Refreshed: time to make $$ + learn!

Ahhhh. Well, I just returned (Monday) from a vacation with my family in Yosemite, California. The whole time, I didn't really feel like we were in California! Partly because California isn't one of the places I know very well. I mean, I don't even see it on TV and places. I don't really know much about it....

Anyway, it was BEAUTIFUL! I have never been to a place like Yosemite before. I was stunned with the surreal-ness and the weirdness. Every day, we would travel around Yosemite Valley in tour buses or shuttles to get to the store (I bought ear-plugs, because my family sleeps loudly and we had only ONE ROOM (: ) Anyway, the cliffs walls around the valleys are HUGE! 3,000 feet up, actually. Unless it was 300. Which would be ridiculous. Heh heh. It must be the former.... There was El Capitan (El cap-i-TAN, a Spanish word,) and Bridalveil Falls, and Half Dome... well, those are places I still need to visit.... But each day, we (finally) prepared ourselves for a trip outside, and then we took a hike in some direction or other! It was glorious, and tortuously, tiring-ly painful. (I would have lost weight, but I mostly did the opposite of undereating.) I got a LOT of pictures.

We also had a LOT of fights. Mom and me, Teddy, and me. Daddy and me had more constructive conversations than anything, though. (More later on that.) Our terrific height above the valley floor and the sharp rocks that detailed every possible descent, which was mostly vertical, made the normal tension produced in our arguing words feel like electricity buzzing in our veins. However, toward the end of the trip, we mellowed out. I don't think it was all me, since I wouldn't... want to take all the credit for our fights... hee hee... ehhh. But anyway, I decided I should be more like Angelique, with her mellow attitude towards others, and forgiveness, and acceptance, and camaraderie instead of my usual defensiveness and... I'm discovering slowly this week--pride? I need to learn how to accept other's help. It's like Orihime says, this doesn't have to do with how I feel--that they don't trust me--what it REALLY means is they love me stronger than they want to let me do everything myself. It's not an issue of distrust, but love. I need to give in to them a little more when they try to help me too much. I've been so afraid of my lack of self-control that I've tried to take too much.

I can't solve all the problems, but I can do my part.

We went to see the giant sequoia trees, and WOW, ARE THEY MASSIVE!! I'll remember that part of the trip more strongly than other parts, because it was so unique. Those trees... they define, mold--they are rocks. Rocks in time...? By living so ridiculously long, they have the ability to stand outside of time. (My belief is in Creationism, not evolutionism, so I see the world as 6000-ish years old, not millions. So, when I see a tree that began its life 2,000 years ago, I am stunned. That is a long time ago. Just imagine-- those centuries, 100, 200, 300 years passing by it, slowly, and fast, and rushing~! It made me feel like I was looking into the past, except everything remained in color, and it was weird. There was a lovely recording we listened to as we bumpled along in a semi-truck cab pulled us down the Mariposa grove sightseeing road, "us" comprising the tour, jiggling and jolting in a funny trailer contraption that reminded me strongly of a theme park roller coaster-- not on train tracks--but wheels. I listened to the Japanese language track for a while before I switched to English again. That was fun, too.

There was a lot of Asian-decent or Asian tourists there in Yosemite. I was fascinated and newly motivated to learn Japanese. I snatched a few It is quite a spot for visiting--there were so many people there of so many nationalities-- especially, I noticed people speaking French, something akin to German, British accents, something tinged with Irish or Scottish, Spain-style Spanish?, and Indian?, but especially Japanese. I was walking past some other-language speakers in the morning, and I heard a snatch of what might have been, "Oh-hio-gozi-mas" which is the incorrect English spelling but correct pronunciation for Japan's "Good Morning". I was so excited! Which is silly. :) But I was fascinated and... so... jealous?

Now I'm learning Hiragana. Well, slowly. I try to do too many things at once, I think. I'm trying not to do that, but I still don't have a handle on it. It's dumb, because when you try to do ten things instead of five, you don't get a thing done at all. Hiragana I'm learning today looks like this:

あ (a)
い (i)
う (u)
え (e)
お (o)

I wrote them out in a notebook. It matters which lines you draw first (strokes). The pronunciations are obviously important to get correctly, so I go to The Japanese Page to hear the audio. Wikipedia tells you how to correctly do the strokes, including the order and the direction.

Well, I have to go clean my room! Actually, the downstairs living-room, because I took all the boxes from my room to the living room in order to clean my room of dirt, and rearrange the furniture to make room for a couch my mom is replacing. I'm excited I get a couch, but it's slow going with the cleaning. It's a big mess, and I brought all my books, clothes, and miscellaneous junk home. There is a LOT of stuff, partly because I already had a lot of stuff in my room from my childhood years. Aaaargh.