Filling in on life quickly

Hi all. I'm going to just post an update about my life in this post. I'm not going to mention what happened with Eric Koolich this month because that deserves its own post and it will certainly get one at some point later on during this week. I'm starting to have some free time, so I'll be getting to both of the posts I wanted to make during this week (I sincerely hope so at least).

Upon checking what I said in my last post, I may have sounded a little too depressed, confused, stressed out, or some combination of the three. I'm not thinking of quitting teaching immediately after I finish my program and I'm certainly not planning on just up and leaving Korea. I was just really busy at the time and didn't choose my words carefully. I won't be teaching for my whole life (unless I go get a masters and do that) but I've known that from the start. I don't mean to convey that I hate it now, only that I'm looking forward to someday doing a different type of work as well.

Work:
Work was horribly busy last month as it has been since the midterms for some reason. I don't know what happened, but this year was pretty crazy. However, all of a sudden my workload has dropped off dramatically and now I have a ton of free time. It coincided well with the fact that I need free time nowadays more than I did before because...

Cat:
...because I rescued a kitten! She lived near the school with her mom and 4 siblings (one died). One day, the three remaining cats just up and left and ditched her. The Chinese teacher brought her into the school and everyone didn't know what to do except one of the Korean teachers who knew I love cats and he told everyone that I should take the cat. That turned into a crazy two-week adventure of taking the cat to the vet, getting her accustomed to her new digs, and getting permission to keep the cat in the dorm. The permission thing went all the way up to the principal, who actually approved it personally with the caveat that "It's too bad the cat has to live in a small apartment so you can bring her to the office if you want." which basically means that he wants to see the kitten occasionally. I feel special now because I'm the first person to ever have a pet in the dormitory here. I'll post pictures of her on facebook soon. I'm excited too because I've had 3 boy cats, but this is my first girl cat. It's also my first time raising a cat on my own (or raising a kitten ever), but I've learned how to properly do it over the years, so I feel like I'm ready.

Japan Vacation:
At the start of the month, Brandon and I went to Tokyo for our big weekend. It was pretty fun, although I was reminded that I'm not really that fond of Japan. We had a good time, but it'll be a while before we go back. A fun story from the trip (the worst day):

We really wanted to hike Mt. Fuji, so we planned a day around it. We got up at the crack of dawn, took a big 2-hour bus ride to the base of the mountain, then waited about 40 minutes to take another 40-minute bus ride partway up the mountain to hike. Along the first bus ride, it started raining. Little did I know at the time, but that would be the last time I saw the sun all weekend. It poured on us the rest of the time. When we got up to the place to start the hike, Brandon had to use the bathroom. As he went in, an older guy grabbed him and pointed to a box full of coins. Apparently, it cost Y100 to use the bathroom. Ridiculous. After getting situated and ready to head out, we got to the start of the trail only to find that it was closed. A few other hikers were disappointed as well because there had been no signage (Japanese or English) to note that the trail was closed on this particular day. In mild rage, we hung around the place where the trail starts, enjoying the "view" (of nothing but straight up fog) and caught the first bus back. While enjoying the view, we found a free public bathroom that we better quality than the Y100 one. After that, we needed to find a way to fill the rest of the day that we had basically set aside for being on the mountain. There was an amusement park nearby, so we figured that would be a fun way to kill some time. It cost about $10 to get in, then would cost additional money at each ride you wanted to go on. No big deal we figured, let's have a good time. As soon as we paid the *non-refundable* entrance fee and entered the park, it cut loose and all the rides had to close due to weather. Since the rain was moving in indefinitely, we had to just leave and take the $10 hit. We left but not before unloading all of the hiking equipment (snacks and water) that we didn't want or need into a locker in the theme park in our rage. After getting back to Tokyo, we went to Akihabara, but a combination of the rain and terrible stuff there in general made it terrible. We went back to near our hotel in search for some drinks or something and happened to find a bar.

The bar we went to actually was really great. It was a new startup whiskey bar with a cool environment and the owner was an awesome guy. It's called Cafe Bar and it's in Kinshicho or something like that. Also, we found a good Ramen place there with God-tier ramen. That and the bar made the are we were in pretty cool. The second day we went to the bar, there was a girl working there. Since she knew a little Enlgish and was extremely cute, she talked to us the whole night. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend but to be honest, I don't think I would have done anything anyway because it was the night before we were leaving. An interesting note though is that I found she had a friend that goes to SCC. She had her friend take a picture of the part of Seattle she was in. I figured it would be a longshot that I would recognize it, but she took a picture of Deseret and the ice rink on Aurora and I was like oh shit she's in Shorline. The girl didn't remember the name of the college her friend when to, but when I asked if it was SCC, she said that sounded right and her friend confirmed it. Crazy small world story.

Anyway, Japan was pretty neat. I'll go again to hike Mt. Fuji, but for now I'm good on Japan.

Other stuff:
Korean lessons are still going well. I've kept myself pretty busy with this and that, videogames and whatnot. I finally finished my computer, so I can start playing games on the weekends again. StarCitizen's dogfight simulator has come out, so now I've been pretty happy too.

I don't know if anyone enjoys reading about it also, but I recently had good closure and am definitely over my ex-girlfriend now. I know that she broke up with me back in October, but I had only just started to get over it in early December. Then, a bunch of crazy stuff happened (Grandpa, a couple quick trips back and forth between Washington and Korea, lots of work, new students, tons of stuff in general) and she kind of slipped my mind of a few months. Recently though with the weather getting warmer, I started to feel a bit lonely and I thought about her again. However I recently learned from Patrick that my ex-girlfriend (according to Patrick's wife) is a bit controlling and crazy and his wife actually told him she regrets having set me up with her. It's stuff I could have realized on my own sure, but just hearing it from someone else kind of opened my eyes and now I'm totally fine. In fact, I was considering starting to try to go out and do things rather than play games on weekends, but shortly afterwards, I got my kitten so now that occupies most of my time. There are still some girls I could ask out that I see and socialize with often, but I don't think things would work out with them, so I'm holding off. I don't really have time to be dating anyone at the moment. Besides, I live with the cutest girl I know anyway (the cat, I'm already becoming a crazy cat lady). Anyway, that was just a bit of good news. Overall, things are pretty good at the moment.

So I owe the universe a couple posts about people that I hope we never forget. I'll definitely make those posts this week or next if I get the time. Until next time, peace out!

I *May* have forgotten to post last month

I had to take a second to appreciate that title. Anyway yeah I did forget to post last month. As per usual, I've been super busy. I just don't know anymore, I think in 2015 after I finish my Korean program, I should start thinking about either getting out of teaching or getting more qualified to be an actual teacher. Then I could at least make more for the amount of work I'm putting in. But in the meantime, these extra classes (though they are a ton of work) do pay pretty well so it's okay.

I really have been busy in the last month, even my free time has been carefully calculated. It's been really weird because the guys will stay up late on their Saturday nights playing League and even though they stay up past 3am with me, I'm usually the first one to have to sign off (even though its only around 7pm for me) because I have to get caught up on work. That all being said, I'll try to fill you all in on stuff that's been going on.

Work:
My night class started up again. Last time around, it was a test preparation class for a speaking test. Really easy to plan for because you could pretty much come up with a logical way to teach it based on how the test itself is arranged. The class was hard to teach though because there's only so much you can do with speaking activities and it's hard to work on 8 peoples' speaking skills at the same time. Since the class was definitely the most boring topic of the four foreign teachers' classes, I let my students suggest some things they wanted to me. The top one that came up was English Culture. I had no idea that it would be this much of a pain in the butt, but I took it on. In addition to doubling my class size (I have 16 now), I also doubled my workload (or more). Turns out planning for what to teach, what order to teach, and how to teach things related to English culture is extremely hard. That class has been nice to teach and I feel like it's been fun for the students, but there's no way I can keep it up next term so I'll probably wind up changing the class to something else. It's really because of this class that I've been so busy all month. It's a horrible pain to plan for.

Besides that, my normal workload is going smoothly. In addition, the middle school classes on weekends are going well too. We're getting towards finals, so Brandon and I are trying to think of what to do after that point. Also we're considering not switching for next semester because some of our classes we only get once a week and we don't feel like we've gotten to know them enough yet. We'll see how that goes.

Outside of Work:
Outside of work I've of course been just as busy. It'll seem like I did a lot here and that might give you the impression that I have tons of free time, but don't be mistaken, I'm just becoming really efficient with my free time.

If you've talked to me this month, I've surely complained about my computer being dead. If you haven't heard about that, it's also why I haven't been streaming my games. It seems that my motherboard and/or SSD died so I had to replace both. I also bought a new computer case while I was at it because my old one got smashed to hell when I originally sent it over to Korea from the states. The build is complete, but I have yet to test it. I'll be doing that when I get back from Japan.

On that note, Brandon and I are going to Tokyo tomorrow until Sunday. We decided to go because it is a 5-day weekend for our school. Wednesday is election day, Thursday is a holiday for our school's founding or something, then Friday is....Armistice day? I should really look into what magical occasion is giving me a day off. Anyway, I think it'll be fun to go back to Japan since Brandon's never gone and I hope I like it better than the last times I went.

Speaking of things I've been planning to do, I have been planning to start going back to the gym. My night class is starting to wind down, so from next Monday, I'll be going back to the gym with the Chinese teacher that I used to go with plus one of the new Chinese teachers. Why do I mention this? Not sure really, but it does kinda go with the fact that I've pretty much gotten a makeover over the course of the last month.

In the past month, I changed my look up a bit. I got new clothes of course as I'm starting to update my start using fashion. In addition, I saw this picture recently on Reddit and thought "Hey I wonder if I can pull off hair similar to that." It's not the same, but it's I guess kinda similar. Either way it's now not just lazily resting on my head the way it has for...my entire life. In addition, I finally gave into peer pressure with everyone (including my eye doctor) saying I should get contacts and I went ahead and did it. Wearing them was hard at first. It took over an hour in the store and I couldn't put them in by myself. I even lost one and had to come back later in the week to try again, at which point it still took 45 minutes. I've slowly worked myself down to a point where I can get them both in in about 3 minutes, but then my eyes burn and tear up for about 10 minutes after that since they're still not fully used to wearing contacts. It'll get better as I go. Anyway, I look totally beautiful now ^__^

You probably don't know or care what I'm talking about, but I'm getting pretty decent at Planetside 2. It's a fun game. I won't bore you with more than that I suppose.

We've started to do more ranked 5s when we all play League with each other these days. A few weeks ago, we actually hit gold with one of our teams. So that means I finally got gold. I'm super excited about it. Hopefully I can do the same in soloqueue. At the very least, having gold in my pocket in any ranked queue has helped relieve a LOT (read: all) of my League related stress.

And last and probably most important is my Korean class. I just finished level 2 this last month (it's the equivalent of 12 months of study). I still have 20 more months to go (oh wow that just hit me) but I think I can make it. I've always said that if I ever lost my teacher, I would probably start looking for different schools closer to me. That actually has happened as we go to level 3, but now I feel like I might stay because of the class. I really don't like the 3 hour commute 2-3 times a week, but any other school just wouldn't be the same. I've lost the teacher, now I think if I lose the classmates too, that'll be the point at which I just say screw it and go to another school (of course that can always change, knowing me). In the meantime, I want to see if I can finish the full course.

That's about it for now, I should get back to packing. Until next time, peace out.