I can't believe it's already the end of the month. Well, one more day, right? We're ending it with near-perfect spring weather, a bit on the chilly side, but enough light and warmth for the trees to be seriously budding; the crocusses (crocii?) were up a couple weeks ago, and I'm seeing daffodils in bloom.

Mr Sweetie pointed out that he'd gotten his hair cut... last Friday. Well, in my defense, that had been a rather topsy-turvy day, with an opportunity to watch the film Ran with classmates, then go to a performance of a couple of Flemish cabaret artists (Kommil foo, for the curious) - both intense cultural experiences on their own anyday, let alone them sharing the same 12-hour period. Anyway, I missed noticing he'd had his hair cut, and he finally mentioned it explicitly to me today. Yeesh.

I wrote in detail about my eyeful of drama, so I don't need to review it. :)

• By some minor miracle, even though I really didn't have enough time to totally study the kanji up for the quiz this week, I somehow managed to actually have studied enough to get through the quiz with my ego intact. *phew* Alas, if there wasn't enough time for that, then there certainly wasn't enough time to prepare for the following class, in which we were expected to work through a sheet of fairly standard expressions - except there were so many of them, and also a number of them which we'd not regularly exercised since reading them in an exercise at the beginning of the semester. *deep sigh* I know I can't keep up with the new material being presented, so it's a trick to not get totally frustrated at the clear expectation that these things are being drilled to keep fresh in the memory as well. At the end of class, though, I was feeling sorry for our teacher, who normally is a mellow and cheery person. She was slowly "cooking", and anyone else would have clearly spent 20 minutes telling off the entire class for being so feckless. But that's not her style. I still want to write her a quick note to apologize, and take the opportunity to explain what my particular difficulties are, so that she at least knows that it's not this one student being obstreperous on purpose.
• We worked on carving stamps from erasers in the Chinese calligraphy class - there's a whole world of their use and role in the culture, of which we only got a taste. Having something of a notion this would be part of the class, I'd spent the night before using the internet to research an old-fashioned script used for stamps, so I was ready the next day to whip up my carved eraser stamp with my name - in this nested narrative, years ago, a friend had travelled to China, and had spent her time sending back letters to each of us with our "Chinese" name: really, just our names transliterated into the Chinese sound system. My actual birthname isn't all that difficult, but the fun thing with the character system is that the characters attached to the sounds also have meanings - she'd shared her version of "Reagan" (the president at the time, which dates this pretty comprehensively) as "Thunder-Root", which amused her no end. (Me, too, by the way.) Anyway, I'll have to arrange for some version of this internet name to be rendered using kanji, so I can show off my mad carving and stamping ski11z. (As if I haven't had enough ego-boo - the teacher asked me to keep my stamp around to show the following class, and also asked for a second copy of a cute "brush painting" of a rabbit - really just a large circle with rabbit bits sketched with the brush on the inside - with the character for rabbit 兔 and the hiragana うさぎ for usagi, finished off of course with my brand-new name stamp. Once I get back one of these pages, I'll probably mail it off to my rabbit-mad friend Mags in Dublin.
• Mr Sweetie did a hero's work on Sunday - friends of ours are trying to be proactive about their housing situation, despite some major set-backs in their health issues. However, the universe wasn't cooperating so far: the one place they've applied to so far for living space turned them down... because they made too much money. Mr Sweetie was given access to their household admin, in an effort to figure out if re-applying with a subsequent year's income (which has taken a dive). Although the admin help is important, I believe (and treasure Mr Sweetie for helping with this) that his presence and involvement will help keep their courage up, and lighten the load of insecurity. Getting an improved result out of the housing association would be good, too.
• J at aikido came through her operation for a hernia, hooray! Her husband G mentioned she might have tried to get to a class to just watch, but in the end, she stayed at home. A good thing, although that meant I didn't get to see her face when G brought home the orange and white roses I'd brought in for her.
• When we were arriving home on our bikes, a pair of police were cruising on their bikes, coming towards us, looking at the nearly-eternally parked white van of the shop run by the Evil Landlord next door to us. Words Were Had (while we simply went into our own house) and the van was moved post-haste. It's unlikely there will be follow-through, but we never know.