Polar Vortex 2019

I had an impromptu weekend this week thanks to the extremely low temperatures. On Monday, we got an email saying that the building was going to be closed on Wednesday. Just before end-of-day on Tuesday, we got another email saying that the building would also be closed on Thursday. Guidelines were that if we had a meeting, we should call in to attend; if we had a laptop and work we could do, bring it home to work; but otherwise, do nothing. Since my job involves a lot of physicians' personal information, I can only do it if I'm physically present, which meant I got two days off. No complaints from me.

I woke up at 7 a.m. yesterday despite not having an alarm set and then spent much of the day playing Darkest Dungeon. I was originally going to go over to lisekatevans's place to make lunch, but we pushed it back to dinner so I had my salad for lunch (the one I made to eat at work), took a Lyft over around 3:30 and worked on transcribing more Wild Man Blues, and downloaded OmegaT and started the process of translation. I would have just used LibreOffice with two parallel columns, but according to everything I found on the internet that's basically impossible. There's no way to have a left column that runs on the left from the beginning to the end of the document, but OmegaT was recommended in response to someone who had exactly the same question I did, so I tried it out.

So far it's pretty great! It takes in a source document(s), splits it up into a series of smaller segments, each of which is isolated and individually translatable, and then outputs a translated document in the same format. You can leave notes, put in a glossary of neologisms or other terms that need referencing, add alternate translations for certain terms, all kinds of quality of life functions I wouldn't get in LibreOffice even if parallel columns were possible. I'm only a few paragraphs in, but I can already see that this'll make keeping track of what I did and what changes I made really easy.

For dinner, lisekatevans helped with ingredient prep and I made miso nikomi soba. The traditional recipe uses udon, but part of the point was for lisekatevans to use up her extra noodles and soba was what she had. Picture below:

( Brothy deliciousness )

The first time I made miso nikomi udon, it was when I first moved to Japan. It was about 35°C outside, with 95% humidity, and I was in an uninsulated house in the middle of a bunch of rice fields (visible on Google Streetview here!), and by the time I was halfway through the bowl I was sweating buckets. lisekatevans's place was warm, but with the icy cold of death outside, it was a lot better environment to each hot soup. She broke out the bottle of sake I gave her last month, called her roommate over, and we sat and ate. It was delicious.

Going home was awful, though. I figured I could risk taking the L, since it wasn't a long distance, but even with a five-minute walk I felt like I could never take a full breath. Breathing deeply set me coughing, so I took shallow breaths and hunched over against the wind until I got on the L where the air was warmer. I didn't freeze, though, and here I am.

I also vacuumed and mopped the apartment yesterday, so while I was mostly trapped inside, it was a clean inside.

Today I have nothing planned until the evening, when Anime Chicago is still planning to have a meetup at a place called Beermiscuous. I was talking with my Japanese tutor about it and she said it didn't even sound like an English word, but I don't know. I think it sounds exactly like some weird neologism that people would come up with. Like a more proactive version of beer goggles. I don't like beer at all--it's the carbonation--but they do have a small amount of whiskey and wine, so maybe I'll get something.

Alright, time for more translating while watching Continue? play through Final Fantasy VII.