement, low income, overweight, PE class, piano, running, smile mile, squirrels

Does it make sense to you? It didn't to me at first. I was doing my French homework today, and it said, "Moi, j'adore le saucisson. Avec du pain et du beurre, miam, miam!!" (It really did have two exclamation points. Talk about excited over food. Though of course, cuisine is one of the finer points of life, as I was watching the Food Network recently, The Next Iron Chef and stuff like that)

English translation: Me, I adore sausage. With bread and butter, yum, yum!

I tried it out in Google Translate just to be sure, and "miam, miam" means "yum, yum". Very interesting. Next time I go to France I'll see what kinds of things my cousins say when they're eating. (Funny, but the word for cousin - the female cousin, mind you, not the male - is pronounced like cuisine)

Oh, but I have been meaning to talk about Google Translate, and Wikipedia. I often use Google Translate if I can't figure out what a word is in French (luckily, they are often similar to English words, so you can guess at some of what you don't know). The teacher said not to use translators, because she says it's a machine and can't always figure out what you're trying to say. For instance, a student once tried to say he had turkey in his sandwich but he said the word for Turkey the country instead of the word for turkey the bird.

Still, despite that, it does work pretty well, as long as you compare it to another translator, or online dictionaries, and I've been able to figure out a lot that way. I guess some things work for some people. "One man's trash is another's treasure", shall I say.

Wikipedia is often scorned as well. Teachers don't want students to use it for their reports most of the time because, basically, anyone could edit the pages in Wikipedia. In fact, one time my history teacher had a student who was apparently dumb enough to want to try causing trouble, so the student went and changed a Wikipedia page. The teacher figured out what was going on because he remembered some of the information on the page and could tell that it wasn't what he had seen in the morning. However, I do hear that there are more serious people who are dedicated to Wikipedia who would probably fix something if it was messed up. So, I don't think you need to worry about Wikipedia pages being opinionated, unless it's a delicate topic. (I mean, something like politics.)

But you know, Wikipedia is actually the most accurate encyclopedia in the world. I heard that people have done studies and it is quite accurate and up to date. I can vouch for this. There is a Japanese singer named Ceui and she didn't have a Wikipedia page before, but one day, a few months ago, I was clicking about in Wikipedia, and discovered she did have a page! Wikipedia is updated much more quickly than an old, classic, book encyclopedia, because those get remastered maybe every few years. -_-;;

My language arts teacher displayed a scary, but still funny, side of herself today. We were talking about the eighth grade standards for the writing test we will take on behalf of the district (and maybe the whole state of California too?) later on this year. She said that there is a person who advises the language arts teacher, and so my teacher heard that there was an elementary school teacher who said to her students, "You can just write the way you speak." This is not encouraged, and my teacher said, "If I ever meet that teacher, I will challenge her to a cage match, and I will take her down!" with quite a bit of vigor. It was pretty amusing, but it was a bit intimidating too.

Speaking of which, it isn't always bad to have your writing seem like you're talking to someone. I know you shouldn't be using speaking slang like "gonna" and stuff like that, but I have seen books where the main character and/or narrator of the book actually acknowledges that there is a reader, as if the character of the book is aware that they're in a book. And if you've seen books that are written to be like diaries, then certainly they aren't written so formally. It really could depend on the situation, I suppose.

Labels: books, ceui, cousins, encyclopedia, food, french, google translate, language, miam, teacher, the next iron chef, translation, turkey, wikipedia, writing style, yum

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