Ice, black ice, white ice, that's the story this morning. Pretty slow going this morning into work. At least there weren't any serious accidents out there. It's a notable phenomenon that most of the residents of the Willamette valley have no idea how to drive in ice and snow, but most of them are smart enough to stay home when they know they're in over their heads. When it gets really nasty I get a kind of perverse pleasure from turning on the Portland news and watching the bumpercar cams they set up at known bad intersections.

No riding this weekend... I woke up to slushy snow on Saturday, and heavy wet snow on Sunday.

I picked up a book that details the basic Kanji list. It's no wonder that people are afraid of learning kanji, 2000 characters just to be basically literate. I think the ABC song was a lot easier to learn, you certainly can't do "Hooked on Phonics" for Kanji. Not that phonics are particularly good but you can teach a child to read most words in the english language (even if they don't understand them) because our writing system is based on concatenating basic sounds together with only a few exceptions. Just how do they teach when students can't be expected to read fluently until high school?