Old memories, New Creations

Years ago I read this article on how to do a cool abstract work in Photoshop.
Today's piece, Greenery Light, is based upon it - I dug it up again.
It's simply applying the technique of brush shadowing and highlighting on a layer selection and setting it to overlay. Playing with opacity is also important. I started with a special noise gradient background.

This one in my eyes is an abysmal heart-breaking failure. The geometry is a nightmare. I messed it up big time. I tried to half-follow the tutorial, and got neither what he wanted or what I wanted.

Still, the colors are pretty. I'm sure it's not as bad as I make it out to be. I'm thinking of re-doing it, though.
It's a sign that my life is getting better, anyways. Lately my from-scratch work has been a lot darker.

The tutorial on how to some of this and better can be found HERE.

Nothing New! Yay! - Issues Resolved and Electricity

I've officially handled all of the vocabulary words...
I had wondered why it only gave me one new one instead of two.

So it will all be review now.
腕 - ude - arm
That's it for now.

I've studied to write - it's just 書く - kaku.
That had been bugging me for a while.
I'm glad to have something authoritative finally clarify.

My latest blunders and wonders are:
電話 - denwa - telephone (not iKnow vocab)
電車 - densha - train
電気 - denki - light or electricity(not iKnow vocab)
自転車 - jitensha - bicycle

In case you haven't noticed my pattern, I've discovered a new common kanji.
It's electricity - 電. the typical pronunciation is den-____.
It isn't a word by itself - electricity is 電気(denki)

A couple more fun words with it:

電子 - denshi - electron
電池 - denchi - battery
停電 - teiden - power outage/blackout
電圧 - denatsu - voltage
電光 - denkou - lightning
電動 - dendou - electric
電卓 - dentaku - calculator
電線 - densen - power line(s)
電撃 - dengeki - electric shock

your calculator's battery was shocked by lightning!
私の電卓の電池は電光で電撃だった！

lol... sorry. I couldn't resist. lol... No pun intended either.

Waltzing Around... And Still Practicing.

This Valentine's Day I'm going to be co-teaching people to waltz at the little dance/ball thing I'm going to. I went and worked on it all with friends tonight. I'm a bit rusty, but I'm far better off than I was beforehand.

Today I worked on my blog code. I spent a lot of time, and didn't get much to show done. Oh well. Stuff is in the works. That's always something.


That's been most of my day - I haven't done much more with my guitar than what I'm doing now.
I'm just practicing speed and technique - nothing interesting.

It's stuff from Guitar Cardio. You really should check it out, those of you that play or are learning guitar.
It makes you better - significantly. Dunno if I said this before, but it's akin to the Hanon series for piano.

I played I Will Follow You Into The Dark the best I ever have tonight.
My singing is improving.
That's saying something. Vocal chords aren't something to be "fixed" magically.
I've learned not looking at my guitar helps.

What I'm concerned about is how sloppy I seem lately. maybe something's amiss. I just need to figure out what.
It could be the strings - maybe one just need tuning... i'll deal with it tomorrow.
It may be I'm just tired - or more observant than usual.

I have had trouble barring chords - namely the D string. Maybe I'm just improving from dead to flat or weak.
It could be a good thing, in a twisted way. I'm not thinking straight, tho.

I guess I'll head to bed.

Gradient Maps!

Today will be more show than tell.
What is a gradient map might you ask?
Just the most awesomest thing in the world!
Awesomest is my new favorite, word. lol...
If you go layer> new adjustment layer> gradient map...> you can apply a gradient map to an image. A gradient map takes the brightness of an image from darkest to brightest and lays a gradient over everything based on that. If you set its blending mode to soft light, when you change the gradient map you'll see all kinds of different "lightings" or "moods" to an image. A gradient map is like a photo's mood ring... lol...

This one has a purple-green-orange gradient map. I personally colored the sky red.

If you make a new layer on top and set the blending mode to hue, you can manipulate colors as you wish.


This third one I changed everything this way, on multiple hue layers.













To get the surreal glowing look to each of these, at the beginning I duplicated the background, and used filter> blur> surface blur on it, with a radius of 8 and a threshold of 97. I set its blending mode to screen.
On the second of these I used a blue-green-yellow gradient.

Up All Night...

Late at night is probably not the best time to practice my Japanese... especially when I have other garbage to deal with.
I'll finish up and note not to do this again... but seriously -
私は寝るが欲しい。

I ran into something rather irritating today:
hayai.
it's not new, but it's still annoying. I thought it meant early/fast.
it kinda does. but it doesn't. it means each of them separately.
It's another freaking homophone.
早い - hayai - early
速い - hayai - fast
That is retarded.

Words for the day:
全部 - zenbu - all, whole
去年 - kyonen - last year
図書館 - toshokan - library
引く - hiku - draw, pull
緑 - midori - green, foliage
上げる - ageru - to raise, to improve

I have a new kana-only word:
たくさん(takusan) - many, much

sorry for ending on a low note.
But my heart's empty. I might smile tomorrow.

Hammer-ons and Pull-offs

These two techniques constitute some of the "real" things good guitar players know. I'm getting better with them, and hope to have a more broad reach of things to learn.
(i.e. more fancy stuff!)

I can now play "twinkle twinkle little star" with them alone, albeit rather clumsily.

Learning to pluck the string with your left hand too means you can play more notes faster - this can double your finger-picking speed.
I'm still getting the hang of pull-offs... They're kinda tricky.
I looked up how to do these two recently - They're the type of things that have to be learned in person. That's why I've fallen behind on technique - no teacher.

But I found a solution: YouTube. As much as I hate mindless YouTube videos by random nobodys, I did find useful stuff.
So my lesson is learned - in effect, never judge a book by its cover.
Same applies to videos and what they appear to be.


In other news, I have been looking at Guitar Hero songs to learn.
I have the whole of GH III audio and I think I'm going to put it on my iPod.
That will get interesting. I'll be sure to find the ones I want to learn.

Considering the fact I haven't really yet learned a song my electric guitar was meant for, I think it's about time to rock. :)

Shadowed Scarlet

This time I decided to go find a picture I took myself and edit it.
The results were good, but I spent more time on it than usual.
Here beside me at the top is the original. This is from years ago at my old house. It was either from our garden or our neighbor's - I can't remember which.
One of the things I've learned with photography is sometimes the great one come to you - you just have to get out there and take lots to find something worthwhile.
That's where this one came from.
This one is today's piece, though it took a few days. I like it - it's better than it looks. It came out rather blurry when I uploaded it. I learned that if you select individual colors and turn them into layers, you can make look like anything . I used layer masks and noise gradients to make the light and dark. It took practice to figure out how to make the light not look lame.
Today's tip: When imitating perspective lighting, duplicate your "light" and erase different parts of each. having different light layers for different areas is key.

Kanji Confusion - Reading/Writing

I didn't do much with Japanese today.
I did run into a bit of confusion with some kanji today,

and I'm trying to set some things straight.

the kanji for "to read", "to write", "writings", etc. have me all scrambled.

ok...

to read is
読む - yomu

to write is
書く - kaku

but, to write down (for the purpose of being remembered)...
to write down is 記す - shirusu

to write down/ compose (song/poem) is
詠む - also yomu !!!

so...
write=yomu
write down=shirusu
compose=yomu
read=yomu

confused? I am... but writing all this down has helped.

Do You Remember

Today I started to learn this song... another one
by Jack Johnson, incidentally.

It was kinda tricky, but i figure it's taught me something valuable.
Aside being a little confusing in the middle of the chorus, it's relatively straightforward.

It's less chord and more individual notes. (it does use G 355433, A 577655, and D 557775)
I love the lyrics... it's a sweet song.

I almost have it perfect already!

I've been working on the song I wrote, too. It's not so bad.
I'm actually thinking of writing another one. This time my reason is kind of as an emotional outlet, so I'm not sure how it will go. Such can be rather spontaneous.

Today's my half birthday, if any one cares. I don't.

Same Old Grind

Photoshop projects get kinda hard some times...
I get in and out of it - some days I'll do lots, other times nothing comes.

The thing that worries me is I've been rather attached to my guitar, lately.
I think I'm substituting everything else for it...

I need make sure i don't leave these things behind, as far as interest goes.

I think what I'm going to do is do artwork that's guitar-related.
I'll probably take source pics of my guitar.

I have an abstract/background piece in the works already.
Next time I might have something with my guitar - I've been thinking of doing such a thing for a while, anyways - just been to lazy to get the camera out.

This one should be great. I'm excited.
Moral of the story today:
when something you want to keep doing gets boring, give it a twist!

Japanese Resource

I have a new blog I'm using as a website for teaching/learning Japanese. I am planning on making it an excellent place full of well-sorted and organized information.

The layout is and will be nothing like a blog - far less so than this one. I hope to build it up over the next few weeks, and I'll start communicating with the rest of the 日本語+English community. I might even look into making money with Google advertising, if it goes anywhere.

It's up and active if you want to look at it...
Japanese Resource

Today at iKnow I came across these :
来年 - rainen - next year
バラ(bara) - rose
レベル(reberu) - level

Along with the usual new:
肩 - kata - shoulder
飲む - nomu - to drink (already knew this)
寝る - neru - to sleep/go to sleep
消す - kesu - to turn off/switch off
元気 - genki - healthy/energetic (common word - knew this)
負ける - makeru - to lose (a game)

Finally! I've been waiting for "to sleep" forever! I've covered "wake up", "get up", "morning", but no evening words!?! And now I have it.

今私は寝る。
I am able to sleep now.

電気を消してください。(ください/kudasai means please)
please turn the light out.

元気/Genki is used all the time...

Genki desu ka?
How are you?(lit. are you well?)

Genki (desu).
(I'm) fine.

How To Practice Guitar!

I dug up an excellent / incredible website.
It makes practice exercises for you, based on how you specify.

My StumbleUpon button yielded a list of guitar practicing websites, all I was aware of, except for this one.
At the website, guitarcardio.com, you're given options of root notes, scales, modes, and difficulty. You tell it how many you want it to generate, and it generates them.

The exercises are clearly helping me. They're a challenge - that's key to improving.
I'm doing medium difficulty ones. Some are harder, some are easier - it's about where I'm at. It's clearly helping my fingers to be more coordinated.

It seems to be the guitar equivalent of my Hanon piano books.

Brush Experiments

I wasn't able to learn anything specific today that I hoped to.
I got a bunch of new brushes at qbrushes.com - a website I recently stumbled upon.
Today I did several experiments - as I usually do when I get new brushes.

They came out... interesting to say the least.

The first of these is Towering Flames. It's just a concept piece. I have been trying to successfully imitate fire for a long time. Nobody on the internet seems remotely good at it (without using source pics), so I'm rather pleased - it's the best yet, and makes me hopeful.
This second one I just did today, also. It's called Bearing it All. Perhaps it's a sign of my troubled heart... oh well. I'm perfectly happy... on the outside, at least. It's rather strange and shocking that such an abstract brush could have such an effect on me. It's still a decent piece, considering that I don't usually use perspective like this. Yes, the silhouette is actually me - from a photo.

Mental Language Barriers

Today was nuts when it came to language.

I was studying my Japanese.
I got into that mindset and I noticed I'd come a long way when it came to vocabulary.
My grammar has improved a bit, also.

This was at church... not long after, I somehow ended up speaking with someone from the Spanish branch that shared the building... oh, and she spoke no English.

That's right - I had an entire conversation in Spanish! It was weird. I've never done it before - it was far easier than I expected. MY comprehension is very high, even though I have so little vocabulary. She noticed some of my Japanese stuff , and we briefly spoke about Japanese in Spanish.

Afterward I thought my head was going to explode... I had so many layers of language and grammar in my head I was losing it.

That's all I dealt with today reaffirming and recognizing things I already knew...
I haven't used much Spanish in years - for some reason thinking in three languages gives me a headache. Just writing this is causing it again.

The important thing is that I have never spoke in Spanish to someone to doesn't speak English. I was kinda scared. It took getting used to. I learned a lot from it, though.
Behind the language barriers, we're all the same people.

Harder to Breathe

This is my new song.

Yes. Finally, the new song I promised myself.

I'm so glad to have written it - I didn't get this post in right away simply because I stayed up late with the song instead of coming here and posting about it.

I'll end with a preview of the lyrics - they're in the works still.

It really did take me into the early hours of the morning to finish it...
I seem to only be good at songwriting at that time of day... I've never understood why.

That's why I haven't written a song in so long - my other few ones were written in the early hours as well.

That's odd, isn't it? It doesn't make any sense. Why is my ability to write music only good early in the morning?


It's two in the morning
I'm still awake mourning
I'm finding some words for a song

She'd never believe me
but i can't help but feeling
i've known a deep truth all along.

Passing A Note

I didn't get this post done on time because I had a lot to do today. I was at a dance all night - it was a lot of fun, though - I made many new friends.
Passing A Note is the name of my new piece for today. It's a work based on my new knowledge of brushes.

I used a fade-off size/opacity jitter to make it go out into the distance.

To get the pen tool to stroke the lines like I wanted took some time... a nice-looking stroke path is hard to do - the natural two-way fade-off one that "simulates pressure" is almost impossible to get to happen, even when instructed how to by the internet. There's just too many things that can screw it up. Luckily I didn't need it, but I need to figure out how to get it to work eventually.

There's a beautiful "fractal" trick I discovered a little while back - I got it to work on a music note - that's where the inspiration came from here.

Also, I just found the tune for the song I'm going to write. I'll cover that tomorrow, though.

Today's Vocab

Today's new stuff was:
遠い - tooi - far, distant
弱い - yowai - weak
耳 - mimi - ear, hearing
据わる - suwaru - to sit (down)

浴びる - abiru - to take (a shower)

This is the first English homophone I've had to deal with.
I've had week before.
I've forgot it already, though - that's even worse.
Let's see...
weak - yowai - 弱い
week - shuu - 週

I'd forgotten 次 - tsugi - "next"

My new grammar/misc pieces for the day are...
また (mata) - again, also, still(doing something)
いつ (itsu) - when, how soon


It did "right" as a new one, so here's these.
右 - migi - right
左 - hidari - left

Traffic In The Sky

and it doesn't seem to be getting much better...

I found a new song already - it was one of those stuck-in-my-head, learn-to-forget ones.
I have started learning it because I don't know the lyrics, which embeds it in my head until I learn them.

It happened to cover material I needed - more individual-string finger-picking.
I am trying to learn things that will teach me something. This covers stuff I needed.

Switching to and from the movable broken x1312x chord.
The two it uses are the second and fourth of this verse:

D - 557775
... - x 9 11 9 10 x
C - 335553
... - x 7 9 7 8 x

It's a good song - not incredibly difficult.
I just need to work on holding down those mysterious chords better.

The Hard Way: Eliza's Necklace

I don't care for removing things from their backgrounds, as I'm sure I previously mentioned.
This is what you'd call the worst case scenario.
There are endless varieties of ways to separate one object from another. There is Hue, Saturation, and Brightness - at least one of these varies in some degree between separate objects. The other 1% of the time, usually the location or the size/shape/texture varies enough.

This time it was medium grays on medium grays... yuck... what a nightmare. I learned something, though - If you keep a steady hand, a layer mask can be fine tuned. Apparently different brushes on a layer mask and a careful stroking of it can get you what you're looking for no matter what. That's a big confidence booster: it proves that anything can be removed from anything. It did take a few hours, though - but probably half that time was spent searching for and attempting other things - and failing.

It's pretty, isn't it? Eliza sent it to me from her phone. Maybe my work's not perfect, but good enough for a source image, and I can always touch it up.

Noticing The Little Stuff

Another day, another practice session at iKnow.
I'm halfway through the course (52%)... supposedly.
The words today are:
首 - kubi - neck
速い - hayai - fast
一緒に - isshyoni - together, at the same time
日記 - nikki - diary
遊ぶ - asobu - to play
今月 - kongetsu - this month

great... another homophone. don't we love those?
はやい - hayai - can be 早い or 速い - "early" or "fast".

I've notice a few little things along the way, though.

For example, とても - totemo - which means "very".
Also, the を (o) vs. に (ni) particles - and when to use them.

i'm a little thrown off by the formal vs. informal speech.
I need to go learn about the -masu and -shou endings, and what they mean.
the whole "shou" thing is a little confusing...

I learned that the -tachi pluralizing suffix can be added to many things.
not only does it make I -> We and You(s) -> You(p) and He/She/It -> Them, but
It makes Child -> Children.

I have picked up a few misc unintentional vocabulary words...
鳥 - tori - bird
キリン - kirin - giraffe
公園 - kouen - (public) park
忙しい - busy - actually i think this was vocab at some point... but I can't remember.

several are reoccuring-I-think vocab, like 寒い - samui - cold.
That one's used it the 冬/fuyu(winter) practice sentence.

I think my comprehension is getting a little better... I'm trying to help it along.
I still don't care for the dictation thing, even if it is helping.

The Finished And The Forgotten

I finally have ...Follow You Into The Dark by DCfC perfect!
I'm glad to have another one down.

Something happened tonight to irritate me slightly... I realized something depressing...

I've forgotten a lot of the earlier things I learned.

Eliza showed me a song of Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat tonight, Lucky.
It was pretty cool.

I used to know how to play Mraz's Prettiest Friend.
I've forgotten, and re-learning it isn't going to be easy - I had to figure it out by ear. Somewhere I wrote it down, though... Hopefully I can find out where.

Also, I used to be able to play Hey, There Delilah by Plain White T's.

I'm kinda thrown now... I feel obligated to go back... Once I do, I'll pick up something new, though. I still practice the more recent old stuff regularly, for practice's sake.

Finding Source Photos

Photoshop without photos sounds kinda ridiculous, does it not?
Well, I don't particularly care for cutting things out. It doesn't matter whether it's with scissors, my dad's xacto knife, my pocketknife... It's really rather tedious to me.

The same thing applies to Photoshop. Whether it be a pen tool or a mask or any of the lassos, I don't particularly like messing with any of it. That's part of my suffering, it seems.
I found a solution that may help me to break this annoyance. I Googled it and found this on YouTube. You can get rid of whites and blacks by using the "blend if:" on the bottom in
blending options/layer styles. Alt-clicking can give you a secondary slider.

Fireworks!!! I have lots of them on my phone from July (of course). This is a neat green one I stuck on a Filter> render> clouds background. While I was in layer styles I gave it a nice outer glow. I love it! It's not a piece of art by its self, but it's an awesome proof-of-concept.

I think I'll be able to take advantage of source images hereafter. I do need to get to where I'm better at finding them or taking them - I don't really like taking pics from the internet - it comes off cliché - and you can't always prevent accidental licensing issues.

iKnow's Dictation

There's a thing I hadn't yet noticed on iKnow that I tried using...
I couldn't figure out how to open it, but now I've started playing with it.

It's called "dictation". It gives me a word or two missing in 10 sentences, and gets me to fill in the pronunciation. Easy enough, huh?
The second half is each of the sentences entirely blank. I have to learn how some of the longer words in the sentences are spelled... it gets rather tricky - even frustrating. It gives you 3/4 chances to make a mistake or ask for a hint, though.

I'm still playing with it - I don't know if I'll keep using it... it might help train my ears, though.

We'll see. I do need work on listening/comprehending. I think I'll do better once my vocabulary course is "complete". It's at 44% completion right now.

Latest words:
電車 - densha - train
自転車 - jitensha - bicycle
探す - sagasu - to search for, look for
紙 - kami - paper
歌う - utau - to sing
遅い - osoi - slow, late


densha/jitensha would be very confusing w/ their rhyme, if it weren't for the fact that I already knew densha.
I practiced 言う - iu - to say/tell today.
It's the companion to "to speak" - 話す - hanasu...
I found this "say vs. speak" pair confusing in spanish once upon a time...
to speak - hablar - 話す/hanasu
to say - decir - 言う/iu

I Will... Into the Dark II

I have the chords/lyrics to DCfC's I Will Follow You Into The Dark. I'm learning it today, like I said I was planning on doing.

It's not easy, but it isn't as difficult to understand as I thought it would be.
It uses:
Dm - x00231
F - 133211
Bb - 113331
Bbm - 113321
A -002220
C - 032010
C(bar) - 335553

It's just there's no "pattern", so there's a lot more to remember.
The intro is this:

Dm F Bb F C
Dm F C(Bar)
Dm F A Dm-C Bbx2 Bbmx2

Eliza's Nebulae

Yay! I love projects that aren't an entire flop! This one did okay.
This evening I spent the whole time on the phone with a dear friend, and afterward I was sitting on the couch in the quiet living room - everyone was gone at the time. My laptop was sitting there. I looked at it. It looked back at me. I thought to myself... hmm...

I opened it to my FireFox and there it was! The perfect tutorial. If anyone's interested, you can find it here at PSD Vault. It's a rather silly how-to-make-a-nebula thingy, but I like my end result. Keep in mind tutorals are guidelines (I don't keep the rules) , but it covers basically how I did it.

I did the first main piece twice however, rather than using the clone stamp as suggested. I thought his clone stamp use was rather lame. You have to be more subtle than that when using the clone stamp, else the reoccurences make it repetitive and yucky.

The tutorial asked you to make a new brush - I added it to my personal collection.
It's a neat little grainy star maker.
I also used my own brush trick on the coloring part - I used a giant blue soft brush with color dynamics. If you understand color dynamics (see The Brush Technique How-To if you're curious) you can use good colors, without consciously deciding specifically what to use. Plus, I love randomness!

Typing In Any Language!

Well... iKnow didn't yell at me today. It only wanted me to do 30.
Today I have:

着る - kiru - to wear
笑う - warau - to smile
一番 - ichiban - most
授業 - jugyou - class, lesson
週 - shuu - week
and... wait for it... 漢字 - kanji !!!

I "completed" my first kanji, 持つ - motsu - to have


My mom wanted me to look into some French stuff for her, since I was able to find lots of easy Japanese resources. I found a handy trick to typing in any of the romantic languages. For those of you interested, you can set your language bar so it will type any character for French, German, Spanish, etc.

If you know how to open your language bar settings, (right-click start-bar> toolbars> language bar> click triangle on bottom right> settings...) Do so and click add. scroll down to look for the English one already checked and find U.S. - International.

Also, another set of instructions are here: http://www.conted.und.edu/coursedev/span1012006/TypeSpanish.htm

That will give your language bar a second option. If selected, you can type español, français, and deutsch characters that you couldn't otherwise, like ñ, ç, á,é,í,ó,ú, à,è,ì,ò,ù, ä,ë,ï,ö,ü,
You can set shortcuts to switch between language settings, too.

What you do is type with the [~ / `], [" / '], and [^ / (no 6)] keys. It will wait for you to hit space for a regular BUT instead you let go, and then type the letter. For ¡ and ¿ hold RIGHT alt and then press then type the normal ones.

Try pressing everything with right-alt!
numbers and punctuation -¡ ² ³ ¤ € ¼ ½ ¾ ‘ ’ ¥ × « » ¬ ¶ ´ ¿ ç
QWERTYUIOP=äåé®þüúíóö
ASD=áßð L=ø
Z=æ NM=ñµ

(Following Her) Into The Dark

I made a big discovery when I was playing bits and pieces of Lee's What It Does to Us this evening. I was about to go to bed, but I forgot to post here anyway.

I'll Follow You Into The Dark - by Death Cab for Cutie - an incredible song... was introduced to me by Eliza long ago, funnily enough, who I just got off the phone and/or texting with. What about it?

Well... Lee can play it. And I was playing two of the chords he uses in his song... the sound was familiar... and then it hit me! I thought I was just imagining it at first, but I looked up the video to go listen to it, and sure enough - Perhaps he was inspired by it, however subliminally... I love it! I'm going to learn it. I have to... It will be marginally difficult, and I was looking for a challenge in my next song to learn. It fits perfect!

I wasn't even thinking about that song at the time. It took forever to figure out where in the past I had heard that sound...


If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied -
illuminate the "no"s on their vacancy signs,
if there's no one beside you when your soul embarks...
then I'll follow you into the dark.

One More Rewind

Hooray for Rewinds! That's what I'm going to call them from now on.
It's when I take something from the past and either toy with it first and then show it off, or merely show and tell my thoughts.
I don't always make things I like enough to show, but sometimes I like their history enough to share them anyways.
This one I considered a failure. It's not really that bad. It's an excellent "texture" - It just isn't anything by itself. I may use it for something in the future. This one is called Randomleaves, and it's a good natural texture. I think it has lots of potential as a random brush or something... I'll have to experiment. It was done entirely be Photoshop - even the colors. I did not so much as touch a brush to it.

On another note, It doesn't look as good with a white backdrop, for those of you viewing this post externally.

My next post will be a real project, for sure. Hopefully it will be a good one.

iknow... Too Much...

I have used iknow often, though not regularly. It suggests you use it daily. I'm beating my head against the wall over it, and it wants me to do more.

I recognize putting off serious memorization has slowed me a bit, but it's asking me to do 43 today (why 43 I don't know) instead of the usual 30!

Granted each set of 10 has only two new ones (the others are review/practice), but it's killing me!
I want to improve though...

I'm more upset that it's right... I need to work harder...
I prefer to go there during the evenings... I need to go during the day instead. That would probably make my life easier.

The new ones this time include:

赤い - akai - red ...already knew that
今日 - kyou - today ...another no-duh
...
姉 - ane - older sister, which I also already know, and
some dumb 酒/sake alcohol thing.

the good ones are:
覚える - oboeru - to learn, memorize
狭い - semai - restricted, narrow (pronounced like "semi", I notice!)
友達 - tomodachi - friend(... this one I've been waiting for.)
忘れる - wasureru - to forget (I forgot what this meant and had to look it up...lol...)
好き - suki - favorite/liked (...this adj. is used instead of "I like..."; in English we use a verb...)
建てる - tateru - to build, erect (a house or building, for example)

Lyrics and Embarrassment

I think the problem I've been running into with lyrics is my mood.

I've had songs I've wanted to write, but I'm terrified the people they're written about will hear them. Call me chicken - that's just me.

Seriously, though - a good song often has a heart behind it. I'm not quick to wear my heart on my sleeve. So I've sort of held myself back because I was going to feel compelled to show what I've done here. So I'm retracting any obligation to. I may later do it anyways. But while I'm writing lyrics, I'm making no promises. that should help me psychologically.

I think I'm also going to pick out a new favorite/popular song to learn at the right challenge level; that will help me get better at playing guitar. I'm not sure what it will be, but I'm already narrowing it down.