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Here’s wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy New Year. Yesterday was the first day that has really felt like this time of the year, with below freezing temperatures and a vicious wind contributing to very chilly weather. At least the sun is shining and there’s been no snow, yet. (Fingers crossed)
The first two weeks of my vacation have flown by and I assume the final week will go just as fast. I wish that working days would go by so quickly because the first 4 weeks back are going to be killers. I told my boss to give me as many hours as she could, if she needed someone to fill in some extra slots, and she obliged me. I’ve got 7 classroom hours a day, 5 days a week, from Jan. 3rd to the 28th! That’s a heckuva schedule when you figure in lesson planning time. I’ll be teaching 4 regular Language Center classes, the usual number for this time of the year, but I’ll also be teaching (babysitting, actually) a children’s English Camp another 3 hours a day. My first class starts at 9 a.m. and the final one finishes at 7:30 p.m. The few hours that I don’t have classes will probably be spent doing the next day’s lesson plans. I figure I’ll be pretty burned out by the end of those 4 weeks, but at least I’ll be making a lot of overtime pay, if I survive to collect it. 
Again, Happy Holidays to everyone, everywhere. More later.
It looks like we’re going to survive through the S. Korean-American war games without our northern neighbors going ballistic on everyone. I’m sure my students will be happy about that, because the next few weeks is final exam time.
So, I’ll be busy with oral interview assessments of and classroom presentations by the students, not to mention all the paperwork I’ll have to do. But, that’s only until December 10, when we have a three-week vacation.
Unfortunately, my financial situation right now dictates that I not travel abroad like I normally would do. So, I’ll stay in Yeosu, take some photos, and whatnot, depending on the weather.
I’ll probably go up to Seoul to do a little shopping for some books and hard-to-find spices, and perhaps to Andong. Anyway, I’m really going to miss getting out of the cold Korean winter weather for a few weeks. I’ll just have to keep summer on my mind.
In case you didn’t realize it, the previous post about my birthday candles was merely a tongue-in-cheek satire of my increasing age. No, I didn’t really set the dorm on fire. Yes, there really would have been a lot of candles in that cake. More later (posts and candles, I hope.)
Hopefully, this isn’t my last post for a while. War games involving South Korea and the United States will begin tomorrow in the Yellow Sea (West Sea to South Koreans) near the line demarcating the North and South, and Crazy Uncle Kim in the North says that this will bring the peninsula to the brink of war. The U.S. has deployed an aircraft carrier to be part of the exercise, so if the nut jobs want to start something, I’m sure they’ll have their hands full.
Hopefully, nothing will happen. Hopefully, North Korea will get an earful from its only ally, China. China has a big stake in all of this. Many analyses that I’ve read state that it can’t afford to let the North Korean regime get involved in a full-scale war for a couple of reasons. It would likely mean the collapse of the N. Korean government, which would mean that hundreds of thousands of refugees would cross the northern border into China. More dire for the Chinese is the possibility of a new pro-American government coming into power, something they certainly don’t want to see.
However, many South Koreans are calling for blood, and CNN is reporting that protests by members of the military are spreading in Seoul. The protestors are demanding that a strong response to the recent shelling is necessary.
Hopefully, the situation won’t escalate any further, and, hopefully, I’ll be posting tomorrow. After all, it’ll be my ??th birthday.
I mentioned in a previous post that I was feeling a bit under the weather, but whatever the minor ailment was, it has passed. I didn’t do anything special, so I feel lucky that I didn’t get an early season cold. However, I was looking around for non-medicinal cold remedies, just in case. (I hate taking medicine, like pills, cough syrups and the like.)
One treatment that I’ve tried before with mixed results is using Korean citron “marmalade” and using it in hot water with a generous tablespoon of honey. It may not always work, but it sure tastes delicious and is quite soothing on cold winter days.
A not-so-appetizing treatment I found on ezinearticles.com consists of this:
Pour a little warm water into a dish and add a level teaspoon of your sodium bicarbonate. Stir it well and then immerse your nose and surrounding parts of your face into it. Slowly breathe the water up your nose until it reaches the point where it begins to overflow into your mouth. Then expel it and rinse your mouth out.
Be careful not to add more than a teaspoonful to the water, and that the dish is of a size that enables you to fit your face into. If the mixture is too strong it will sting your nose for a while. A little trial and error will tell you how warm the water should be, which is warm enough but not hot.
Do this three times a day, and it should see off even the heaviest of colds well ahead of time.
No doubt. It’ll probably cure hiccups, snoring, and leprosy, too.
From a website entitled grandpapencil.net comes this one:
Place your hat on the table and drink well from a large bottle of whisky until you see two hats.
Get into bed and stay there.
He also lists some Texas Cold Remedies that involve cow dung and weasel skins. Take a gander if you dare.
And how about cough drops. From associatedcontent.com comes this: Most interesting about the evolution of cough drops was the fact that by the 19th century drugs were added to the candies. Among the first such drugs were opiates such as morphine and heroin . It might not have fixed what ailed them, but users of the candy were probably so buzzed high they didn’t care. The cough drop manufacturers eventually turned to slightly less narcotized ingredients such as codeine, the staple of most cough medicine today.
Have you got an unusual cold remedy? Leave a comment to let everyone know what kind of winter cure you use.
On another “cold” note, the temperatures in Montana are getting cold early, it seems. Great Falls has a forecast of -5 F. (about -20 C.) for Monday. Have fun, global warming deniers. (Even though Dr. Jeff Masters on his Weather Underground blog points out that the year to date is the warmest on record.)  More later.
There hasn’t been too much going on around here lately, thus the relatively long time between posts. The weather has finally turned nice, with the gray, rainy skies and humidity of the past few months giving way to cool mornings and crisp, sunny days along with lower, but still high, humidity. Very nice and just in time for Korean Thanksgiving, Chuseok, of which there is a nice writeup here.
This year, the holiday falls on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the upcoming week. It makes for a short week of teaching, but, unfortunately, we do have classes on Monday and Friday. Most of the students are whining about this, of course, since they want to leave early for their hometowns and don’t want to come back until next weekend. I don’t blame them a bit. If it were me, I’d take off and not worry about being counted absent for the one or two days I’d miss. I told them that and said that if this were the U.S., almost all the students would turn this into a 9-day vacation and wouldn’t worry a bit about being counted absent.
I told my students that one or two absences are not going to affect their grades all that much, especially if most of them are absent. The grades are based on a curve system here and they are only graded within each individual class, not with all the other classes combined. But some of the kids are so overly worried about missing even one class that they probably have trouble sleeping at night thinking about that particular stain on their otherwise spotless record. Darned overachievers anyway. Sheesh, take a break, go home and enjoy the extended holiday, lighten up.
Oh, well, whatever the case, I have to be in class on Monday and Friday, though I expect there will probably be a pretty light turnout, especially on Friday. If most of the students are in class on Monday, maybe I’ll give them homework to do over the period, so that if they want to be absent on Friday, they can get some extra credit for doing the homework. Something like that, anyway.
Also over the last few weeks, the teachers’ apartments have been without cable TV. We had the admin people check into it, and we were told that the cable is no longer available. We’d always had it, and I assumed it was part of the annual maintenance fee that we pay every year. Apparently not. It was hardly worth it anyway, with only 15 channels available and of those, 3 were English channels — CNN, a sports channel and Animal Planet, which never came in good. The rest were Korean, Chinese or Japanese broadcasts, and whenever a lightning storm or heavy rain hit, the reception was knocked out for several days.
But, today we’re going to have a new cable package installed, one that brings with it close to a 100 channels, including quite a few more English stations. We have to pay a one-time installation fee of 30,000 Korean won (about $25) and a monthly subscriber fee of 14,000 won (about $12), but it’s worth the price. Now, in my two years at the Yankee baseball academy in the Dominican Republic, I never had a television, so I could do without, but it’s nice to have anyway.
P.S. TS Malou never did amount to much; it eventually passed quite a ways to the south of us, so we got only a few inches of rain and a small amount of wind.
I’d be completely remiss if I didn’t write about the loss of one of our good friends in Bangkok. When Nai and I go to the Big Mango, we always look up our friends Git and Goh. We can usually find out where they’re hanging out by checking in at a hole-in-the-wall (HITW) restaurant/bar/karaoke where Git has worked at times and where he can quite often be found. We went there in late June and Nai asked about Git. The folks who own the place, who always welcome us with open arms, spoke with Nai for a bit, and Nai turned to me and said “Git die.” “What?!” I said. We were both too stunned for words. What a complete shock. It seems that he was getting severe headaches, but didn’t go see a doctor until it was too late. He passed on just after Songkran, around the middle of April, from what, I don’t know–encephalitis, meningitis, an edema or tumor?
Git was such an extremely outgoing guy, enthusiastic, polite. He was the one who would fill your glass with beer or ice if you were running low on either, the one who would wipe off a wet or messy table, the guy who would go punch in your karaoke tune. Though he wasn’t that great of a singer, he loved karaoke. He always encouraged me to give it a go, though I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. The night we found out about his death, Nai and I went to our favorite karaoke bar and I sang a Beatles tune, “In My Life,” dedicated to him. A lot of tears were shed. We’ll miss you, Git. Rest In Peace.
Here’s a shot of Goh (on the left) and Git enjoying a bit too much beer in one of our favorite karaokes.
Coincidentally, while Nai and I were there this past June, Goh, who is deeply broken-hearted by the loss of his friend, was recuperating from what I think was an appendectomy up in his hometown of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand. Nai phoned him after getting his number from the people working in the HITW restaurant/bar/karaoke, and from the description Nai gave me of his medical problem, it sounded like appendicitis. Goh will be back in Bangkok by now. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t post a photo of our friends who own and work in the HITW place. Quintessential Thai–friendly, fun-loving and welcoming.
I woke up real early this morning, like, at 3:30, and looked out my window to see a beautiful, clear sky, the first time I’ve been able to see the morning stars in what seems like weeks. Some of the recent evenings have been mostly clear, but we’ve had mainly overcast morning skies for quite a while. This morning, there was a beautiful, waning crescent moon rising in the east, preceded by Capella, Aldebaran and the Pleiades.
Of course, just because it was clear doesn’t mean it wasn’t humid. Again, like it’s been every morning for the last month, the humidity was over 90% (95 today, according to the KMA website). Jogging is a real chore when there’s that much moisture in the air. It’s stamina-sapping, and by the time I’m finished, I’m drenched. Anyone who sees me jogging back to my apartment might think that I’ve been for an early morning swim. I managed to get in 67 minutes today, but my pace was oh, so sloowwwww. One positive aspect of losing all that water is that when I weigh myself after jogging, it looks like I’ve shed a couple of kilos!
Now, I’m going to watch the opening game of a 4-game set between the Yanks and the Red Sox. Yeah, I re-subscribed to MLB-TV in order to watch the teams struggle through the dog days of August and head down the stretch in September. The Red Sox have been devastated by injuries all season and are 6 1/2 games behind the Yanks. Hopefully, the New York squad can win 3 of 4 or even sweep the series; that would pretty much leave the Sox dead in the water as far as getting a spot in the playoffs.
Excuse me now while I go chug another liter of water. More later.
If you’re a baseball fan, then you must know by now that George Steinbrenner, The Boss, principal owner of the Yankees, died Tuesday of a heart attack. His presence will be sorely missed by all of us Yankee fans.
I think that many fans of other teams openly hated him, but admired and respected him in secret because of his single-minded determination to win, and these fans of other teams wished their owners had that same drive. There are probably quite a few other owners who are only in the game for the money, but the fans of these teams suffer more often than not. I’m sure that Steinbrenner cared about increasing the value of his investment in the team, but his main focus was on winning and putting money back into the organization, rather than pocketing any profit.
When I worked with the Yanks in the Dominican Republic, I always hoped that George would make a surprise visit to the academy, but, of course, he never did. I once tried to call him or, at least, get a message to him. This was way back in ’77, I believe, and it was during the game in which manager Billy Martin and outfielder Reggie Jackson almost came to fisticuffs in the dugout. I found the number for the Yankee office and gave them a call, but the line was busy. I tried for about half an hour, but I never could get through. I just wanted to let The Boss or someone in the Front Office know that I supported Martin and that Reggie should be disciplined or traded. As it turned out, poor Billy was hired and fired about 5 different times, and Reggie is now a special consultant for the Yanks. George loved both of ‘em.
RIP, Mr. Steinbrenner.
Lest anyone think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, I’m still kickin’. I returned from Thailand last weekend, and Language Center classes for the public-at-large began on Monday. I’m teaching 4 classes a day until children’s classes start in a few more weeks, when I’ll have one additional afternoon class. Right now I have classes from 9-12 and 7-8 in the evening. Thus, I’m off from noon until around 6, when I go to the office to prep for the next day’s classes. I also go in around 7:30 or 8 in the morning for more prep work.
I’ve been starting up my jogging program early in the morning–I mean EARLY; I go to the soccer field around 5:30 a.m. and jog for about an hour, then back to the apartment for breakfast and a shower, then up to the office. Around noon, I go to the gym weight room a few days a week for more punishment (well, at least I will be going–I just started yesterday and Thursday, and, geez, am I sore today). I finish the weights about 1 o’clock, then it’s time for lunch and . . . ummmm . . . time for . . . errrr . . . being lazy. Nap time, reading, watching TV, playing OOTP Baseball on the computer. Whatever. But, I haven’t been working on the blog. I’ve corrected that today. I’ve also been processing the photos today that I took on vacation, so I’ll be posting some of those soon. (Fingers crossed ) Anyway, stay tuned for more later.
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