my goals for this year are pretty simple, because i don't like making lofty resolutions that will just overwhelm me and make me feel bad if i don't complete them.

so, this year i want to continue saving money, continue raising my credit score (i would love it if i could hit 800 by the end of the year, but even just 750+ would be awesome), and continue learning japanese (i'd like to get to upper beginner level by the end of the year, and i think i can do that).

also, come summertime, i want to spend more of my time outside, even if it's just sitting out and soaking up the sun.

other than that, i just want to exist and be happy and enjoy what this year has to bring me. i feel like, in the last few months of 2019, i've been in a consistently good mood, and i just want to keep that outlook and mindset going into this year and beyond.

also, i'm honestly excited for this new decade because it kind of feels like a clean slate, at least in terms of my mental health.  in the first half of the 2010s i was absolutely miserable, but these past few years, while not being perfect, have been better than any of the years of my early 20s by a mile, and i'm excited to start off a new decade in such a great mental mindset.  ♡

damn, i forgot how much i love this song.  i haven't listened to it in so fucking long because on spotify they only have the remastered version now which has a guitar outro instead of a piano outro and while i do love the guitar outro too, the piano outro is just... 100000x better, honestly. what a tune.  the lyrics hit me so fucking hard, too.   but especially this bit:


also, to challenge myself, i might start posting a favorite song of mine every monday and just write a little bit of why i like it.  we shall see, but i'm tagging this entry as such to hopefully get the ball rolling.

i've been back on a sims kick lately.  the past few days i've been playing my little polyam fam (ugh i love them lol), but today i came across this challenge on tumblr and it inspired me so much. i created an alien sim, and i have this whole backstory for him, and i even literally started writing out the story.  i've probably got a chapter drafted up so far.  which is... wild.  like who am i.

i definitely want to post it on my simblr, but i'm gonna have to keep the story kind of light to post there... but i have so many ideas for this story, that i'm also potentially thinking of, like, actually writing an actual story?  literally what is happening to me lmao.  i've never written a day in my life.  but i have all this inspiration and i'm actually pretty excited. 

so the sims challenge is called the human enough challenge and your alien sim has always wanted to live on earth and then they get there (however you want them to) and you have to have them blend in with society and build their life up from scratch.  and i'm super excited to play it with my newly created alien sim xephyr.

the story i've got going for seph is that he was orphaned as a baby and grew up all on his own on sixam (the alien planet in the sims), always dreaming of living on earth.  but he knows he's never gonna be able to get there because he has no money for a spaceship. and also because, y'know, he's an alien.  he can't just go waltzing down to earth at random. 

but one day he's like 'what if i just stole a spaceship and visited.'  so he gets the idea in his head and since he passes by the spaceport every day on his way to school he scopes out the spaceships to see if there might be one left relatively unguarded.

after a few days he's starting to think there's no way he can actually steal a ship.  but then he spots an abandoned one that's set to be taken to the junkyard, and he's got his ticket.  

he sneaks into the junkyard every night for the next few months to fix up the ship.

his whole plan is just to visit for a couple of days so he barely brought anything with him. but the ship crashes as he enters the earth's atmosphere.  he lands on a deserted (or so he thinks) island in windenburg.  there's a creepy abandoned campsite nearby, so he stays there, surviving as best as he can while he figures out how he's gonna make a life for himself on earth.  something he's always wanted, but never expected would happen, and especially not the way it did.

that's pretty much all i got for now.  some more backstory about his life on sixam is kinda brewing in my head but there's not much in the way of that yet.  

but !! i'm so excited to play and worldbuild some more tomorrow when i get home from work haha.  thankfully i get home at 9am so i can literally have the whole day.

oof i'm so ridiculous

i'm sure it will be quite a looooooong time before i ever actually use it / develop my coding skills more to the point where i'm comfortable putting myself out there, BUT the other day i finally started coding a (very, very) rough draft of my portfolio! 👍🏻

i haven't entirely figured out how i plan to display my web development skills beyond coding more tumblr themes since that's the only ~experience i have so far, so my tentative plan is to revamp my old theme blog then update old themes + make some new ones.

but honestly, before i even get that far ahead of myself i really need to buckle down and work on learning javascript more + jquery too. then there's also some server side languages i wanna learn too, like xml, php, and sql, but right now js & jquery are my main focus because they're essential for front end web development along w html & css.

i took the html & css quizzes on w3schools just to see where i'm at in terms of knowledge. i got 95% or something on the css quiz (literally got ONE question wrong ugh) and about 80ish on the html one. i definitely need to get more familiar with html. i'd say i feel roughly 75% comfy with most of it. css, however, i feel pretty darn confident with.

(i wonder if dreamwidth will let me add an iframe in an entry. that would be sweet actually, so i'm gonna try, haha.

damn it didn't work. i wanted to try and embed my portfolio lol)

ah well, anyway. i've really gotta stop procrastinating with the learning coding thing. i gotta get into it more studiously in my free time if i actually wanna get somewhere with it someday.

so this is my kick in the tush to get my shit together, haha.

also i really wanna display my photography on my portfolio too, so that's another reason why i gotta learn js & jquery, cause i wanna display them in a more dynamic, slideshow kinda way. i've already got some photos displayed as bg pictures, and i plan on implementing a slideshow bg on bigger resolutions too.

it's so windy today.  D:  it's scary lol because my house is old and shakes a lot when it's windy (and even sometimes when it's not).  every time a big gust comes through it makes me nervous.  i also really don't want any trees to fall on the house.  i'm sure we'll be fine, but the last time it was super windy like this a two trees fell in the back yard (though one managed to miss the house, and the other did minimal damage thankfully).  

at least by tonight the wind should be calming down.  

in other news, i've been working more on learning japanese and man it's such an intriguing language! for a while i was kinda at a standstill in my motivation to learn, but i recently found out that my friend is learning korean for fun and knowing someone else is doing the same thing kinda just kicked my motivation into high gear haha.  i'm excited to continue learning more. 

so far beyond knowing hiragana (some still trip me up but i can read the majority of the characters), i've also learned how to say/write quite a few basic words and some little sentences (mostly sentence fragments tbh), including introducing myself: 初めまして！レイですとアメリカ人です。　which is romanized as hajimemashite! rei desu to amerika jin desu and means 'nice to meet you! i'm ray and i'm american.' 

i've mostly been using duolingo up until now, but i've found a whole bunch of apps and have been using some websites as resources too. i also have a book on kanji and might look into buying another book or two - we will see.  i'm gonna move on to learning katakana next (i already know a few things like how to write my name (レイ), and how to write america (アメリカ).  then once i've gotten the hang of katakana i'll move on to kanji!

kanji is where i'm gonna have a damn hard time lol.  there's like nearly 3k kanji that japanese people know.  i only know a handful at the moment.  雨 (ame, meaning rain), 猫 (neko, meaning cat), 日 (hi, meaning day or sun), 光 (hikari, meaning light), 美 (which is pronounced emi and is basically 'lol'), and 犬 (inu, meaning dog).  there's also a couple more that i can translate into english but don't know how to pronounce in japanese.

speaking of that, i forgot i also know 日本 (nihon, or japan) and 日本語 (nihongo, or japanese), haha. but goodness gracious i don't know how native japanese speakers remember so many?  

the one thing that's definitely gonna trip me up is how difficult it's gonna be to write japanese by hand.  like on the computer, you can just type the syllables and then the kana and kanji (if there is one for the specific word) will be automatically generated. so for the most part all you need to know is how to pronounce things to type correctly.  but handwriting it is a whole new ballgame, lol. some of the kanji are so intricate. 

one step at a time though.  reading and writing by hand are going to be a lot easier once i know kanji.  though there's also stuff aimed at kids (like books, shows, etc) and beginner resources that put the kana above the kanji so you know how it's pronounced.  which will definitely be helpful in my journey. 

anyways, bestie i know you're (most likely) the only one reading this lmao so i hope you enjoy my rambles about learning japanese!  also ily <333


ps, the title of this entry says 'windy day'. :D

i made a dumbass mistake at work yesterday and i can't stop thinking about it and how stupid i am and i just want my brain to shut up.  i know the embarrassment will fade away in time but it's still so fucking annoying. -____-

somehow today is day 4 of my 9 days off already. i haven't been doing much besides listening to a lot of music (i've been listening to so many japanese bands ahah), though i have also done a fair bit of tidying up around the apartment. but mostly i'm enjoying spending time with myself, just relaxing and doing nothing. it feels really good. i would probably start to go stir crazy if i had any more than 9 days off though.

also, even though no one is likely to be reading this, here's a mv of a song i've been obsessed with the last few days:

Watch on YouTube