Priti not only speaks English fluidly, but she's not male. I was extremely surprised to realise that, and also very pleased. I'm a little embarassed about being pleased, but at least it's honest; I've had a lot more negative experiences with Indian men who couldn't adapt to American workplace culture (numerous) than I have had with Indian women (zero). It sounds like I'll be talking to her in person on Thursday.

To the potential detriment of my pocketbook I discovered an online source for subscribing to shoujo manga magazines. I plan to continue resisting for quite a while, however; I need to have better luck reading the manga I have now before I go on a buying spree. This might not be so insanely far into the future as I had thought, thought; Kim Allen (who told me about the fabulous Japanese class I'm taking) said something in email about renting manga from a store in San Jose, and it occurs to me that if she can do this with 3 quarters of Japanese, I might be able to start making some sense out of all the manga I already own. So that first, and then a shopping spree.

I finished my use cases this morning and, rather than leaping ahead to turn them into object diagrams, I am determinedly flicking. I caught up on vast quantities of email that have been sitting around forever, and now I'm surfing the web with some amount of happiness, although the sense that I ought to be creating object models of my use cases haunts me. Perhaps I will compromise, and read the use cases everyone else has been writing instead -- while continue to web-surf and write in here, of course.

But first, I need music. The random CD of the day is ... the soundtrack to My So-Called Life, which I bought a few years ago and have never listened to. Excellent; if I don't like it I can put it in the stuff-that-is-going-away pile. I'm feeling a strong need to reduce the amount of stuff that I currently have, so that I can get new stuff I like better -- specifically in the arena of books, music, and clothing. In what spare time? Well, as of a week from tonight Japanese II is over, and Japanese III happens on Thursdays, so for me it will be happening instead of gaming, which means I will have three glorious free weeknights every single week. Imagine that!

Hmn, this CD is actually pretty good.

I'm sort of longing for tea, but I forgot my tea ball, which limits me to what I have in bags. That's not too much of a limit; I have a lot of bagged herbal tea (almond sunset, fruit & almond), plus a box of Yamamotoyamabagged teas, which are 'teas of china and japan' -- mostly greens, with a few oolongs. But it does mean I can't work through my piles of Republic of Tea cannisters, which must be dealt with so that I can (of course) buy more tea. Do you sense a theme here? I guess a lot of my life right now is moving towards getting rid of things which no longer have meaning for me, so that I can surround myself by things that do.

All right! I have chrysanthemum tea, which is actually a pu-ergh oolong with chrysanthemum flowers. It's a bit surprising how much flavour it has, even from the bag, and it's fulfilling my tea longing nicely.

I have also acquired some work virtue, as I dug up the zipfile of the code we're rewriting and am even now peering once every few minutes at ASP, trying to make head or tails of it. Without much investigation I think I can safely say that i don't like it, but maybe this is just prejudice caused by the fact that my xemacs won't do syntax highlighting on it.

I'm listening to the My So-Called Life CD over and over and over, something I haven't been doing lately in my desire to hear more of the music I keep at work. But this one has started growing on me; by the end of the first time through there were pieces I wanted to hear again, so now it is on infinite repeat, and I am slowly getting to know the songs -- there are tracks that stick out (soundtracks are good for that, mixing so many different artists) and are starting to stick with me. It's been a while since this has happened, and it's nice.

Time to go get some work done! I'm remembering all over again how nice it is to just sit here and write and write and write all throughout the day.