Deanna has left the building

Deanna is currently off in SimCity Classic land. Please leave a message and she'll get back to you as soon as she's finished dealing with the latest earthquake.

(well, not right this second since I'm at work, but I played for like 5 hours yesterday. Poor Eli. I suck.)

Oh, hmm

Yeah, so it's in my own journal, I guess I should mention how wacky that Chick-Fil-A was that we saw. On our way to Rudy's, actually, I was remarking how I wanted to take a picture of it, but there just was no good vantage point to do so. I mean, even with a wide angle lens, it'd just be impossible from the ground to really convey the way the towers all surrounded the Chick-Fil-A without being far enough away for lots of cars and stuff to get in the way. I figured the best place would be the highway crossing over the road nearby, but there was no reason to go up there and no shoulder on the highway anyway, or something.

I'm thinking, actually, that part of why I started playing Simcity again is from watching everyone play Age of Empires all weekend. It seems like a similar game, except things are much more static in Simcity, I think. Well, I play on easy level, that is. I bet if I played on hard level and had a large city, it'd be a lot more of a pain in the ass to keep track of all the stuff and disasters and whatever. My main problem right now is trying to figure out how to slow down the computer enough to make the game reasonable - usually I pause the game to build stuff and then let it go ahead.

Google makes me worry

I lost the URL for the book list for the 日本語能力試験 (the Japanese Language Proficiency Test - I wonder if that Japanese text will even come out), so I searched on google and found all of these pages abotu the test, complete with percentages of how many people pass every year, etc. It seems that the test I am taking, the san-kyuu (Level 3), gets passed by about 35% of people taking it outside Japan. I hope I read that page wrong. I mean, you only need to get 60% of the stuff right to pass, and... ugh. And we only have like a month left to study, really. I really want to pass, so my studying Japanese at CMU will at least culminate in something. I started too late to earn a minor, so this will have to do. Assuming I pass.

The good thing is, I found a great site to study kanji on. Now I just need to get a hold of the general study guides for the test.. tonight I'll sit down on amazon.co.jp and type in some ISBNs and see what I come up with. The other great thing is, I seem to know 90% of the kanji for Level 3... I just need to brush up on a few and learn the few that I don't know. I feel bad for Carl and Oren - it seems you need to know like five times as many for the Level 2 test.

The other bad thing is, the listening section will probably kill me. I'm not sure how to study for that. I have my tapes from Japanese classes at CMU, and Carl is getting Level 2 CDs, so maybe those will help. I dunno.