cxcvii) Make. Do.

Today, I took a door and an old clothes rack, and repurposed them into a standing desk/shelf kinda thing.

Grandad woulda been proud.

#136: I Prefer Draughts.

Social engineering. The trick is not to actually forcibly make anyone do what you want them to do - positive or negative.

Prepare the idea in the right way, use the right lighting and wrap it up with the right bow - often all that remains to be done is to allow the opportunities to present themselves to the right parties.

How do you know what's right? Easy! Practise makes perfect. ;)

(Otherwise known as a more pedantic, targeted version of the "Throw Everything At It And See What Sticks" approach)

And I Can Barely Talk English Too...

For all the obvious reasons, I find that I tend to use the Cantonese and Hakka parts of my brain more in my Mandarin Chinese classes. It's a lot easier to understand the concepts and grammar quirks when thinking from the perspective of their related dialects. However it does tend to drive my teacher up the wall when I try to reply quicker to improve my fluency - as my speaking then goes towards Cantonese tones and nobody understands what the hell I'm trying to say.

The exciting thing was when I could actually see those classes paying off when I went to HK last month and discovered that I could actually read a lot more around town than I ever could before. However the weird thing was that when I was reading all those road signs and ad-boards, I was actually reading in Mandarin first and translating to Cantonese second... (¬.¬)

So when I'm learning, I'll think in Cantonese/Hakka first and then figure it out from there, when I'm actually practising Chinese I'll think in Mandarin first and then convert to Cantonese...

Confused yet?!

Also, when talking to my Grandad in Hakka, I find I'm beginning to fill the gaps in my Hakka vocab with Mandarin words over Cantonese (since my Hakka is dying but I still find it more grammatically similar to Mandarin than Cantonese)...

I want my eventual 8 kids to speak Chinese too... but in the future I'm thinking they're gonna end up speaking some horrible amalgamation of Cantonese/Hakka/Mandarin/Chinglish coz their dear old papa's brain melted down and decided to just clump the whole lot into one lobe entitled "Just. Chinese." (>.<)

No More Targets.

A week later, and somehow this lazy bum and fatass extraordinaire has actually made it into routine to goto the gym after work every day... Every. Day. (O_o)

Hence the new focus and the New Mission. Which is pretty handy as I've pretty much struck out 3 times already and was coming dangerously close to repeating a Japan Yr 1.5 scenario... Yahhh that wasn't pretty. Old habits. Bleugh.

Only originally joined to be able to say that I'd fulfilled my New Years resolution at the beginning of this year.

If you're gonna do anything worth doing... init, Newt? ;)

This One's For You, Newton ♥

For my New Years Resolution I'm gonna...

...go to a gym! ...and do some of that exercise..thing.... With sweat! And everything! Reguarly!

\(^_^)/

It happens every year around this time... (¬_¬)

The trouble with being utterly cool, and having the CTU ringtone from 24 as my text alert on my mobile for the past 3yrs is that now... everytime I watch the damn show I find myself reflexively picking the phone up every 5 minutes...

Kinda like a lab rat experiment. (O_o)