Ochazuke on rainy Sunday

Rainy Sunday. I didn't go out, but not because of the rain. I love the rain and always have. I have a perfect pair of moss green rain boots and a cute polkadot umbrella, but that's not the only reason why I love the rain. I love the rain for many other reasons. I like the sound of rain hitting my umbrella while marching in the puddle with my rain boots and feeling epic. I like watching the rain outside the big window from my bed and pondering random things. And of course I like listening to the rain when I'm dosing off at night.

I woke up around noon. I wasn't planning on sleeping in today, but I stayed up until 4am, watching mike and other speakers at the HTML5 conference in Japan live on UStream, so I guess I was pretty tired. I only had some cold rice from last night in the rice cooker, so I decided to make some ochazuke. Inside the shelf, I luckily discovered some homemade pickled ume that mom had sent me before, so I sprinkled the ume flake over my ochazuke and poured genmai green tea on top. That was such a brilliant idea. The pickled ume certainly added a nice flavor to it. I enjoyed ochazuke and felt the kind of serenity, which is usually what I gain from eating Japanese food.

There are so many tasks to be cleared away from my To Do list, and the list seems to accumulate every hour or so. My first priority for the weekend was finishing Chapter 4 of my thesis. Yesterday, I was at the computer lab on campus and worked on it for 6 hours. I wrote about 10 pages and complied some data. I haven't finished the chapter, but I feel like I've accomplished for the weekend, so I didn't feel like writing my thesis today. I managed to finish grading students' essays though, which was the second priority. My students in Modern Japanese Civilization are all motivated individuals who tend to get involved in the topics. So their journals end up being novels, which is great, only if I didn't have to grade them... I'm glad I've got it done though and marked it off from the list.

Other items to be completed by early this week are...(I do this so that it becomes visual and public and I can't cheat or get away from it!):

• finish Chapter 4
• write a recommendation letter for my former student
• finish e-filing taxes (I'm so close to finishing! I just need to enter my freaking bank info)
• update the course schedule and post on Blackboard
• submit my paper to Purdue Literary Award
• buy gifts and cards to people I love & ship them
• go to Walmart (yikes!) and get a coaxial cable (so that I can watch this year's Academy Award—to see Eddie Redmayne, specifically)

Well, something like that...hopefully by my next blog entry, the list is shorter. 

Until next time.