Farewell, farewell

I wrote a song last year (please, don't laugh!) with this title, tune taken from a song which I thought was just a song with the same title, but then I found out that that song had taken the tune from a song I wouldn't sing in a million years. How embarrasing!

I won't post the words here (for reasons difficult to explain) but I will say this: that you can sing it when leaving your home for any foreign country across the International Dateline or, with modification (I'm thinking up the modified lyrics right now!) going back.

I'm leaving now for another land
A land I love so dear.
But still my heart is sore for you
All my friends and kindred near.

This land it is so far away
That our day is their night.
And when the dark here falls again
They finally see the light.

Farewell, my family and my friends
I know we hate to part
But if we do not meet again
You'll still be in my heart.

I'll leave you with these parting words
And I hope again we will meet.
Goodbye, adieu, and fare thee well--
This parting's far from sweet.

Actually, the last verse could be added to the original version. The last verse of the original I can't post here. The first verse of the original went like this:

"I'm leaving now for another land,
A land so far from here
So I must leave my lovely home
In a land I've loved so dear."

The chorus I can't post here, either. Some things must wait until I'm out of here for good.

So, I give this to you, weblog readers (are there any out there? :) ) until Stateside. Have a good day, and night, wherever you are.
Saro

P.S. Once we go back for good (not this year!), I'll get to learn Spanish with Rosetta Stone. I wasn't too keen about the idea until we all tried the demo. Wow!!! Now I'm actually a little excited.

My second-favorite place on earth

The Death Star is my second-favorite place on earth. It's actually a beautiful place. It's got a lot of trees, a beautiful grove. There's a stone seat that we call the Emporer's throne, underneath a tree. There's a pretty little place full of clover and roses. We ignore the W.C. in the backround.

How did it get such a crazy name? It all started when in February or so we watched Star Wars and made up a spoof outside. It served the purpose of the Death Star, and from then on, we call it that. But it's many places, a castle, a garden, a spaceship, a lovely place to sit, etc. I love it!

I think there's about 7 favorite places on earth (personally). My backyard, the Death Star, the little corner park in Seattle, Beacon Hill Playground, Grandma's rock garden, Throne Park, and a certain park in Burien.

It's wonderful to have something to write about, for once, and time to write it.
Saro

Irony to the fullest:

"Dear, for a treat tonight, let's get a bucket from KFC and watch Chicken Run."

Trouble always comes in Ps

Packing, planning, presentation--I guess that's what you'd call our three "P" troubles. Packing...50 pound limit on each suitcase..."Okay, Susie, let me see, is this heavier than you?"...planning...I want to do this, this, this, and, oh, Mrs. So-and-so invited us to dinner...presentation...that's not my job.

Ugh, this isn't exactly a vacation, and yet it is. A whole two months (well, if you say a month is about four weeks, eight weeks is two months) of it, and here we are planning, packing, and presenting...

And yet, multiply the stress by two or three next year, because everything we want to take home has to go...now. It's enough to make your head spin.

And you hope it'll be worth it. You live your comfortable lives and then suddenly, bam, it sneaks up on you. It's enough to make everything spin.

Anyway, soon enough it'll be over. Friday begins the stress of travel, which, except for customs lines and worry, is my second-favorite part of the whole business.
Saro

Bu shih. Wa shih ni baba.

That's a movie quote translated into simple Mandarin. I'll leave you to figure it out (if you really want to know, let me know and I'll tell you).
Saro

This was just to show that I have a few basic Chinese skills...

In Dulci Jubilo

Hi there! Don't worry, I'm not losing my mind. It's not Christmas and won't be for awhile yet (though next month...). I'm just putting together the Christmas Play so that we can memorize our lines. I'm terrible at memorizing things the old boring way, but I can memorize something I use every day just by...using it! I memorized a complex web address I really need, and I know a lot of songs that way. Quotes from movies...well, that came from seeing the scene and having it just go to me, and then finding the script or something to insure accuracy. (But I think my mom is tired of me yelling "Noooo! Noooo! Noooo!" every day!)

But I have a perfect idea this year. It's really hard to explain, but I'm hoping it'll work. I've got to hunt up some lyrics. The English version of "In Dulci Jubilo" is just one of them, and it's not the title song, either. That, thankfully, is easier to cite who wrote it and all that. I just got to make sure I'm talking about the right tune, and...Christmas bells, anyone? I guess I'll have to go without that sound effect.

Yours, from the frazzled "playwright"--
Saro

Looking through stone

Looking Through Stone
I saw a face in stone
The face of one I didn't know
And through that face in stone
I saw another.

I saw a face in stone
One seen in many a place,
But when I look through the other stones,
I cannot see anything.

I saw a face in stone
The face of one I didn't know
And through that face in stone
I saw another.

Nothing much is really happening...yet. Talk to you later.
Saro

While strolling through the park

Today we went to the park. We ate food from the vendors there--I got my favorite. It's called "noodle-rice" and it's basically a bunch of different cold (but cooked) noodles and some vegetables and spices. Yummy. I try to eat it without slurping...

We walked through it carefully, to explore it and enjoy it. We came upon the exercise place--think those "exercise trails" you see back in the 'States, overgrown and rusty, only these were rather new. There was this one thing that--oh, gee, I don't know how to describe it, but you stepped on it and it was like a swing for your feet. I spent ages on that and got a terrific sunburn on my bare shoulders (I will wear a navy blue tanktop and navy blue pants together on a sunny day...). Of course, before that we had a terrific downpour! We got almost soaked and the rain drummed so hard I got a headache.

We were allowed two rides each, and we went together on both. The first was a sort of pedal-roller coaster. It was a long track (that didn't go up and down or anything) and you pedalled along it. It looks stronger than it feels and it is stronger than it feels, but I didn't stop worrying until I pretended I was in an X-wing and Susie was a droid. But she objected to being a droid and was Red 8 instead. Sigh. I was Red 5 :).

For the other, we went on a tilt-a-whirl and had a lot of fun screaming. And we forgot to do the leaning that makes you spin more, too! Yeeks, that would've been one heck of a ride!

So it was a really fun day. I really would like to go again. Believe it or not, the "playground" and the noodle-rice were the highlight of the day...
Saro

While strolling through the park

Today we went to the park. We ate food from the vendors there--I got my favorite. It's called "noodle-rice" and it's basically a bunch of different cold (but cooked) noodles and some vegetables and spices. Yummy. I try to eat it without slurping...

We walked through it carefully, to explore it and enjoy it. We came upon the exercise place--think those "exercise trails" you see back in the 'States, overgrown and rusty, only these were rather new. There was this one thing that--oh, gee, I don't know how to describe it, but you stepped on it and it was like a swing for your feet. I spent ages on that and got a terrific sunburn on my bare shoulders (I will wear a navy blue tanktop and navy blue pants together on a sunny day...). Of course, before that we had a terrific downpour! We got almost soaked and the rain drummed so hard I got a headache.

We were allowed two rides each, and we went together on both. The first was a sort of pedal-roller coaster. It was a long track (that didn't go up and down or anything) and you pedalled along it. It looks stronger than it feels and it is stronger than it feels, but I didn't stop worrying until I pretended I was in an X-wing and Susie was a droid. But she objected to being a droid and was Red 8 instead. Sigh. I was Red 5 :).

For the other, we went on a tilt-a-whirl and had a lot of fun screaming. And we forgot to do the leaning that makes you spin more, too! Yeeks, that would've been one heck of a ride!

So it was a really fun day. I really would like to go again. Believe it or not, the "playground" and the noodle-rice were the highlight of the day...
Saro

Website overhaul

What do you think of my changes? It was really fun to fix up my website to look different, better, I don't know. I'm still going to put the ClustrMap up, since I haven't gotten to that yet...I have a big dot in Thailand, of all places!

It's less than two weeks until we leave, and yet, life goes on practically as normal. It's really really warm and I am getting sick of the heat. It figures, too, that I wear my dress which is dark-colored and soaks up the heat!

Oddly enough, I've been remembering...well, that will have to wait until tomorrow. Computer usage is limited because of presentation issues....
Saro

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

profile pic

Search your feelings. You know yesterday was Father's Day.

I guess you know who was on my dad's Father's Day card. If not, well, I'm not exactly going to tell you (hint: he's really nasty!). But, believe it or not I couldn't find anything of that genre anywhere! What on earth? That's crazy! I'd display it here, but that would give away something, and besides the pix are probably all copyrighted anyhow.

For Father's Day I gave my dad a bunch of Star Wars comics. Most of them were dumb (ewoks in Seattle, the Millenium Falcon's really messy engine) but a few were fun. I like to do that.

I am getting into the Star Wars Musical. My family thinks it's funny but a crazy idea, but I've really warmed up to it. I like it a lot. It's worth a try, but I've got to be careful about learning the songs and singing 'em!

But Star Wars still isn't all I think about. We saw some Wa dancing yesterday and I really enjoyed that--until, oh, please, it's kareoke at the highest level. The music was getting really loud by the end. And I was singing Shaker songs (leave it to me to sing folk songs in the weirdest places!) like "Love is Little" and "Willow Tree" (I'm not sure of the names. Anybody who's familiar with Like the Willow Tree and Where the Wild Birds do Whistle could figure it out. Anyway...)

No new poetry lately. Lost inspiration, I guess. I can't wait to blog about America.

School is out for the summer, I'm having a blast so far (no pun intended) (actually, we do the lightsaber thing. Susie's Han)

Well, that's about it. Except for this. Tomorrow I will be completely changing the template and profile pic and a lot of things on this blog. But don't worry you're still coming to the right spot, huh?

That's all for now.
Saro

Crazy lao wai

If you read in the China Daily that there are crazy foreigners in the southern Yunnan area, well, Kiana and Micha and us are probably the culprits. We were doing everything from playing Barbie Princess and the Pauper (which, by the way, turned to a jump-off-the-wall contest where I kept crying, "Oh, no, my tutor just jumped off a cliff! Oh, well, I will jump off, too!") to playing drop-the-pencil-case with a bunch of students who were just tickled. And, I murdered a folk song because I got caught and had to sing. So, I sang "Granny, Will Your Dog Bite" amid giggles and my sister has her head down and is shaking her head.

In between that, we played hide'n'seek and I hid in two great spots, once, in a fairly obvious place in a corner, and once behind a bunch of singing students. Micha, however, carried off the honor by hiding up in a tree and sending a bunch of students into gales of laughter while I looked all around me, and then they pointed.

So, yesterday was a real good day. Some days are like that.
Saro

Two more days now

It's almost summer--I'm talking about vacation, I mean. Friday is the last day. And then, I have two weeks to straighten and sort out my room and things to see what I'll take home and what I'll leave. This isn't gonna be as hard as next year--I'm coming back, you know. But in the more immediate future I'm going to have some fun, because our friends are coming over this week, and on Saturday my sister and I are going to try to do a tea party. And Sunday is Father's Day. I wish I could post his card online when he's seen it, but the pictures are probably copyright. Which is too bad, 'cause I really like what I came up with. Do you believe I couldn't find any cards of that nature around even though I searched? Actually, I'm not making any sense, am I?

Well, I'm pretty bored, actually, I mean about blog entries. I can't wait to get to America where I think there'll be something to write about (Just hope it isn't ten ways to survive a plane crash, depressurization, my Grandma is getting on my nerves, stuck in Kunming, Hong Kong, or San Fransisco, or any of the above, etc.!). Well, we've already made going to one restaurant an almost given, which is just music to my ears....actually, it isn't!

I have really nothing else to say. But I better go now...I've got to illustrate something and something else (Is Something and Something Else a Jane Austen book?)...
Saro

Thread coming out of my ears

Yesterday I worked on three sewing projects--two ongoing, and one just started. The ongoing projects are taking up my mother's gray pants, and also hemming a "handkerchief" with a decorative stitch. The handkerchief, by the way, is steel gray with black flowers on it, but I like it.

The project I am starting right now is a quilt. Does that sound pretty adventurous? I've made one before. That was a nine-patch quilt in a style given in my school book, this is a twelve-patch variation with designs. I'm basically going to sew the top here, then when we get home for good see if we have a remnant big enough for the bottom and enough batting. If we do, then I'll sew that. After that? Well, save up to get colored thread and seam binding tape in a proper color.

Last night I cut the quilt squares. Two each of blue, white, green, gray, white, green. Properly it would've been purple, white (or red), green, black (or...um...yeah, black), white (or red), green. Some of you might be figuring this out!

Well, I won't be able to show you any pictures until 2007 sometime, but I hope you'll enjoy it...
Saro

Lindsay!!!

Whitney handed me the gob of frosting and told me to adorn other people with it. I adorned Lindsay and she got right back at me...

Yesterday was Mum's birthday. We burst in during class hours and serenaded her and then dived out of the way. That made her class prepare a big party for her. Before that, however, she was supposed to try on Linda's Tibetan costume:
And let me try it, too:

And then there was the party with a lot of fun things, like a cake with 43 candles on it, and the whole class was giving her cards and things. One of the candles burned down and burned a bit of frosting, but otherwise it was okay. I ate my cake quickly, and a good thing it was, too--at the end, they plastered everybody with frosting from any spare cake! Hence the fact that Lindsay and I got into a two-minute fight.

Well, that's about it...there's really nothing much going on that's really interesting to write about. I wrote a poem recently that doesn't make a lot of sense so you can add your own meaning to it--but I'm not sure if I want to post it just yet. It's hard to decide. I happen to think it's one of my better ones (call me a hack poet, I don't mind!) but it's just...oh, I'll just wait and see. Maybe a little later.
Saro

Photo op!

Took a few (53!) pictures of student dorms for some presentation...anyway, a lot of the students wanted pictures with us. Yeeks! Don't I look awful?
Saro

going i viking

I couldn't think of any thing to write about except for history class. So today we learned about Alfred the Great burning the cakes and about the vikings. Actually, we've been learning about the vikings for awhile. I kind of like their way of life when they're at home, but a raid gives me the shivers and I sympathize with the folks that were getting raided. I know that the raid had ties in with the home life, and yet I think the Norsemen way of life at home was very interesting and almost okay to live in (I live for indoor plumbing, that's one of the reasons why there's an almost in there....).
Saro

Okay, okay, okay, this is the last one for a while

I am a huge Star Wars fan, but it's not my only interest, nor is it my passion, nor am I going to blog about it forever.

But, I will post this post about Star Wars, and now (having seen all I want to see) I will stop for awhile. I'm pretty sure, I mean.

Yesterday we tried to watch the rest of "Return of the Jedi". After some trouble, it worked, but then it froze up and our DVD player committed suicide (yes, I meant committed suicide. Sometimes I think that my Dad will toss it in the river where you toss things you just hate (books that are terrible and you don't agree with you toss in the river Elbe)). We tried to fix the DVD player, we tried to watch it on our computer, we tried to watch it on another computer...and all the time I was worried about those little ewoks.

Then, that evening, our friends were waiting for us outside. "We'd like to play with you tonight," they said, "but we have to go inside and watch TV. You wanna watch Star Wars III?"

"Um, nooo," I said, and suddenly we were all saying the same thing at once. "D'you have Star Wars VI???"

"No," they said.

Well, we had a discussion I barely remember, but in the end Micha and I were running home to get it. We came back and trooped up to their house. After a feverish selection of chapters, we sat down to watch, and....I started to cry. It's a beautiful movie and there are also parts that just break your heart. Of course, the crying wasn't too bad and they all had different theories as to how to stop it. Micha tried to get me a drink of water. Kiana gave me a pillow to cry in. Susie giggled and asked me to stop, because I was making her "hysterical". I tried, but I couldn't help it.

I can't give away what made me cry, but I'll tell you this: near the end it gets beautiful and more intense than I thought a movie could be. It is science fiction (which I still don't like), but I can forgive it that for its quality. It's worth seeing.
Saro

P.S. I stopped crying, now.

anticipation

Has anyone seen those Heinz Ketchup commercials where you have the guy holding the bottle upside-down and there's this song, "anticipation"? And then there's this woman who hands him one of their bottom-opening bottles and...well, it apparently works, but in my experience your fries or burger are suddenly drowned in ketchup.

It's that way with days sometimes. There's English Corner in the evening which may or may not be fun (depends what the story is and/or whom we meet) and in the afternoon there's Return of the Jedi :). But there's nothing happening in the morning.

Sometimes I wish for upside-down days. In my experience there are tons of things you want to do that you don't feel like doing until you can snatch a moment (lesuire all the time isn't that great, folks!). It's much more fun to be all busy and then get inspired by what you did or be crammed with ideas when you have your time.

Well, that's all for now (I have got to go). See you later!
Saro

Bored stiff

I am bored stiff right now. I'm talking about weblog-worthy things. Oh, yeah, we have borrowed at least a ton of books that are worth reading and rereading, I have schoolwork, I'm doing a lot of Star Wars related web searches...yeah. But...there's nothing much going on to blog about. A sore throat is getting me down and is making playing tin whistle very uncomfortable. Tomorrow my dad and sister are going to a village school all day for children's day, but I opted out of that. Sorry, but I bet he'll blog about it, if you wait long enough and don't mind morals (he's like Louisa May Alcott in that he laces everything with a more serious side, but both do it so that they're excusable :) ). We watched 35 minutes of "Return of the Jedi" yesterday, but the bulk of it we'll watch on Saturday. Wonder what it sounds like in Spanish? Learning Spanish might be a good excuse to watch a dubbed version...nah, the technical language would bog me down. Huh, that might be a good idea, though. Also the Spanish section in the library. Anyhow, blogging about movies is dangerous because I found out about a certain something in Star Wars V because some websites assume that everyone knows that one. Uh, no, they don't. However, if I were to blog about movies I would be poking around with specks in other folks' eyes while ignoring a big ol' log in my own (see? Even I put in morals sometimes!), so I won't.

If you have seen some or all of the Star Wars movies and are familiar with the different scenes, check out this site because it has animated spoofs. It's very well done. It does have sound, to warn library or workplace users (not that I know any that would read this...). If you click on "Outer Space" you'll get a funny spoof of "Apology accepted, Captain Needa." My mum (serious-central) was laughing about this one from description only. It's that good!

Well, I have nothing else to say, so I will get back to my book. My mum says that's a better way to waste your time anyhow, and I, computer and movie and internet nut as I am, agree.
Saro