Honey honey!

It's the middle of the night and I can't sleep - why not write a blog!

I mentioned last time that I was adjusting to a shiny new job - I now work full time! It's coinciding nicely with bouts of exhaustion and stomachaches. (Sarcasm.)

I work for a local sustainable honey company! I technically work under the apiary (but I am still, ironically, afraid of bees) - the same as my brother. He's a pretty helpful coworker to have, too. Especially when I was hired to be friendly and sell honey and not necessarily to have upper body strength.

I do honey tasting demos a lot - it's a small and fairly new company, so we like to try and get the word out. It's very popular with kids. Free sugar!

This one was very boring and the table kept getting rearranged and recorded so I had something to do.

I also work on the farm with labeling, deliveries, and lots and lots of sticky cleanup.

Labelling...

A lot of the work is repetitive and not terribly exciting. Especially when your honey crystallizes and refuses to look nice for sales. But it's a job I enjoy, for the most part, and lets me continue to take hula and buy my own food. And gas. Sigh...

Speaking of hula, my halau was accepted into the Panama Pacific International Exposition! It's the centennial celebration of the 1915 World's Fair, and apparently it's a big deal. For me it means my skirt will be taking up half my closet for another year....

A hui hou!

What do I eat??

As you may know, I am allergic to dairy. I'm not technically allergic, but it's close enough to be important, and not something I can take lactose pills for.

Recently my stomach has been bothering me with a vengeance. It's been over a month, and it has made me tired, very irritable, and lazy. Something must be done! So I am cutting soy out of my diet, just to see if that will help (I already can't drink soymilk so it wasn't a random choice).

Soy, I have found out, is in everything. Bread. Mayonnaise. Crisco. Butter substitute. Coffee creamer. Peanut butter. Oreos. Cooking oil. Soy sauce (Horrors!). And since I am taking this huge and drastic step out of unwilling desperation rather than a well-thought-out health jaunt, I am not making healthy homemade substitutes to these foods. I am mostly subsisting on natural peanut butter and fried-but-not-in-soy potato products in my first week of my shiny new full-time-and-then-some job.

I'm also probably anemic, mildly protein deficient, and a little bit picky, so no soy does NOT help me.

So what do I eat?

Luckily, I have the best mom ever, who has made homemade bread, cornbread, stew, chili, spaghetti and meatballs... all guaranteed dairy and soy free. AND delicious, of course. :) I would have given up without her! I'm not sure if it's worth giving up soy in the long run, but it will be nice to know if I need to steer clear of tofu and every protein bar ever made.

Moms and peanut butter. What else do you need?

Why I love Valentine's Day

Hello!

I haven't been updating my blog. There hasn't seemed to be much of a point, considering I'm not in Hilo anymore, and nothing interesting EVER happens here. (Sarcasm. I'm mostly lazy.)

But SOMEONE has informed me she needed more blog material to read.

So far in 2014, I did a high-stakes audition with my hula group, got a part time job (selling honey... it's pretty sweet), started volunteering to work with elementary school kids in creative writing (very cool), and taking care of my baby goat-monsters. Among other things.

And now it's already February! We're in the middle/end of the Chinese New Year, the Japanese holiday of Setsubun has come and gone, and now it's time for Valentine's Day.

I have plenty of friends who celebrate with their significant others... and plenty who either violently oppose the holiday or celebrate SAD - Singles' Awareness Day. I, having been single for 22 straight years (preposterous!), can't really relate.

My favorite Valentine's Day memory is getting a box of heart-shaped cookies from my family while in Hilo. Cookies were promptly shared with my dancing group, and in return I received some AMAZING chocolate rum truffles that may or may not have had milk in them. They were worth it. (From one of the friends who use alcohol for baking rather than partying. Good friends to have.) We also used to loosely celebrate "chocolate day", which is when all the candy goes on sale on the 15th.

Now that I can't eat chocolate, I'm stuck to trying to figure out what the big deal about Love is. I can choose to enjoy a holiday about love and chocolate, whatever the history of said holiday may be, with OR without that Special Someone. (It doesn't help when your Someone is about 3,000 miles away... thus the chocolate dilemma.)

It helps being a Christian and believing that I will never be truly unloved, and it also helps to be mildly antisocial, but I am planning on enjoying myself, being cheesy, and attempting to cheer up my unhappily single friends with a barrage of chocolate, hopefully reminding them that a lack of a date does NOT make you alone in life.

In short: less drama, more chocolate and baby goats.

I also may have the opportunity to go to a Valentine's Day party for some international university students! I asked to volunteer with the local InterVarsity chapter, and they have a lot of Japanese students this year so it looks like a good fit.

Japanese tradition is for girls to give chocolate to the boys they like - or to their friends, family, and co-workers. On the flip side, White Day in March is a chance for the guys to reciprocate. I have mentioned this to Boyfriend without much success. We shall see.

:) A bientot!

November, apples, and writing

It is officially November! Halloween has come and gone, with very little fuss. I made applesauce dramatically and did a little pumpkin dance. I enjoy Halloween mostly because I like the color orange. And spiders. And black cats. And not zombies.

We went to Apple Hill this past weekend and bought apples. 40 pounds of apples, I believe. Apples are the candy of the fruit world; which is good, seeing as I didn't get any Halloween goodies.

There's a very small dent in the apple stash now.

This November I am going to be participating in the National Novel Writing Month. You can find out more about it here: NaNoWriMo website

Basically, you write a novel (50,000 word one, to be exact) in 30 days. A bit daunting, especially to one who specializes in short stories.

I attempted it last year after being roped in, but between work and school I barely made 10,000 words - which is an achievement, but there are not many of those words I would consider book-worthy.

This year I have no school, no job (yet!), and time to properly procrastinate. There is also an upcoming trip and a large amount of apples. Hmm. This year I'm expanding on a short story from class, which makes plot a little easier but is also frustrating after painstakingly condensing the story to be SHORT.

I figure if I blog about it, I'm committed.

Tally ho!

Job hunting!

Well! My post-graduation summer is mostly over (although since I don't have school as a cutoff anymore, I can laugh at everyone else bemoaning the 'end' of summer and go by the calendar for once) and I still don't have a job. I have a sort of on-call thing that has resorted so far in a lovely day of bottling honey (sticky), but only because the main worker injured herself, and I'd prefer that not to happen very frequently.

So right now I have no job. I have been rejected officially from one, at which I am mildly offended and vaguely proud, similar to my very first rejection letter for my fiction story. (It wasn't what they were looking for, which I can believe, because I don't think it's the kind of story that anyone really looks for. It does have my teacher's approval, though, which is good enough for me.)

I wanted to work at Starbucks, and that didn't happen. That's okay. Being surrounded by that much dairy probably isn't the best thing anyway. I DO still really want to work at the Japanese restaurant. Hire me! I know my Japanese food! Just ignore the height and the gray eyes!

Grad school is looking more and more appealing. However.

Hula is keeping me (mostly) sane for now. We have a festival in Napa coming up that should be very educational and a lot of fun. I get to make my own kihei and chant for ceremony AND volunteer with all the musicians. Yayo!

Happy sort-of almost fall!

'Aukake

Hello! It's August. I just logged in to see my reading list of blogs had been deleted. I was affronted.

I haven't posted much, because I've been mildly ill off-and-on, hot, tired, and not breathing very well. That is pretty typical summer but doesn't make for excited blogging times. Today I trimmed goat feet and rode my horse (who is incapable of doing more than walking, if that) and exhausted myself.

I also came back from a visit to Hawaii!

Yes, yes, I did just leave, but my friend and swing dance mentor invited me to her wedding, which was lovely and beautiful and full of dancing, and I hopped over to Hilo to visit friends (including Boyfriend) and stomp around some more. It was very sad to leave as it felt like I had only just arrived, and I'm accustomed to staying for 4 months! But I saw some friends and visited the ocean and ate poke. Not a bad trip at all.

One of my friends (who ended up, unbeknownst to me, at the wedding with me) I hadn't seen since January, as she had gone off to Semester at Sea, which is... what it sounds like, really. Something like 10 countries on a floating schoolboat. I got a postcard from Vietnam, bangles from India, and Chinese tea.

This friend is the one I jokingly say I would like to be when I grow up, and am only joking because she's younger than I am.

Her project for the trip was to make a quilt. She asked people from her different stops (including Hilo!) to write or draw their dream for the future on a square and made a quilt out of it. I helped her translate a few (LIBB!), and it was fascinating to see the different answers from everyone.

There was a man who lived in the forest and asked for more trees, several with that peculiar Japaneseness that I can always identify and never explain, some worldwide problems, and an African boy who wanted a bed. It's sobering to see the answers from Myanmar and Ghana next to the ones from the US and Japan. And I think that was precisely what she was going for.

Sort of puts my current job search and lack of plans into perspective. Hah!!

Summertime!

Long time no blog!

I have successfully graduated from the University of Hawaii with a double major in Linguistcs and Japanese Studies with a minor in English. Hooray!

There's not actually a diploma in it yet. Start out in life with a little disappointment.

I am also ensconced back home, recovered from battles with strep and heaven knows what else, and playing with goats

Who are you?

But that is not important. I have no idea what I'm going to to with my life, I have no job so far, and with all my spare time I may as well update my blog. I have reports on things that happened months ago that I never got around to

In the meantime I have a few words to say about Grammar.

Not grammar, Grammar. Especially Grammar nazis, although that's really a terrible term and I'm surprised people who are so PC in other ways still use it. Grammar correction is perfectly fine with me. Grammar overcorrection is a little silly. If someone can get there point across with out proper punctuation, and posibly spelling... well, so what?

I have the double (dis)advantage of being a linguistics student rather than an English student and also being an ESL teacher. Linguists don't usually tell people what to say or how to say it, we'd rather observe and surreptitiously take notes. (At least the nerdy linguistics I hang around with.) I especially find text-speak fascinating, as even the most eloquent of people can change their entire discourse between actual writing (emails, letters, documents, essays...) and texting, because it's closer to speech, which doesn't pay much attention to grammar and punctuation.

Or does it?

Being around ESL speakers for a while, it's become apparent that it's bad to correct every speck of improper grammar all at once. And my helpful tutor training informed me that correction itself isn't going to fix the problem, explaining it is. Besides, "you are my adoration" in a birthday card is really awesome. I'll take it.

(I may be slightly defensive because I am too impatient to correct myself while texting, and idk is just so much more convenient to type.)

I will now get off my tiny soapbox and finish cleaning my room. Carry on.