Two of my basil plants died in an unfortunate lawnmower accident

Went to a wedding for another of Z's friends this weekend. It was outside at a pretty farm, with some friendly dogs running around the whole time. Unfortunately, we all dressed for 'late August' and got very cold weather for this time of year. It wasn't so bad when we were moving around, but once we sat down for dinner and the wind picked up, those of us without jackets or blankets were freezing cold. On the plus side: good and very sweet speeches (even though I didn't know the couple); vegetarian options for dinner!; cake was co-made by groom and one of his relatives and was delicious, with lemon and poppy seeds.

When they started the music, it was originally at a reasonable volume and I thought, did I really haul earphones around all that time for nothing? And then they turned it up again, so Z and I moved to the back. And then they turned it up again, and I gave up and went for the earphones. We had a good time dancing, but I got tired of all the activity before Z did, so I wandered off to somewhere quieter to play fetch with the dogs and read fic on my phone while he enjoyed seeing his friends.

The drive back was on a much prettier route. Z and I agreed that when the pandemic ends, we really should take a day trip out to some of the places we drove by. When my parents and I went to see the eclipse a few years back, we enjoyed stopping at random small-town museums and old mills and stuff like that.

After we got home, I sent off another job application, and another today. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, I have a new data analysis job to work on, and my own stuff. I buckled down and did some work on that one persnickety coding issue yesterday, and actually made real progress on it! My two basic tests pass! The code is kind of a mess and there's something else going awry in the next test, but I was quite pleased given how difficult this problem has been.

Also got inspired on an old YOI fic I decided to finish. While I'm not signing up for Trick or Treat this year (the change + the weird vibe of new mod suddenly popping up to make an abrupt change to something that has caused a lot of dumb wank already are not for me), I did finally get a rareshipsonbingo card set:( cut for size )

Read: Finished Crazy for Kanji. Found a small mistake (word defined as 'spinning silk' really means 'spinning [any kind of fiber]' - and, relevantly to the meaning the author is trying to draw from this, most silk is reeled, which is another, entirely unrelated word). There was also a bit of weird exoticizing, and for some reason the author quoted someone saying in 1997 that Chinese character are totally on their way out. Uh, sure, that's why they added more jouyou kanji and why Chinese people still write with them. But, overall, I enjoyed it. The author's joy of kanji is infectious and such a refreshing attitude compared to how kanji usually get taught. Some of the kanji games were fun, too. I also enjoyed the section comparing Taiwanese vs Japanese signage.

It inspired me to study some radicals today. Fortunately, most of them are either obvious or I osmosed them at some point, but I never realized that ⻖meant different things on either side of the compound. Or what it meant at all. I always just called it the 'beta' radical because it looks like β.

Reading: Haven't started anything new yet, but I am trying to finish Genji before Christmas. It's not that I don't enjoy it - it's just a slow read and veeeery long. Also made a tiny bit more progress on Skate Boys in Japanese.

Reading next: I have enough new unread books that I might just pick one at random! Tokyo Ueno Station will be next in print.