in my last post on food i left out a very important picture:
this was my pineapple rendition of mumbo jumbo, of banjo-kazooie fame.
ok. back to the whole "i haven't posted in a while" topic. given the month-long dry spell, i have a lovely set of things i can write about. and for your reading pleasure, i will write about all of them. right now. GO!
the first weekend of december, i roadtripped with cool kid sara to southern california to take the jlpt (japanese language proficiency test). the test was a bit harder than i had anticipated. at this point i'm giving it about a 50-50 that i passed (apparently it takes two months to grade a scantron #facepalm).
wait...i thought i was good at japanese? did i not study hard enough? lemme think...i did study, right?
exhibit a
right, right. i dinked around on read the kanji, mainly because it charted my level of awesomeness with characters (see all the colors?!).
exhibit b
well, yeah they're comic books. but they're in japanese! that's studying!
exhibit c
it's listening practice!
ok, so maybe i didn't really study per se. sigh. however! even if i didn't pass, at least some good came out of the whole experience. like the road trip. which gave me new hope that there are in fact good things to say about LA. traffic, of course, is not one of them. but little tokyo is! check out this cool map:
we ate at the deliciously wonderful, though hardly hole-in-the-wall, curry house. (and if you're interested here's the menu.) we didn't have this awesome map at the time, so we mostly hung out in weller court (the upper left block on the map that is cut through diagonally by onizuka street), which also housed kinokuniya, a japanese book store.
all of this was over-shadowed by a later drive down to san diego the following day, when we went to book-off:
for the uninitiated, book-off is an amazing used book store that has a very large selection of $1 books (¥100 in japan), the most important of which are comic books. i bought $40 worth of books (some were from the higher priced sections):
i'm currently reading at a rate of 2 volumes per week, working on gto (see exhibit b). so with any luck, this supply (and the 10 not-pictured volumes i already owned) will last me until it's time for another road trip.
continuing with the good that came out of the jlpt experience, i discovered the wonders of evernote and livestation. just to show you how cool evernote is, here's a screenshot:
i have a note open entitled "studying for the jlpt" with the tags ブログ and 日本語 ("blog" and "japanese"). whenever i think of something i want to blog about but don't have time to write a post immediately, i make a note in evernote. since i've started a trend with the above picture, let's take it a step further (this is random and unrelated to using evernote).
ok, lemme see if i can get this right. this is a screenshot of my blogger window, which contains a screenshot of evernote, in which the open note contains a cropped screenshot of my read the kanji progress chart. pretty cool, huh?
*completely different topic warning*
my home brews turned out ok. mostly. the first ones i opened (about a week and a half after bottling) were rather sweet, tasting more like cider than beer. they were very drinkable, just not very beer-y. it was lacking in maltiness, hop flavor and aroma, and body. the brews that i let condition for a few more weeks had a more subdued sweetness, but were otherwise the same.
the results shouldn't be too surprising though. the west coast pale ale batch is half booster (a packet of fermentable sugars), which essentially waters down (or alcohols down?) the malt and hops of the wort.
the beer, dubbed "ben's breakfast blend", won't need too much work to be a solid beer. replace the booster with another can of hme (hopped malt extract), and the flavors should be more or less balanced.
in 6 of the 20 bottles, i added an extra spoon of sugar (NB: sugar is added during bottling to carbonate and raise the alcohol level of the beer). after 3 weeks of conditioning they tasted the same as the early batch, but quite a bit more alcoholic. unfortunately, i didn't get them all in time:
this is the ceiling of my closet. i kept the brews in my closet to minimize light exposure. the extra sugar brews were more alcoholic and more carbonated. until i discovered glass shards on my floor and this in the ceiling i hadn't appreciated just how much more carbonated they were. 4 bottles exploded about 36 hours ago, leaving my closet full of glass and my clothes soaked in sugary beer. (-_-)
i think there were more things i was going to write about, but i'll leave it there for now.
ciao!
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