Notes from the crazyhouse

1. Skim milk is horrible. Awful, awful, an abomination unto mankind. Like milk-flavored water.

2. Drama of the day: PENS. Nobody has any pens and this is clearly because everybody has been STEALING THEM from everybody else. I find a box of a dozen and distribute. The reaction? "By tomorrow they'll be gone because SHE'LL STEAL THEM AGAIN." "She has seven of her own now. I promise she won't." "NO BY TOMORROW THEY'LL BE ALL GONE."

Over pens! PENS! My Easter present to this household is going to be three boxes.

Why yes, I AM up visiting my grandparents, is it obvious?

WEE bookstores

Gods preserve me from bookstores. WEE. Loot for today:

The Elephant Vanishes, a book of Haruki Murakami short stories. Murakami is a surrealist fiction author very popular in Japan these days, and I've read the titular story in translation as well as begun reading TV People in the original. I'm still torn on whether I should've just taken the plunge and bought a Japanese collection online.

Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies, a very well-written and hilarious modern grammar book that I just picked up on impulse. Crap I always wanted to know but didn't know where to look up- and would probably have been unmotivated to do so even if I had. This is actually fun to read.

And the big one, the one I actually went into the bookstore to find: Kodansha's Effective Japanese Usage Dictionary. A Japanese grammar book that's almost as heavy- and expensive- as the new Compact Nelson. Yes, really. It's gorgeous, something like 800 pages of small-print, heavily detailed explanations on when to use 気持ち and when to use 気分, or what exactly is the difference between ぜひ and どうか and なんとか and どうぞ。*fangirls*

Oh yes! In a different bookstore I picked up a small thing, Sanseido's Daily Concise English-Japanese Dictionary. It's pocketsize, likely full of words that I would mostly already know if I were going J-E, but I'm weak on E-J and it's tiny and cute and pretty and howww do you get 650 pages in a 1cm thick book? HOW. I LOVE Japanese fine-page books. They display a mastery of paper that's just never a priority in this country.

I also grabbed two boxes of pens and some Easter candy for the house, and a few CDs besides. There was a Lain soundtrack in the used music store for $7, how could I resist? Plus they had Mystery Bags for a buck each, five CDs per, so I tried my luck. Anybody ever heard of Dropbox, Uberzone, Keysha Cole, Leadfoot, or Eliza Carthy? I'll have to pop 'em in later.