I don't have one particular thing on my mind for Thoughtful Thursday, so I'll ramble about life, martial arts, French, and writing today.
WordPress is acting strangely for me today, so I'll apologize in advance for any possibly strange formatting and such. It has been deleting things after I type them...
Life
My bank accounts have all been sorted out. Unfortunately, I am not currently eligible for overdraft protection due to my currently unemployed state. It doesn't matter that EI will be paying me nearly as much as what I netted when I was working. It also doesn't matter that one pays income tax on EI. Ah well, I'll be able to eat and pay for my mortgage and my other expenses. Self employment would count if I was actually making money off of my writing or any other venture.
I think I'm getting somewhere on cleaning my condo. Some days it's hard to tell. I find something that needs to be gone through and that makes an area messier before it gets clean. This is rather like a number of things in life.
The outside of my oven is clean. I need to run the self-cleaning setting for the inside, but I have an appointment this afternoon, so it will have to wait until later. I don't think the people that owned it before ever cleaned it, so it's pretty gross looking inside.
One of the things I almost have organized is my movie collection. Any non Blue Rays are in CD wallets. They take up so much less room. The problem is that I had bought a movie I already owned. It was $5, but I don't want to get into the habit of accidentally doing that. I have a list now that has all the movies I own in it. I should probably get a real copy of Rent eventually rather than the PSP version. It's the only PSP movie I own. Hey, I should charge that thing up and play with it sometime soon. Actually, I can probably trade or sell some games, though I think most probably aren't worth much.
I'm registered with three recruitment agencies now. Hopefully, I will get a job lead soon, though it could be nice if it happens after the snow is gone. I like to hermit in the winter except for fun things like ice skating.
That reminds me. It's only about $20 to get a skating pass for the year. I should do that and get my butt out of my house as there are about 8 arenas near me, which is awesome. The canal is fun too, but not near my home at all and parking at Dow's lake gets expensive.
French
French has begun. We have a new teacher that we know only by first name. He's very different. He makes us work a lot and often leaves the room while we are completing an exercise.
I was already doing one of the things the teacher wants us to do this semester, which is reading French books to increase vocabulary. He wants us to present on the books we are reading. They can be children's books. They should be at a level for us where a 10-word sentence would have 2-3 words we don't know. Any easier, we don't learn. Any harder, we don't understand enough.
It sounds like exam is going to be very difficult, so I'm a little scared. At least the courses are inexpensive, so if I had to retake, it wouldn't kill my wallet, but I rather prefer passing classes.
He often likes to mention things that will damn us if we are taking the government exams. I write those down in case I go that far with French. My main aim has been to talk to my extended family. It would be nice to be eligible for bilingual job positions, though.
Martial Arts
I figured something out about my grip last night while I was practicing my cutting in my condo. Generally, they tell us to have our right index finger at a certain spot on the handle. But my tiny hands kept slipping as I cut. I couldn't figure out what was wrong for the longest time. Last night, I noticed something on my handle. As many might know, katana often have inserts of things like fairies and such. One on each side of the sword's handle. Near the bottom of the handle is a knot. This knot is where the left pinky rests above, on top of an opening where the manta ray skin shows, which is grippy. Well, I noticed that on the right side of the handle, near the bottom of where my doves sit, is a similar feeling knot. Instead of making sure my index finger is one finger away from the tsuba (sword guard), I'm going to try to make sure my right pinky is gripping by this knot. Hopefully, my slipping grip will go away and my cutting will improve. I'm sure it will take a bit to correct this for good, but I already feel an improvement in my grip.
Writing
I'm struggling to write this short story. I did some plotting last night. Hopefully that helps me get it written and the anthology accepts it.
Once I finish it, I'll be back to working on The Blood Waitress Club. I might still need to fix the parts I last read to my writing group. I'll have to take a good look at it.
So much to do and there never seems to be enough time!
Ciao,
R~