Sorry about the mess in here...

It's been a while since my last post, but there has been literally nothing going on. I while away my hours and days as best I can. Of course, I have this immense luxury due to the fact that the school system here isn't big on scheduling things up front, or if they are, then they're certainly not big on telling lil ole me about it. I had an extra two week vacation after approximately 4 hours of teaching spread out over 5 school days from Feb 4-11... but I didn't know that I had all this time off until like, 11am on the 11th. So yeah, not much time to plan anything. Plus I've got other obligations in the evenings, so this all adds up to a lot of time of time spent sitting around my apartment, staring at walls, watching paint dry, watching grass grow. Slowly, because it's... you know, winter.

I've cut the language learning down to 5. Korean, German, French, Italian, Portuguese. I figured the Spanish could wait, seein as how I sort of already speak it. And the others, the Russian/Chinese/Japanese/Arabic... well, I was getting all confused. It's not really a good idea to try to learn 5 alphabets at once, I've decided. I have enough trouble with the umlauts and accents and funny-sounding letters in the European languages...

It's cold here. It snowed a few days ago, after a wintry mix (I always liked that weather terminology) fell for a while during my walk home Thursday night. It was this stinging biting rain that turned to little flakes of ice falling from the sky. Not pleasant.

I joined a gym -- it's been a long time since I worked out, as my pecs and triceps can attest today. I was trying to open the suddenly-heavy sliding door that leads to my terrace/washing machine yesterday... ha. With an armload of clothes leaving only my right hand free, and the need to pull the door from right to left, I almost gave up. I struggled with that door for at least 20 seconds... it never occurred to me to drop the armload of clothes. I was going to defeat that door in a fair fight. Well, it turns out I needn't have scrupled to fight clean; the door had its own dirty tricks. My cheeks burned in shame and humiliation as the door taunted me mercilessly, saying things about my mother it would be heinous to repeat in polite company. Door: 1. Sean: 0. After I finished crying, though, I realized I had forgotten to unlock the damn thing. You don't have to be the strongest to win the fight, just the smartest. My long and arduous journey to the washer was complete. Ha...

By a random confluence of events, I ended up staying at my friend Jill's place near Icheon last night. She's out of town, so she said I could crash here since I was planning a night out in Icheon. That ended up not working out as well as I'd hoped, but at least it was a quick trip to her place afterwards. So this morning, thanks to her generosity, I've had a breakfast fit for kings! Or at least, fit for IHOP. So far, in the hour and a half I've been up, I've had coffee, gone to the store for milk and eggs, and cooked banana pancakes (with syrup -- yum!), fried eggs and sausage, and then eaten like a fat American champion! And God saw that it was good.

And that's really about it. Au revoir! Auf Wiedersehen! Arrivederci! Tchao! Annyong-hi gaseyo!