I just went from a 6 to a 4. This is a bit of a surprise, since I stopped going to the gym a bit less than 3 months ago. Since DH went to Calgary, I have no way to get to the gym easily, so we froze our membership. So who loses weight after dropping out of workouts?

There can only be one explaination. DH is bad for my figure. :) Here's why:

• I have extremely good self-control with snacks. I would take a small bowl of chips or 3 cookies and put the rest back in the cupboards, or eat one square of chocolate and put the bar away. But when DH is around, if I don't eat it he eats it. So we go in a bit of a competition mode and I overeat.
• We used to share a big bottle of soda pop. Now I can't drink a bottle of 2L in a week, and it's flat in 3 days. So I just don't even buy the stuff.
• He likes pasta, I like rice. When I'm alone, all I eat is brown rice.
• He puts butter on toast and corn, I like toast with cream cheese and corn with nothing. The butter never even leaves the fridge now.
• I used to eat at set "times" of the day in order to have dinner together. Now I just eat when I'm hungry, and in small amounts - when the man's around I eat more.
• He buys cereal, I buy granola. Breakfast then: cereal and milk or eggs and bacon with bread. Breakfast now: thawed fruit with granola and plain yogurt.

Most of all, I've gone completely Chinese in my home foods. I don't think pickled vegetables, dried bamboo shoots, tofu and shitake mushrooms contain any fat at all.

So plusses: I lost fat and DH might not recognize me by the time he gets back. Minuses: I need new clothes and there's a blizzard out there.

My BFF (totally) came by today and we went downtown to get sushi. There's this one place I make her go to from time to time - although she admits she loves the place herself - that has these deluxe bento boxes with enough food to feed 2 each.

Today was sashimi day though. 24 slices of fish for $14. Scallops, surf clam, salmon, white fish, tuna and octopus. Too much, really - I should've gone for the bronze combo but went tor silver instead, and honestly, it's WAY too much fish. Especially the way they slice it. Those pieces of tuna and salmon are 3/4 inch thick. I thought I might need a knife. When I dipped one in my soy sauce it spilt the soy sauce.

Curtis had enough miso soup and tempura to drown a normal tot. He loves it though - that's my boy. Eating Japanese food at 2. :)

If you're thinking about getting some cheap sushi, definitely head to Sushi on Bloor.

I was listening to 南拳媽媽's 我們 today; I usually wake up to mandopop, so it's not that surprising. But all of a sudden in this mandopopness there were two random lines of something that sounded like Cantonese. It wasn't QUITE Cantonese. It sounded like someone trying hard to make something sound like Cantonese.

So I looked up the lyrics, and there it was, randomly two lines of Cantonese. I don't get it. Why? I mean, imagine someone doing a song in American English and then throwing in Cockney for a phrase.

I mean, throwing in English has become a matter of course in Asian pop - the occasional English phrase is expected, Japanese is sometimes used, but this is the first time I heard Cantonese in a Mandarin song.

I think I'm confused.

Well, it's not like I haven't been singing or anything, I just haven't sang in public since I was 5 months pregnant with Curtis. It's not that I don't want to. I just can't imagine lugging a 2 year old to concerts. That's just too much work! Another thing is that right now I'm not really interested in singing in English. Sure, I did it for years, but my accent (that I can't seem to get rid of) really bothers me, and I can memorize things in Cantonese in ways that I can't seem to in English.

I do karaoke once in a while online, here's one... Mona Lisa. If it doesn't work, click the link under it.


See? ACCENT! It's subtle, but you can definitely hear the Cantonese accent. I'm working on singing in Mandarin right now, and frankly I sound like a Cantonese person speaking Mandarin - it's really hard to listen to. Maybe I should find myself a language exchange student.

Btw, it's pretty uncannily how much that avatar looks like me, isn't it?

Last night a friend came over after work and we watched the Taiwanese drama The Rose until around 2:40 in the morning. She came over at something like 6. That's a lot of drama.

At episode 17 or so, we lost the subs. I included subs when I burned off the DVD (I use XBMC to watch drama) but either I didn't name them right or I included the wrong subs. Either way, she couldn't watch it with me anymore without translation. So there I was, 12:30 in the morning, translating Mandarin in real time. Thank goodness for mandatory closed captioning in Chinese. If I couldn't read at the same I wouldn't have been able to do it. I interjected occasionally with "Get a brain!" when Jin/Sumire should be getting a brain.

At one point, DH came online (we're long distance right now) and I started chatting with him a bit and paused the drama.

Friend: Can you chat with him and translate what's on the TV at the same time?

Me: What kind of a brain do you think I have?

Now I think I'm tired. And a little sick. *cough* Maybe I shouldn't be drinking Coke.

In the meantime, I've also translated chapter 30 and 31 of Bara no Tameni for fun - ok it's more like I can't read anything without translating it in my head now and I might as well write it down. Youth Gone Wild 11 is 25% done, and I think my brain's about to fry...

Go ahead and watch a Chinese drama. You'll hear this word a lot. Usually, it's translated as pervert. If you look it up in the dictionary you'll get:

• metamorphosis; abnormal; anomalous

That doesn't sound so bad, does it? Loosely speaking, it simply means a change - for the worse. Here are the uses the word (biàn tài / 變態) is usually used for:

• Flashers
• Rapists
• Incest
• Pedophilia
• Describing general deviate-from-the-norm sexual behavior. And by "norm" the general Asian view is heterosexual monogamous relationship.

Well, now you know what it means. Go ahead and use it. :) It's a verb or adjective, not a noun.

I just finished the first draft.

Yup. You heard me right. In a day. The entire volume.

Dammit, I just couldn't stop reading. In between doing real work, taking care of baby, I was tap tap tapping away at my keyboard. Thankfully I've gotten so used to the way these characters talk that I just translate out loud as I read, and type as fast as I talk.

I never knew that the skills I learned in translating Taiwanese drama out loud for my friends could transfer over so well. See, Taiwan dramas are almost always subtitled in traditional Chinese. So I would read them out loud in real time. Now I can easily read with my head in Chinese and speak it out loud in English. Then I just type as I talk and that's that. I hit a few roadblocks here and there but nothing major.

Especially since I started using this yesterday: Nciku.com

The dictionary itself I find pretty useless, as there are lots of terms it simply doesn't have definitions for. The hand writing recognition, however, is superb. So if there are English-to-pinyin words, I can look it up in 10 seconds.

Although I think I'll wait a few days before revising this one. It's time for something completely different...

...even for me.

Why exactly is "punk" translated as "pun-he" and "heavy metal" translated literally to "heavy" and "meta"? I don't understand.

When I was a kid, we used to write stuff out a lot. I mean, A LOT. We'd read through a chapter in the Mandarin textbook, then the teacher would write the new vocabulary on the board. We would all have to copy the words down into our notebook and write each one 10 times. Then we're marked for accuracy - calligraphy does not count for points, since I ALWAYS got a C. For writing like an adult and slurring strokes.

Here's one thing though. Guess when I learned my English alphabet? Preschool. Same as everyone else in Asia - we learn our English alphabet in preschool, basic phonetics in elementary, and conversational English in highschool. By rights we should be all fluent, or at least we should have decent comprehension of written English.

So why bother translating everything into Chinese pinyin? I don't get it. What's more, why translate SOME uncommon words by pinyin and some of them by direct translation? I don't get that either.

Well, that's what an electronic stroke-recognition dictionary is for, I guess. ;)

I spent the last two days re-reading Cat Street since AWM released the last chapter.

What a great story! *cries*

Whenever I start reading a series I just can't stop until I'm done. I'm sitting on the couch, DS in hand (ComicBook DS - homebrew - can't live without it) and tea by my side. There you'll find me at 3 AM, still flipping the pages. Then I'll try to sleep but can't get the story out of my head, and I end up falling asleep at 5 AM, woken at 9 by the human alarm clock Curtis, and spend the rest of the day like a zombie.

Back to translating...I'm revising the first draft for V9 of YGW at the moment, and that usually take two days. More on that after I finish this volume. And as usual, I don't talk about it. :) If you're looking for spoilers, go read the Chinese synopsis.

I really don't know what the attraction is, but while I was on my DS yesterday, 5 brown ants (those really small ones) crawled out of it. Huddling for warmth? Who knows.

What I know is that today I'll spend my time traveling up to Dixie plaza to get some ant killer. I mean, I've left them alone for a while, and they haven't really multiplied in numbers. Since Curtis' chocolate incident, however, they've been EVERYWHERE. I'm too blind (myopic) to actually be able to find them and track down the chocolate Curtis has hidden (and where a colony of ants is happily feeding on it) so my only choice to bring the population back down is borax based ant-killer.

I had hoped it won't come to this - the Buddhist in me tend not to want to kill things. But ants crawling on my DS? Ok they're really asking for it.

I woke up this morning and my baby greeted me (he's responsible for the morning call in this household) with brown stuff on his face, hands and feet. Now, this has happened before, and it was rather...unpleasant. Back then I hadn't learned the lesson of putting pants over his diaper every night. I would pick him up from this crib and put him directly in the bathtub, and it was major clean up time.

This time, however, the brown stuff wasn't so bad.

It was chocolate.

Belgian almond bars, to be exact. I've always believed in eating the good stuff when it comes to treats - bad treats aren't worth the calories. So I order these really good European chocolates from an importer in Quebec, and there's literally 5 kilos of the stuff sitting in a box in the bedroom. It lasts months and months.

Curtis had found the mother-lode. He must have seen me pull a bar out of the box last week, which miraculously turned into little squares of sweet goodness. So while mommy was asleep (the crafty devil) he snuck his hand into the box too, and devoured half a bar of chocolate. He used the other half to draw on the walls, the window sill, and whatever was left over was stomped all over his bed. The sad part is that I can't find the wrapper. There could be more lurking around some place, ready to be smeared over my face next morning.

It's definitely laundry day.

I'm on my way to slim-line my bills. So the first step? Free voip. Thankfully, since I'm in the eastern Canada area, there's a service called freephoneline.ca that provides free VOIP - no SIP, only softphone, but it's good for a backup. I've also signed up for Vbuzzer, which is $50 a year for unlimited Canada and US calls, with a local number.

That's a huge jump down from my $35 / Month Bell Canada bill. *yikes*

VBuzzer works on SIP which means that I can plug a phone into an SIP-enabled router and use my old phone for VoIP calls. Nifty. Another great thing is that the voicemail is remote - which means that I can forward it to an email and check it elsewhere if I needed to. It's also accessible via a smartphone, so that means cheap VoIP long distance calls when I'm on the go. Handy to have when the DH is working in Calgary.

Next step? Put the internet on dry-loop, which is adding $8 to my net bill, then canning the current home phone. Then I'm off to get a $10 phone card / month to put my cell on pay-as-you-go. How much money do I save with this mumbo jumbo? Well...

With my current plans:

$35 (homephone) + $43 (internet) + cell ($50) = $128 a month or $1536 per year

and the new plan

$4.17 (homephone) + $52 (internet) + cell ($10) = $66 a month or $794 aper year

That's $742 to put towards other things. Like an RESP for my baby or saving up for his ballet lessons when he's 3. Funny what a little bit of shuffling can do.

BTW, if you want to do vBuzzer yourself, please be aware that even though they have all those numbers listed, NOT ALL OF THEM are available. Canadian numbers run out all the time, so the chances of you getting one is slim. There are other services out there that cost about the same though.

Too bad Skype isn't here in Canada - I'll jump on it in a second if it was.

Working on it. I can't give away anything, so let's just say I'm starting to have issues with Taiwanese slang. More and more of their phrases are in the book (well, obviously since that's where this particular man hua came from) and it's starting to feel like I'm translating Cockney slang at times.

It also seems like the longer you go...the more the character swears. Showing their true colors, perhaps? I dunno.

If you haven't read the series (which is available on the net up until the middle of Volume 6 at the penning of this post) I strongly recommend you do. It's in the genre of Shoujo/Josei/slice-of-life with bits of celebrity fantasizing thrown in. The art is great (if you want to complain about vol 1, it gets better in a hurry) and the translation I've read so far from 2-6 is superb and the fan scanlating work very well done.

It's making me read other things too, in researching some of the less common-in-asia terms. For example, did you know that a Benz is known as a "black head car" or "face cream" in Taiwan? The first time I read "Face Cream" I was like - why's he calling the car that? To the land of the lost-in-translation jokes.

Anyhoo, if you see a dark streak of light going past your screen, that's me translating.

In the middle of translating some Chinese man hua, I'm seeing how limited the Mandarin language is when it comes to swear words.

There are only a few basic swear words. You could call some one:

• An animal - a pig, chicken, turtle, fox, beast
• Egg, Fetus
• A number - three eight, eight - woman (eight means gossiper)
• His mom. Mom. (it all depends on how you say it)

Then there are descriptive words. Which could be the following

• Stupid / dumb
• mixed-up
• trouble-making

So in other to insult someone, you throw the descriptive word in front of the swear word, or even compound them. Dumb egg is used a lot, as is mixed-up-egg, three-eight-turtle-egg, and so on. "Your mom" being the be all and end all of all curses. It's the equivalent of the F word in English. Of course, translating it as "your mom" will causes everyone to wonder why a character is calling for the other guy's mother, so I'm forced to write in the F word instead.

See what I have to put up with growing up? This is probably why I don't swear, at all, in English.

Well, he's not a baby anymore. He's 2! That means when I call too book daycare at the gym, he'll almost ALWAYS have a spot. No more missed sessions for me because he's an infant.

Everyone keeps telling me that he should be talking - all those guidebooks I have don't help. I'm sure nobody fits into their developmental schedule. According to them, babies start uttering their first words at 9 months, and are basically talking fluently by 2. On the other hand, they mention that babies are sometimes not walking until 18 months.

Curtis started walking without help at 10 months, and by 18 months he could get into ANYTHING without help. When you try to teach him how to talk, however, he gives you a sly smile and say whatever he wants.

The weird kid can also match pitches. I'm a singer, and sometimes I sing books to him (I just bring in one of those souvenir albums) instead of reading books to him at night. He can emulate hums and understand the idea of singing the same note mommy does. He can even do slides.

Speaking? No thanks. He'd say Dada, but Mama is only reserved for special occasions such as when mama is prepping dinner and he's hungry already and would she please hurry it up.

It doesn't help, of course, that he's the size of your average 3 year old.

Signed into work late last night to install IMs (to communicate with ME only) and ran into that notorious malware that parades as an antiviral program. AVG didn't pick it up though, which means I really should look for a better antiviral program. It's not the first time either - it doesn't CONTAIN a trojan or virus like other programs. The program itself is considered malware.

After a bunch of file searches / deletes, registry searches / deletes, everything is finally back to normal.

I can't believe i worked til 2 AM again. *sigh*

And it's too late for this sort of introduction, so I'll just go to bed now and start anew tomorrow.