neko!

Ooops, it's now October 1st. Which means somehow September was completely blog-free... how did that happen? I'm sure I was greatly missed. ;)

When I last left you, I was previously interviewing for a large financial corporation. You know the kind, rediculous salaries and even more rediculous working hours. I was on my fifth (fifth!!) interview, at which point I had met maybe 11 people, who all seemed to approve of my humble self. But suddenly an order came from the heavens ( er..the American head office) which declared headcount to be a problem in these turbulent times and to not hire any new people!! ..so, for better or for worse, I was not asked back to the 'trick interview'. Ce la vie.
Don't worry though faithful readers, it looks like I will most likely be employed soon. And until that day I am being a very good housewife. I had better get a job soon, because the housewifelyness is creeping in and infecting my SOUL. You know you have a problem when you actually *get excited* about your prefecture introducing a plastic recycling program.

Besides the garbage sorting, (which is no joke a full time job!).. I have been keeping busy with...

*Japanese.
I'm studying for the Japanese Language test Level 1, which I am very likely to fail as I still have problems with newspapers. Those sneaky chinese characters still trip me up, even after 7 years of exposure. Wow, it's been awhile! But I passed level 2 so I gotta study for something... unfortunately there's no 1.5.

*Jobhunting (but that's boring so I will overlook it)

*Enjoying the geeky media available in this country.
Otaku alert! For fans of manga author Naoki Urasawa who penned the famous 'Monster', 'Yawara' and others, his 22(3?) volume masterpeice "20th Century Boys" was made into a live, hollywood budget style movie. It's the first of a trilogy. And it's awesome!! :D
To those who want to get up to speed, I found a link to translated scans of the comics, done by someone with a lot of time on their hands. Lucky!

*Adopting a stray cat
That's right. A cute little scraggly skinny calico cat lives in our neighborhood, and coerced us into giving her food (by coerced, read 'meowing','looking sad', 'being super skinny' and 'being rained on'). Finally we tried bringing her into our apartment, and she immediately made herself at home. Having gotten that far, in the few weeks that followed, she also 'coerced' us into:

*taking her to the vet and getting shots and checking for an IC chip (there was none)
*researching the best kinds of cat food. Note: none are available through easy means, and so we gave up and are feeding her Friskies, which is according to several sites, a 'bag o' crap'. At least she likes the stuff.
*Making her a cat house/jungle gym thingie.
*Being dissapointed she never uses the jungle gym thingie.
* taking her to the vet for her 'squinty eye', and paying $80 for treatment.
Oh Cally, you know how to make our purse-strings sing!

My mother in law thinks that the cat is a sort of surrogate baby, which is such a mother-in-law thing to think. (Can you tell she wants us to have kids right away?)
Well, maybe the cat is sort of practice for one. I expect a kid would be right there along the lines of messiness, hungriness, adorableness, expensiveness, but maybe multiplied by a factor of about a hundred. ;) If you don't hear from me by November, just remember, I am feeling guilty on the inside.
Chao!

*UPDATE*: Here's a picture demonstrating Cally's saccharine sweetness :)