Always got something going on

Sorry about kind of delaying my updates here. Maybe I should just start planning to post towards the end of each month because I like to procrastinate so much. You know, now that I've typed it out, that doesn't sound like such a bad idea...

So how has my life been going? Pretty well. I mean I'm still really bummed about the whole breakup and all, but on the other hand that was two months ago and I have no interest in turning my blog into a Spring-2008 depression fest again, so I'm not going to really mention much more about it. Suffice to say, I would take her back in an instant. But now for more interesting things!!!

Work:
My night class ended recently. It was only scheduled to run for about a month and a half anyway. It was pretty nice having a lecture based class like that, but I'm definitely appreciating having some evenings off from work. I still have Korean class 2/3 times a week, so having some days when I can just linger late at work, then go home and make and eat my own dinner is nice. I've also started doing a language exchange with one of my Korean co-teachers which at the very least will not be unhelpful so I'm looking forward to learning this language as quickly as I can.

In other work-related news, my teaching partner here is moving away early. Her husband is getting moved to Hawaii. It worked out best for both of us really. She was kind of overbearing and difficult to work with at times this whole year though we were able to get along well enough. But she and her husband certainly deserve to get put somewhere nice and I figure I deserve to have a month to myself! It'll be good to have the whole classes back together for me. It's big class sizes compared to what I'm used to, but I seriously doubt I'll have any problems. It's just for this last month where finals are done and the lessons are mostly just "for fun."

In a crazy small world story, I found out one of my students is the brother of one of my Korean friends over here. I first met my friend in 2011 at a Starcraft match. He is actually the guy responsible for introducing me to my first pro player, Jangbi. I saw him several times since then and we've been in touch since then. The funny thing is he looks just like his younger brother who is a student of mine. We just found out last week that they're related. Such a weird coincidence.

Social Life:
Hahaha yeah right.

No but actually I just hang out with the Chinese teachers and Brandon a lot, that's pretty much it.

I guess another funny story is that there are just tons of rumours about my dating options at this school. The Chinese teachers are trying to set me up with this one Korean teacher who I think is really cool. At the same time, my first grade and second grade students are saying I should date the Chinese teachers (different classes say a different Chinese teacher) because the Chinese teachers apparently really like me (of course none of this is credible because high school). And while that's going on, the other half of my classes are saying I should start dating the Japanese teacher (who is really cute and looks a lot like Sunny), Actually they think that there's already something going on between us. It's because I asked one question too many about her in class one day or something so they figured I was interested in her. Then they asked her about me and she just acted coy and said she didn't know me that well. She was being professional because she actually doesn't know me that well, but the students assumed she was lying and her and I are secretly dating or something. Oh high school. Is this what it was like to be popular? I sure wasn't missing out.

Gaming:
What else can I talk about in posts? Season 3 ended recently for League. I failed to reach gold, but I did come close in the end. I'm not mad or anything really. I wish I had gotten there, but I feel like I didn't deserve it. I see too many faults in my play. These faults would all have been rectified by just playing more semi-regularly. I'm going to try to do that in Season 4 and I'm shooting for somewhere in platinum. A long and over deserved shoutout to Eric for so much excellent advice in the way of League. Also to Steven for his teaching as well. And of course Mike and Keir for being great duo partners during the season. Next season let's work hard together, 화이팅!

Fantasy Football:
I figured out the last thing I can talk about. I just failed to make the playoffs this season. It marks the first time I've failed to finish less than 3rd place in our league. I was pretty salty about it, but I guess my dominance had to end sometime right? At least I earned a few good records (both good and bad) this year on my way to the bottom! I considered starting my playoff predictions again this year, but I've decided against it because I think the Seahawks are going deep and there's no way I'm going to be the one to jinx them. Oh and feel free to ignore the following advice.

DAVID FROM THE FUTURE: DRAFT A FUCKING QUARTERBACK WITHIN THE FIRST 10 ROUNDS.

So that's about it. I'll probably start posting at the end of months from now, so expect something probably after Christmas. Happy Thanksgiving (today that you're waking up to if you read this shortly after its posting) and at the very least have a good Christmas. Peace out!

No, Apparently I Can't

Well as many regular readers of the blog will know, I no longer have a girlfriend. For those of you just now finding out, yeah it's true. That kinda sucks given how excited about it I was last time. It seems like we were only dating a short time (which I guess is not untrue), but it was actually about 2-3 months in total and I just took forever to post about it beginning. I'm pretty bummed, but it's been a couple weeks now and I've tried keeping myself as busy as possible (I did too good a job) which prevents me form dwelling on it too much. I'm actually going to avoid talking about the breakup here in part due to I don't want to make a permanent record of it, but mostly because I have other things I want to mention. If you want to hear more, feel free to set up a time to chat with me though. I can do Skype or just instant messaging; both are fine. I'm more than fine talking about it like that. In fact, I've already done it several times. I'd like to thank the people that gave me some good perspectives on it also (you guys know who you are but I can edit in your name here if you want everyone to know, haha).

But anyway, it's been a busy month. I'll start with the trip to China that I took last month. I went to Beijing with Brandon, the next-youngest teacher English teacher here. We went over Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok), so just a quick 5-day trip. Neither of us speaks Chinese, but Brandon has a friend studying in Beijing who is from Canada, but is also Chinese so he speaks both English and Chinese fluently. Having him was extremely helpful. I don't think I'll go to China again unless I have help translating like he did. It was almost impossible to navigate to new places without his help. We got to see a lot of cool places like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and other cool places around Beijing. We also got to hang out with friends of this guy, which was pretty cool. I can go into more detail about it or show pictures, but they're also on my facebook in the meantime. It's hard to describe what we did exactly because we just had a lot of fun the whole time. It was a good adventure.

Since I've been back, I've just been working and trying to get ahead on lessons and stuff. My work has been starting to pile up recently. We split our lesson plans evenly, but somehow it worked out that I needed to do two whole chapters of lessons in a row because they were topics within my expertise (technology and environmental crap). In addition, I'm also planning our other classes' projects at the same time. Then this week, I found out my night class (Macroeconomics) is coming back, so I've had to start planning lessons for that to try to desperately get ahead. I'm managing to stay ahead without having to rely on working for more than 2-3 hours on the weekends or losing sleep so far. It would better if I had more time, but my Korean classes are eating up a lot of that.

Speaking of which, I've joined a private school for my Korean lessons. The ones I had at school were becoming irregular because the teacher that's tutoring me has been busy this semester so I've only gotten to see her a couple of times since summer vacation. Brandon actually also just started going to this private school this month too. He's the one who found it and everything and learned the process of how to apply, so I have to credit him for that. After hearing he was doing that, I considered the idea of doing it myself, but I then figured I was probably too busy (this was before I got a night class (I figured between having a girlfriend, self study, and my private lessons, I would be fine)) so I chose not to do it. But then that following weekend, my girlfriend broke up with me and I guess I should say the short story of it is that she was stressed out about the language barrier (it wasn't that bad, in fact we were set up because she was so good at speaking English and the people that set us up knew I was studying Korean). At any rate, I wound up deciding that I would take classes on the day she broke up with me. It took until the following Monday to get a time for a placement interview though. I think the guy placing me at a level was having a hard time because I learned a lot of stuff in a logical order, then forgot about half of it, and then started just learning whatever through private lessons and self study, so my knowledge is kind of all over the place. I wound up getting put at Level 1, class 5 which it takes 5 months of classes to reach. Considering I only really ever took 4 months of official classes at Yonsei and that was two years ago, I figured that sounded more than fair to me.

Class is going really well. The problem is that it eats 6 hours out of my day three times a week. On class days, it takes 3 hours by subway round trip to get there. The class itself is two hours and then there's another one hour (split on either end of the class) because the subway leaves from here so infrequently that I have to get there super early or late every day then subways traveling as far as my stop leave very rarely from the middle of the city so I have to wait about a half hour after class too. Overall though I'm learning a lot and it's pretty fast paced which is nice. I'm looking at going up to classes five times a week possibly during school breaks or if the time is convenient then I'll do it during the regular year. I need to be rid of my night classes first though.

So my normal schedule is drastically changed. Mondays-Fridays, I have work from 8-4 every day (that hasn't changed) but now I've added my night class (M/W 4:00-6:00) and my Korean class (T/Th/F 7:00-9:00). The only place where I have more free time is Saturdays since that's no longer date day.......ㅠㅠ

Anyway, Brandon and I still get to hang out a fair bit which is nice. We've also started hanging out with the Chinese teachers more. It's been nice to hang out with them because I really like talking with them. I don't know what exactly happened that we finally started considering inviting them to stuff, but I'm glad we did start.

Other than that, life is okay. I'm not totally bummed out permanently or anything. I think I'm past drinking myself to sleep at night (I'll let you decide whether I did do that for possibly a few days to a week...). I figure I'm going to just work hard and get gold in League of Legends and then maybe get back out there after the season ends or more likely after my night class ends (season ends on 11/11 and my night class ends on 11/26). I'll be online during my usual hours. If you see me, feel free to say hi. Otherwise, leaving emails and messages always works too! Until later, peace out.

I Can Has Girlfriend?

You may look at the title of this post and go "Damn, that's a dated and now stupid reference."

Yeah, that's how long I've been promising myself I would title my blog post this way when the event happened.

But anyway, hey guess what everybody, I have a girlfriend now! Whoa! Crazy! Amazing! 10/10 story! So much wonder and surprise! He did it folks, the end goal. The blog is finally done. We can stop following it!!!

No sorry, I'm not going to end it that easily. Although to be honest, I did once toy with the idea of ending my blog once I finally got a girlfriend. Nowadays, I've grown to like having it around for keeping people up with what's going on in my life if I can't talk to everyone regularly. Also, there's the whole "I'm not a whiny, lonely teenager anymore" thing going for me so I'm going to keep the blog around.

At any rate, I'm pretty happy right now. I don't know how I've kept this post from happening for a month (that's a lie, it's because I'm really lazy), but it's good to finally blog this news at long last. We actually have been a "couple" (god this post is already full of air quotes and parentheses this early X__X) in the more proper sense since mid August (like the 17th). I don't know if she has ever been in a relationship either, so it's like two awkward people trying to figure out something that neither of them know how to do. It's still cool. Our work schedules and the fact that she lives in another city mean that we can't see each other more than once or twice a week (recently we've been making time to see each other twice and we always spend the entire day together on Saturdays), but we talk every day so that's still good. It's really cool because at this point, I feel like I have enough of a social life here. I have friends from back home and we talk all the time, plus I have some friends here at work that I hang out with and now I have this girl who I talk to every day.

Hmm, what else can I say. I mentioned we met through my coworker because his wife and this girl are friends. He's also been able to give me a lot of advice on dating Korean girls since he's "beaten the game" so to speak. This girl actually lives in a town outside of Seoul that I was recommended to many times when I was applying for jobs here. In fact, over 50% of the places that I was recommended to were in her city. But of course, if I had wound up going there, I would have never met her. The funny thing is I chose my current city because my 3p1c map r34ding sk1lzz (read: shitty map reading skills) determined that this city was in a superior location to hers for viewing starcraft (so, so wrong. even before they switched locations to a place MUCH more convenient from her city (oh also there's the fact that I don't go watch starcraft live anymore anyway :/)). I also chose not to teach in her city because of the lack of convenient subway stops. Good thing I can't read maps to save my life because it turns out there are two very convenient ones. So if I had really read the maps right, I would have wound up in her city this year. Fortunately, I didn't and I came to this city instead. It allowed me to meet her and to be honest, it's made being here worth it. Plus a couple of the people (anyone that's not my partner) that I work with have been really cool.

Other stuff time though. I've been busy with the new semester staring up. It's been pretty mundane. My partner and I delegated the work better from the get-go this semester, so it's allowed us both to plan really far ahead. Both of us are planned out well past one month from now which feels really nice. It's allowing us to make more fun lessons since we have more time to prepare now. I've also been more properly added to the male staff soccer team. I got my jersey recently. It's pretty neat. Oh also I joined a gym near the school. It's not because of this girl (just something I've been meaning to do for a while and it happened to happen after I met her) although being her boyfriend is pretty good motivation to keep going all the time.

Other than that, not much is happening. Brandon (the teacher I work with who isn't my partner and isn't the econ guy. We hang out a lot on weekends when I'm not playing videogames or going on dates) and I are going to Beijing next week from Wednesday through Sunday. It's Chuseok (K-Thanksgiving) break, so we figured we might as well go somewhere cool while everyone goes home and all the good stores and stuff are closed for the holiday.

Around that, as always, feel free to set up a time to Skype with me. If you're in the League crew and you're reading this then you don't get a choice on talking to me, I'll just be online sometime whenever I get the chance.

Until next month, peace out!

Oops, I did it again

Well it seems one wasn't enough. I have once again had a month where I failed to update my blog. Sorry about that. I really meant to last month, but it was finals + the end of the semester until the 26th (year round school), so laziness and me being preoccupied with other things kept me from posting. After that, I went to Hawaii to meet up with family and spent that last week of the month forgetting that I was supposed to update. Anyway, good things have been happening so I figure I should update on that.

I feel like I generally got everyone filled in on the stuff I'm doing so maybe from now on I can actually talk about experiences or something? Hey wouldn't that be nice.

I guess before I forget, here's a link to the most recent video of my apartment. I filmed it in July or something I think. Either way, it has indeed changed from the last video you would have seen it. Important additions are my bedsheets (that only took me four months to get bedding...) and a new desk that actually has enough room for my computer (plus it has room for two monitors now!) which has made my computer setup feel a lot nicer. The one thing I feel bad about is my tower has always been on top of my desks since I first built it, but now it has to be below the desk. I feel a little bad sticking it down there, but it hasn't had any problems and I have only accidentally kicked it once or twice, so it's not too bad I guess.

The summer season is in full swing and thankfully, my air conditioner is working well. Without it, I would be dying in the heat/humidity. I still feel like a rich guy though for having an air conditioner, an unnecessary luxury in Seattle.

The end of the semester finally came and now I'm halfway through my contract. That means only half a year left with my current teaching partner (unless some bill gets passed about military spending in which case she may have to stay another year, fml). That hopefully will not happen though. Aside from that, school is going well. The students are good, my Korean lessons are really helpful, and I'm getting along well with the other coworkers. One guy got fired back in March and his replacement arrived shortly before my last post, so I didn't know anything about the guy. He's turned out to be really cool. I'm going to grab dinner with him in a few minutes actually. We hang out fairly often and just get a beer or eat or something. He's about my age and a Redditor so we get along well.

Final news (I'm already at about the end of this post because as I said, it's about dinner time): I met another person haha. The guy who has worked here all year (there are three of us foreigners that have been here all year, my teaching partner, the other guy, and me) had a friend of his wife and back in March, he said they would be willing to set me up with that friend. I was skeptical at first and eventually I wound up meeting that other girl and hung out with her for a couple months. We went on two dates so I can hardly even say we dated. I'll get to that in a second.

Anyway, that other girl and I stopped seeing each other in May (just that we weren't really interested in each other (mostly her being less interested in me T__T)) and a couple weeks after everyone found out we had stopped seeing each other, the guy said he was still willing to help set me up with his wife's friend. At that point, I was a little bummed out because I'm so introverted, it's hard to meet people here and I was figuring I wouldn't have the chance to meet anyone again. Anyway, I said sure it could be fun. Before we went to meet her, the guy kept saying things like "you don't have to date her if you don't want to" and stuff like that to make me feel like there was no pressure if I didn't like her. That kinda weirded me out and I was starting to worry if there was something wrong with her. I was wondering if I was walking into anything bad. Turns out he was just weird and I had nothing to worry about. The dinner was awkward at first because everyone knew that the other two were really trying to set us up, but eventually it became less awkward.

We've gone out three (technically four if you count the first time in which we did go out just the two of us after the four of us had dinner) dates now. It's going really well. Neither of us have dated anyone before (that's why I don't really count the other girl. I mean I didn't do anything with her anyway, not even any hugging so how can I possibly count that?) so we're going really slow it seems, but as long as I don't move too slowly in this then I should be fine. I consulted the guy who set us up since he has beaten the game so to speak and he says I'm doing good so I'll take that as a good sign. Hopefully this can continue for a long time.

What happens if she ever becomes my girlfriend? That's like the final objective of my angsty teenage years of this blog.

At any rate, I'm going to try to start holding myself to regular posting times again, no more of this whenever I remember to crap. I'll try to do posts in the first week of every month. I have to just do one post a month because my life is too mundane and busy (yes at the same time) to post too often. So look for a post to come along in the first week of September (only half a month away!!!) and then every month from there on out. Who knows, maybe even in only half a month I'll have some cool news! Until then, peace out.

Ok I should start being better about posting what I promise to post.

Well sorry everyone, I kinda dropped the ball on regular updates. To be honest, I was kind of building to something and I wanted to make sure it panned out well before I was posting regularly again. I will start continuing to tell about things now that it panned out. Of course as many of you may know, what I'm referring to is the girl I was dating here for a while. I was hoping to wait until we officially became a couple or something (moreso than just going on dates every weekend). Unfortunately it didn't pan out as I had intended and we broke up recently. So nothing going on in that department now. But I did get practice dating and stuff so it wasn't all bad. I'll enjoy some single life for now then try my luck somewhere else. A co-worker actually was going to set me up with a friend of his wife's before I started dating this other girl, so that might actually happen soon because I think his wife was really hoping I would go on a date with her friend. Who knows, maybe that could turn out well. In the meantime, I'm not too concerned with it. I'll just go back to my old routine.

But I do owe you a new post about some other aspect of Korea outside of my house.

How about work?

I pull regular hours each week which total to 40 hours (five eight-hour days). Of those 40 hours, I spend only 16 in the classroom. The rest is all planning. We come up with our own curriculum and work with our Korean co-teachers to make lessons that are relevant to the students' needs and the co-teacher's own curriculum. At the end of the day, they're the teachers and I'm not. My classes are times when otherwise they would just have classes with the students so my lessons need to at least supplement what they're doing in their classes. I have a partner teacher who is also a foreign teacher and we teach eight classes together. We split the classes in half though so our classes are like small group classes. We teach second and first graders in high school (the equivalent of juniors and sophomores in American high school). At this school, every student studies two languages. They study either English Major/Chinese Minor, English Major/Japanese Minor, Chinese Major/English Minor, and Japanese Major/English Minor. Each of the four options has two classes per grade so in order it would go 1-1 and 1-2, 1-3 and 1-4, 1-5 and 1-6, 1-7 and 1-8. Me and my partner teach the English majors and the other two teach the non-English majors. All students except third graders (seniors) get taught by a foreign teacher. So eight classes that I teach, two classes each per week is my regular schedule. It's not too bad.

In addition to that, I'm also a middle school teacher! Every other Saturday, I teach a first, second, and third grade middle school (7th, 8th, and 9th grade) class (each one hour) of students hoping to enter (test into) this school someday. It's a pretty good gig and it pays extremely well so I like it. For this, I made my own curriculum so that was nice to have free reign of what I teach PLUS it looks excellent on a CV if I apply for other teaching jobs someday.

I also teach night classes (every foreign teacher gets one) to students. These are run like AP classes and again, they pay extra from my usual salary. Also, like middle school, I have complete control over the direction of the course. Normally, we would get two per semester. I don't know if it will happen next semester though as interest is dwindling due to the changing nature of college applications in Korea these days. I actually had two CP classes cancelled on me this term, so I don't have one. The other two foreign teachers that were here at the start of the term did get classes though. I could have had a class this term, but I conceded it to my partner who was really bitching about not getting a second one. Plus, I got two CP classes in the first term (I'm special ^_^) so I figure not having one this term is no loss for me since I just did more work up front. When I did do the CP classes, I had one class of Microeconomics which was fun for me to teach. The class was the biggest of all the CP classes and unfortunately not enough signed up afterwards even though I kept getting compliments of how good it was. Since it was econ in another language for the students, it was an interesting challenge to teach. My other class was a writing class specifically designed for senior students. So I'm the only foreign teacher here that's taught 3rd grade students which is great for me because it gives me the exclusive relationship and cool teacher status with a whole grade now. That was a small class of only seven, but they were really cool so that made the class fun.

And I have one last job which is elementary school teacher! Sometimes, we are called upon to go to the library on Saturdays and teach English lessons to elementary school kids in partnership with our school's Red Cross Youth program. My partner is a masters certified teacher who has only ever taught high school. The other teachers are two guys who have only taught middle or high schools. While I've never taught, I grew up around an elementary school teacher my whole life. Every teaching tip I picked up from her has perfectly applied to this experience so while the other three have had a terribly hard time adjusting to the kids, I have probably had the easiest time. I still wouldn't want to do that for a living though. It makes me glad that I decided to take this high school job instead of settling for an elementary school position just to get closer to Seoul. That would not have been worth it.

So those are my main jobs. Of course since I'm the youngest/cutest/most aggreable/what have you, I get roped into a lot of  other side jobs too which are no trouble. It usually just involves proofreading things for coworkers, translating some stuff if I can, teaching some coworkers English, and generally just helping out with random stuff. I also offer to read essays for students and things since I have a lot of planning time and feel like I should use it well so until recently, I was looking at a student's essays every day. He was in my senior writing class and he plans to study at Harvard, so he took the SAT recently. He wrote me a practice essay every day for about 3 weeks and I graded them SAT style every day.

I'm happy with the amount of work I'm doing. It doesn't really interfere with my weekend free time too much so I still have time on those days to relax and hang out with the guys online or go to Seoul or go on dates (until recently, brb going to go drink to forget T__T). I also ran through my finances the other night out of boredom and I noticed that if I keep the same costs throughout the whole year, I will be able to live off my extra job salaries alone (CP, middle school, and elementary school) then at the end of the year I would pocket around 105% or something of my base salary. That would be pretty sweet. Maybe I should get a girl to spend it on or maybe I should actually buy something to improve my quality of life to human standards.

Nah who am I kidding.

Until next time, peace out!

An Actual Update (of past events)

Ok sorry about the huge delay of over one month here. This post won't exactly get me to all the current events, but I hope it will get a good few things out of the way. In the next few posts, I'll be talking about my place, my coworkers, my students, my life, my new friend, and other things. I'll see how far I get in this post.

My apartment:
For jobs like this in Korea, a school provides its native English speaking teachers with a place to live. For most schools, this is an apartment that is nearby the school. In fact, when you fill out forms to apply to come here, one of the questions you get asked is whether you want them to find you an apartment near the school, a bus terminal, a subway station, etc. This school is a bit of a special case though as it has dormitories. They have special dorms for teachers that live here. For teachers that are married, they live off campus. For teachers like me who are single (or basically anything that is short of actually being married), they are provided housing in the school's dorm. It's not as great as an apartment, but it's more space than I need and it makes the commute really nice.

My first apartment was on the top floor of the dorm in the teacher's wing. The teacher that lived there before me was the only female teacher that year (we only have one this year as well) and she was super concerned about leaving a mess, so it was pretty clean. Unfortunately, the clean stopped at the point where it required dusting and wiping surfaces down. It took a number of blackened paper towels and I never mentioned it to her because she was so afraid of me thinking she was a slob. I did joke about it with the other teachers from last year though when they told me about it.

Now my apartment up there was okay, but it wasn't that great. The view was nice, but the shower kind of sucked (the hot water stayed good for 5 minutes) and the heat just randomly died and came on. After two days and halfway unpacking, I was informed that I was going to need to move because of some BS reason that the Vice Principal had. I forget what exactly it was, but I found out later my moving didn't solve anything because my new neighbor here didn't move. Either way though, the move was a very positive thing for me. I have a slightly larger space now and the bathroom is certainly bigger. My shower is excellent, even being on par with the one I have at home. Additionally, the heat here is actually pretty regular. As it's May, that's no longer a problem. When the winter comes though, it will come in handy. Also, it's on the second floor, so I don't need to use the elevator which was slower than all hell and had a tendency to be crowded at hours when I would usually be using it. With a few minor improvements, my apartment has become a home to me. I have three videos of the progress of remodeling it. I am saving the last one for when I have it exactly how I want it, so that will hopefully come around in about a month or two. There were some more expensive additions I needed to make after I started getting paid. Here are the videos:

March 2
March 12
April 6

Okay I was hoping to write more, but dinner just finished so I'm going to go eat. Until next time, peace out.

No really, someday I'll actually get some good catching up going on.

Sorry about totally not updating the blog all month. I promise that for once, I have a good excuse. The excuse is that I met someone here. We're not dating yet (trust me, I would probably come home, tell anyone online, then make a blog post about it if that ever happens). You can ask in person if you want, but I'll eventually come to it in my blog posts. Long story short, we're not dating yet, but it looks like we will be soon. Because of the type of people that live in this city (military), some lingering racism present in rural South Korea, and the fact that her last boyfriend (of six years) ran off and got married then broke up with her last December she was a little nervous about being an actual couple until she got to know me better. But we're currently dating so it's only a matter of time it seems. Unfortunately, I was supposed to bring my list of talking points back to the room with me, but I totally forgot it at the office so I don't have much to talk about today. I'll try to get a post in tomorrow or something. Sorry about that. Just wanted to confirm that I indeed did have a good excuse for not posting. You shall hear from me tomorrow!

Old Information, New Post Should Arrive Eventually

Hey, hope all are doing well. I didn't want to get another month of no posts, but at the same time, I don't have time to sit down and make a huge post. I expect that I'll have internet in my own apartment soon enough, so I'll start putting out posts more regularly after that. I think once a week, I'll make a new post until I'm pretty caught up. For this one though, I'll just write about the first couple of days here.

I caught my flight with no problems. Upon signing in, I was given te chance to change my seat to a front row (extra leg room woot woot!) so of course I instantly decided to do that. To add to the excellence, only one other guy moved into that row (a row of three) so we had the middle seat open to put our stuff on. I was running on about 2 hours of sleep because I  was looking forward to sleeping on the plane, but I forgot Korean Air is really nice, so I wound up watching a bunch of semi-recent movies that I had never gotten around to watching. I did manage to get an hour of sleep, but that was really all.

When I landed, it was 5pm and I was sufficiently tired because in Washington, it was now midnight which meant I was running off 3 hours of sleep across 48 hours. I was going to go find the taxi place when I got lucky and a driver coming back from the bathroom saw me and asked if I w anted a  taxi ride. I said yes, so I got a taxi very easy and additionally, I got hep with my bags. The ride to Incheon was 45 minutes (even though the airport is in Incheon...), but it was a good chance to get some Korean practice again. A lot of what I had forgotten came back during the cab ride.

I had to stay in Incheon overnight because I wasn't supposed to arrive until the following day. Originally, I was excited because I never got over to Incheon last time I was in Korea though I had wanted to. Now I just know I don't need to go again. Everything is pretty far apart still, so my plan of going out and finding a nice place to eat kind of died on the table (so to speak). Since it was late (late in America, it was only 7pm in Korea), I just decided to go to bed and get a good 13 hours of sleep. The next morning, the rep from the school (actually I think she was just a hired driver since I haven't seen her since) got me at 10 and we started the 1.5 hour drive from Incheon up to Dongducheon.

Actually, I'm going to stop there for now. I have to get back to work since my partner is gone for the week and I need to get ahead on lesson plans. Until next week, peace out.

Bye America (For Now)

Ok well time to get a post in because this is the last time I'll have guaranteed easy access to the internet in February. I'm leaving tomorrow for Korea so I'm just spending today finally getting everything squared away. Before I wrap up my American life for now though I guess I'll catch you up on a few of the bigger events that happened this month.

First off, congrats to Keir on getting level 30 in League of Legends. Now we can both do ranked someday. He took 6 months to get there, which is half the time it took me (although I made an account and just let it sit, then actually started playing and did 90% of the work in 4 months) so good on him. Also in League related events, I captained a team in a tournament in the early weeks of February. We got second place in the tournament and we were all pretty happy with each other. The casters even said I "played a mean Cho mid" so that felt good. The champion was even banned against my team for the final game because I was doing so well on him.

In other news, it's been good to catch up with some people and see them in person for the last time before I go. I helped my aunt move the rest of her stuff into the new house. I finally finished work on the shed, so I can say that story is closed now forever (hooray!!!). Aside from that, it was general hang-outery with other people which was just nice. I mostly spent the month taking it rather easy and just getting ready to go.

Short post so sorry for that, but I have to get back to packing and I have a couple emails to send. Until I'm in Korea, peace out!

Finalizing Preparations

Howdy everyone. I've been hard at work this month getting all my documents in order and it now looks like this will be my second to last post made from America (although who knows what the distant future holds, perhaps someday I shall make posts from the good ol' US of A again). My contract is slated to start on March 1 and I expect to arrive in Korea as long before that as reasonably possible. I want to give myself several days to unpack, acquire things I don't want to carry over but will need (ex. towels, bedsheets, food, etc), familiarize myself with the area I'll be living in, and hopefully to glance over the textbooks I'll be using. As of the writing of this post, I have no idea what my address will be and I have not booked a flight yet. I'm supposedly going to be told these things when I show the school that I've acquired my visa. My visa should come in on Thursday though, so hopefully I'll know these important things before too long. I'm just glad that this long process is finally coming to an end. It may seem like it moved quickly since every time I posted, I had new information. The truth is that I only got that new information days before I would post and those posts were a month apart each. This process began in September and I've been worrying about what I would be doing for employment this year since then. It's nice to finally have some assurance. Having that, I can just take this month mostly to myself to (RUNNINGIN)square away things before I leave.

It also seems like now is becoming a good time to leave the area. Aside from caring for Grandpa, which is a never-ending and increasingly complex task, most other people around me seem to be settling into a new phase in their lives or major projects have been finished. With all that, it seems like I can quietly slip away and people will be fine without me. I plan to interact more with people this time however. I am going to adjust my schedule in Korea though to get up earlier so that I can play games with people in the mornings and get to bed at an earlier time. I think that will work out for me well. If I get up at 8 or earlier on a regular occurrence, it will be easier to wake up for work in the morning. There are so many benefits to doing that, I can't think of a reason not to. I also want to get to Korea early so I can get on that schedule in time for the school year. It will be nice to talk to people I know this time. I would rather not repeat last year where I woke up at 10-11 every day and I thus was unable to regularly talk to anyone other than Keir given my schedule.

In other news, it was good to see everybody on the 30th of December. We had a fairly large get-together (game night minus Chris but plus Davis and Orion) which was pretty nice. I got to hang out with people fairly regularly this month due to that and the Seahawks doing somewhat well in the playoffs. Speaking of playoffs, I forgot to do my picks this year, but just in case you were wondering, I would not have beaten my record. I got four picks wrong, so that would have made me shy of tying my previous record.

I've still been playing League a lot too. I have dipped in my ranking due to people leaving games mostly, but hopefully I'm on the rise. They're implementing a new rating system very similar to the SC2 ladder soon though so that will be nice. Speaking of SC2, the Heart of the Swarm expansion comes out in March. I may have to pick it up in Korean. It sounds like global play will be available, so that should be interesting. Hopefully I can get a Korean version and just change the language.

Well I had best get back to work. I'll make one last post before I leave in February, then my adventure begins. Until next time, peace out.

Some good and eventful news

I was delaying this post until I [hopefully] had some more news about the application process for work. Not only have I gotten more information, I actually got a job offer. Since I'm pretty excited about that, I'll hop right into that part of the post.

Work:
I had originally been applying to places to the immediate west of Seoul. That would put me in a very convenient place to make it to Starcraft matches should I desire. Due to the presence of Starcraft there, it was an area of Seoul (that isn't the metropolitan area, but is close enough to Seoul that I would lump it into that myself) that I was familiar with. Gwangmyeong is the name of the place I was looking. If you zoom out a bit from that map, you can also see Bucheon to the west and Anyang to the southeast. Those were the other two places I was primarily looking towards. I've been working with a recruiting agency as you know by now because that's how it is done. In addition to recommending teachers to jobs, they also recommend jobs to teachers because some schools in less desirable places will put their school out there if nobody seems to be applying. The hunt in the areas I preferred was going well it seemed, though too slowly for my taste. During that process, a school was recommended to me in Dongducheon (you can zoom out a bit and see that I'm north of Seoul). The location is less desirable than what I was hoping for. Though I'm right along a subway line (that was pretty much a requirement for me), the ride into the heart of Seoul would still be about an hour or more. Fortunately the subway cost is pretty low, so that shouldn't be an issue. I just may not go to town on days other than weekends.

An added bonus about this school is the type of school. In the other areas, I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I would be teaching elementary school students. This would be very basic stuff and to be honest I didn't really mind that since I have no teaching experience. My only preference for age was to not do middle school (elementary school students have motivation, high school students have smarts, and middle school students have neither). This school is actually a high school. More than that though, it's a foreign language school where the students are supposed to be more proficient in English since they're planning on going to study in America for college. So I will be teaching students in a speaking/listening class and a writing class. I realize that all sounds normal, so you may be wondering what caught my eye specifically about this school? They are also asking me to teach AP microeconomics and AP macroeconomics. They were requesting someone that majored in econ. So this means that I actually will get to make use of my undergrad degree. I'm super excited about that. I'll probably need to refresh my memory on Asian economic development though. Fortunately at SU, I was on the IED (international economic development, not expolsives T__T) track, so I have a lot more information on international economic development than the normal standard econ major might.

So anyway, I start on the first of March and it seems like I might need to leave in mid to late February for an orientation period or something. I'll know more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it will be good to spend as much time as possible with people before I go. Speaking of which.

People are here:
Davis and Orion are both in town this week which has been cool. We've been kind of formulating a plan to set up a big get together for everyone. In addition to that, Davis and I have been playing Halo 4 which has been fun. We're hoping to beat it before he goes, which is looking possible. It was also nice to catch up with everyone. I got to sit down with Eric, Davis, and Orion over the course of this last week which has been good because those three are notoriously difficult to facebook stalk.

Games:
I've been slowly starting the shift off of my Xbox to my PC because it's not going to be an option when I'm in Korea. I did pick up Assassin's Creed 3 because I put a lot into that franchise and I really like the games. That will likely be my last game on the Xbox though. I cancelled my Xbox live gold account after 9 years on it. I still have the account I guess, but now I can only access the marketplace to give Microsoft more money.

Over on the PC, I've still been playing a lot of League of Legends. I finally climbed up to gold tier, putting me in the top 5%. I haven't played as much ranked as I want to recently due to lag, but I'll start again soon. At the moment, I'm a higher current elo than Eric, though that will soon change I bet. He and I might duoqueue sometime. I was really happy about getting to gold though because it means that I've now officially become a better League player than I ever was in Starcraft. I haven't played Starcraft in a long time, but I still watch it really often. Terran is really weak right now, so I see little point in playing and just getting smashed. I'm holding out until Heart of the Swarm comes out in spring and then we'll see. I'd still like to get moderately good at that game. In the meantime, I'll be grinding at League trying to get better there. Keir is playing League now too and getting pretty good, so that's been fun to play with him.

A final note is that the four of us (Steven, Eric, Chris, and I) are finally getting into putting time into our four player co-op games that we've accumulated over the years. It's been fun so far and I hope this continues. It's nice to actually be playing games that we bought and shelved too quickly.

Well I don't have much else for you guys. Christmas was pretty nice, I got some good stuff that will be useful when I go to Korea. I stream games still at twitch.tv/runninginsquares and now have a webcam if you ever want to see my beautiful face on those dark, cold winter nights. Oh and on a side note, my phone has been having battery deterioration problems and now holds a charge for about 2 hours. I keep it on silent to prolong the battery life as much as possible, so the only way I would answer a call on my phone is if I'm actually looking at the phone as I am getting called. This crowd isn't really the crowd I need to be informing given that you know how often I'm online, but emailing/texting/instant messaging me is the way to go to get a hold of me. As a result of the phone problems, I've started getting myself into the habit of checking email more often. Also, my house phone is an option.

Ok well I need t go meet Grandpa for lunch today so I'm off to do that. Until next month (and next year!) peace out.

Another month, another check-in

Good news everyone, this post won't be too long! I still have not secured a job in Korea, but at least this time I have an actual timeline I'm working with. About half of the post might be about that, so you know it won't be too heavy of a read. I'll get straight into it now because I haven't got much else to mention here.

I have done the document submission and other things requested of me by GEPIK and I'm currently being recommended to schools. A couple early possibilities have come my way, but they were in pretty undesirable locations (...locations for me that is. They're good locations that just aren't close to the area I would like to base myself in) so I turned them down and I'm currently waiting on schools to show an interest in me. I'm of course worried because I keep hearing about how the job market for teaching jobs is shrinking, but the recruiter I'm working with is pretty positive and helpful, so I have to figure she knows something I don't and maybe my chances are better than I think. At any rate, I should start to get an idea of schools that might be interested in me by late December and in early to mid January, I should be doing interviews and finding out if I have a job or not. By the end of February then, I would be going out there if I do wind up getting a job. The process is long and it gives me time to get all my ducks in a row as far as paperwork goes, but I'm starting to get to a point where my work here is drying up and I'm going to start feeling like a bum when I have no jobs to do here and all I can do is wait to find out if I have employment. I'm really banking on getting a job in Korea though, I hope I just get one and this all works out. On a related note, I mentioned my project not being accepted in my last post. It was indeed a quick fix and a quick turnaround for grading as I received a notification that it was accepted about a week after I finished it. So now I can OFFICIALLY say I have a 4.0 GPA in my current pursuit of a masters degree (whether or not I continue to pursue that remains to be seen).

So yeah my jobs are drying up. I still do stuff with Grandpa of course and I still do stuff for other family members too, but as far as my steady work with the shed goes, that is pretty much complete. I need to remember to post pictures eventually. I've been taking whatever jobs need to be done for family members though, not being too picky because I really feel like I should be out doing things at least 3 times a week. Though I enjoy playing all the new games I'm getting on super sale from Steam, I should be doing good stuff and helping people as much as I can before I (hopefully) leave. Plus, maybe I can earn some good karma along the way or something. I haven't been picky though, I even drove down to Vancouver, WA to help my Grandma with some things down there. I had only seen her at my graduation in the time since I've been back from Korea, so it was nice to catch up.

For Thanksgiving, my family got back into our tradition of going down to central Oregon (Sunriver) and renting a big house for my family and my uncle's (mom's oldest brother's) family. He has two daughters and a son, each married. Both the daughters have sons, one is 6 and the other is 4. The 6 year old and his family couldn't make it, but we'll see them at Christmas. The other two kids did make it which was nice. I hang out with their son a lot even though he's older than me by about 14 years. We're the lefties of our generation and since we both like beer, we did a big brewery series of tours in Bend which is the nearest city to Sunriver. That was a pretty fun way to spend the time. Other than that, it was nice to see everyone there and just hang around for a few days.

In League, Keir has been playing more and getting better. That has stopped now though as his finals are approaching, so he can't play again until those are done. I'm not going to let him and additionally, he requested me to not let him so we are doubly sure I will not be letting him break his study routine. Outside of that, I'm trying to soloqueue a bit more. I haven't done it as much as I would have liked, but I've seen more success than I expected, so I'm pretty happy. Maybe I'll get out of "ELO hell" this season haha. Our ranked team dropped the guy we didn't know in real life and we picked up our friend Wolen as well as Eric Canada. They will be good additions to the team. Eric Canada is the main replacement for the other guy and Wolen plays with us when Eric Canada can't. Peter is on the team too, but I haven't heard from him in quite a while actually.

A few of us have also been having fun with the Tekkit mod for Minecraft. Aside from that, I just picked up Civ5 (as did Chris and Steven) and that has been super fun and super hard to tear myself away from. It's reminiscent of the Total War series, but a bit more polished in ways. I like it.

EDIT: Hey everyone I just remembered. If for some reason you really need to get in touch with me, use the internet. I am able to check my email multiple times a day and I try to stay on facebook for the chat feature when I'm at my computer now (since I don't use gchat anymore). Failing that, you can also use our mumble server if you have it/have the information. You can still contact me on my cell of course, but I recommend you don't do that because it is slowly dying (charge now lasts part of a day) and I won't be getting a new one until I know one way or the other if I'm leaving for Korea. So that would be 2-3 months of my cell being kinda shitty.

That's all I have for now, so until next time, peace out.

Not good news. No bad news either, but things have happened.

Well when I last posted, I seemed pretty sure I would have a good idea one way or another whether I would have a job lined up for next year. Turns out I was wrong. I'll speak more on that soon though. This past month has been filled with things happening, most of them pretty okay. This is my first weekday where I've had the day to myself (which means I was doing work that didn't require leaving the house). In fact, I've only really had one true day off since the first week of this month. I've been keeping really busy, but it's not such a bad thing. Being so occupied helps me remember what day it is. Additionally, it's good to try to make myself feel like less of a bum.

Teaching Jobs:
I had a couple interviews with a couple different recruiting companies. One dealt only with EPIK/SMOE (all of Korea or just Seoul). One dealt with those plus GEPIK (the province around Seoul). Both told me that it was going to be difficult for a new teacher such as myself to get a job within the Seoul Metropolitan area, so I decided it would be best to work with the company that offered me a shot at GEPIK. Unfortunately (also kind of fortunately), the application period for GEPIK starts a lot later. In fact, it should be coming up this week or next week sometime. It meant I have more time to wait before determining whether I have a job next year or not, but it was good in that it gave me time to prepare my materials for application. I've spent very little time working on the lesson plan I will need to make. I've been doing a lot of shed work and though I've been thinking about my lesson plan, I haven't really sat down and hammered it out. It will be easy though, I'm going to tweak one of the many plans I made in my teacher training class last summer. On that note...

My project:
I found out today (though I received an email on an address I rarely check anymore on October 15) that my project was not accepted. This means I don't officially have graduate credits yet. The project requires minor tweaking that according to the professor should be easy for me to fix, but were too crucial of details to let slip by. No worries there. I wish I had noticed my notification back in mid-October when it was sent so that I would have had more time to work on the project. It's due a week from today though, so I will have more than enough time. It's just one more thing I have to do in addition to this lesson plan I'm making for applications. It looks like that last little bit of work on the shed will have to wait for next week sometime. Speaking of the shed...

The Shed/Work:
How are you liking these amazing transitions? Most of my work this month has been on the shed. I had the canopy up above all the contents of the shed and I assumed it was keeping it dry, but I failed to remember that we just had a dry summer. When the rain came, the canopy proved still effective, though things needed to get sorted fast. Due to the rain we've been having, I've been spending a lot of time working hard on the shed. I re-carpeted it, sealed it up a bit more, installed shelves, fixed things that were supposed to go back in, put things back in, and organized it. I also set it up with internal lighting which was pretty fun. As of right now, it is nice enough that I would be willing to show it off to people. It is not yet complete however. I still need to do a bit more organizing and take the remaining junk off to Goodwill or the dump. the shed has provided me with good work though. Between working on it and working with Grandpa, I've been pulling at least part time job hours. Now if only this came with a paycheck. I may get paid, though I don't necessarily expect to (I never said I was doing it with the expectation of being paid). Soon this job will dry up though and at that point, I'll be focusing more on my applications, studying Korean, and playing League of Legends. Speaking of League of Legends....(yeah we're keeping this combo alive)...

League of Legends:
Keir has started playing more often which is cool. He seems to be enjoying it a lot and he is definitely getting better. I've been doing ranked matches off and on getting mad and stopping, then starting up again. I would love to get gold ranking before next Tuesday's season end, but that seems unlikely. In other news, Steven, Eric, Albert, and I have formed a ranked 5s team to start getting better. Chris stepped off the team, opting to manage us instead (for tournaments and whatnot). This has left me as unquestionably the worst player by a large margin on the team, but soon I will start practicing a lot and that will help me get better. We needed a fifth player, so Chris found us a guy off Reddit who seems pretty cool. We haven't practiced in a while because he's been sick, but we should be getting back on track soon. Normally, we're keeping to a schedule. Additionally, congratulations to Steven for getting Diamond rank. A big accomplishment and we're all proud of him for it. Looking forward to watching him go pro someday (you never know!) and seeing him play.

Other stuff:
C-c-c-combo breaker T__T. I'm sorry, I couldn't relate League to other stuff. I haven't had much time for other activities recently due to my schedule of work and League. Fantasy football is going well though I am getting destroyed this week. Five of my best players were on bye. Keir is starting his second half of the season dominance this week. I want to find time to study Korean, but I have to wait until I have free time first. I guess it will work out well because I will likely finish the shed around the time I find out if I will get hired for a job in Korea. Other than that, I've been thinking of things I would need to get done before I leave for Korea and keeping track of those for when I get time to do them.

Hope everyone is well. Until next month, peace out.

Almost forgot about this!

It's been a while since I posted. I've been keeping pretty busy and to be honest, I might have missed September completely had I not remembered the blog exists. I've been doing mostly the normal things and just trying to spend as much of my time doing those as possible. On top of those things, I've started to try to become a power user on Reddit to chase after Keir's success. That will happen perhaps never because he is just too good at Reddit. But enough of all this, I'll probably just move to things and keep this post moderately short.

Games:
I've given up on soloqueue for League. They changed the rating system to one where your highest ever elo is now the reward tier you will get come season end. Unfortunately, this means that if I had never played following my placement matches, I would be about 200 elo higher right now. But after the reset, your "current" elo was made your new highest. On top of that problem, people are now trolling and not caring in matches because you can get your highest elo to the point you want it, then trash your elo for the rest of the season without really caring because your highest elo will always be there. I really wanted to pull myself up to gold rating, but it seems that will not happen in soloqueue. Fortunately there is another way to get gold (well two actually). I can get gold on the ranked 5s team I'm on (which is unlikely because we rarely are all on) or to do ranked 3s for which there is no real defined metagame. People don't play it very often, so there's no real set way to compose a team (though there are dominant strategies, but they are not common knowledge like other game modes). Anyway, I played a couple games in a team with Eric and Eric Canada and we went 2-0 pretty decisively. We are having schedule problems right now because Eric Canada just started school so we will have to work around that. It seems that this method is my best bet of getting to gold though.

Guild Wars 2 has been good. I've been leveling up a lot slower than Chris and Steven though. Steven has been level 80 for just over a couple weeks and Chris has been there for about a week now. I'm still level 51. Now that I'm not playing League as often though I'll probably start catching up. Recently, I've been using my former League time to step up my search for work.

Search for work:
It's been going well. I did a lot of research and I think I have a program nailed down. I want to apply to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education program (SMOE) because it would put me in Seoul (though the location would be random, but anywhere in Seoul is fine with me). Failing that, I could always do GEPIK which guarantees placement in the region immediately surrounding Seoul. I would rather be in the city though, so if SMOE doesn't work out, I'll be probably giving another program that could place me within the city a try before doing GEPIK. As of right now, I've been trying to work with my resume which at the moment looks like crap since I'm just starting out. It's hard to find ways I can tailor it to a teaching job, but mom agreed to help look at it so that will be nice.

The shed and work and things:
That has all been going well. I think the shed is going to be done soon. The cement pouring was supposed to happen a couple weekends ago, but it wound up not happening. I really hope that goes down soon though because its starting to turn cold and this is getting ridiculous that we haven't done it yet.

Other stuff:
My great aunt (grandpa's sister) died last weekend. It was pretty sad because it was unexpected. She went really bad in just a couple of days out of nowhere (the couple days prior, she had been up and having fun at a wedding). We all made it down to see her in Port Angeles before she died though, so that was nice. I learned while I was there that I am apparently the only one interested in our Dutch heritage. Or at least I'm the only one deemed smart or resourceful or willing enough to look into it so I can summarize it for other people? Either way, it looks like the burden is on me. I was planning on doing all this someday anyway, but not for a while. I guess no change there, I really need to learn Korean before I invest time in learning Dutch.

In girl news, I haven't gotten to see my friend in a while. We had opposite schedules for a while and then a couple weekends ago, we were supposed to get together (she asked me then I responsed and I never heard back from her with a plan) so I'm not sure if she didn't get my text and thinks I didn't text her and is mad at me or something or what (have fun decoding that sentence, I'm not going back to edit it :/) but I haven't seen her. I might try to hang out with her this weekend if we can get in touch. On the plus side, this means she hasn't had time to set me up with a girl. The more and more I think about that, the less I figure I want that because I don't want her to set me up with a girlfriend for two months before I go off for a long time. If I get in the right place in Korea, I've begun entertaining the idea of staying longer and longer. We'll have to see where it goes though.

So this was a pretty quick post, which I guess is good and bad. I keep busy, hopefully everyone else is doing well. You can always get in touch with me on facebook and crap like that. We have a private mumble server now too, so if you want the info, ask Steven or myself and you can hop on and voice chat with us there. Until next time (when hopefully I have a job!), peace out.

A Quick, Late Post for the End of August

Hey everyone. I've been having a pretty good August. It was nice to no longer be in that class all day (though my work schedule will soon take up a large chunk of my life similar to that). I wish I had been as productive as I planned to be this month, but things kept getting pushed back on me. Here's the fun chain of excuses! I was going to clean my bedroom, but that requires cleaning my computer area at the same time. I was going to clean my computer room, but I needed to finish this project I'm working on (more on that later). I was going to finish the project earlier, but I had communications issues. At the same time, I was going to work on the shed more, but I had to wait on my aunt to get some guys to install a door first. I was going to pour some cement, but terrible things kept happening. Fortunately now, things have gotten on track. All that really happened was I was left with a couple weeks after class where I got very little done. Guess I'd better get describing now.

Graduate Project:
This project is basically the same exact project as our final project for the intensive class. The only difference is that was a group project and we had less than 72 hours to complete it. This time, it's an individual one and we have until September 3. It also requires approval by the professor via email. I planned to leave a full week after the class to let myself relax, then I would get started on the project. Unfortunately, I had trouble contacting the professor at the end of that week and it wound up taking another week to just get the project approved. I'm currently breaking from working on it. I work quickly, so having only two (crowded with other things) weeks to do the project is still plenty of time for me. I can't work on it tomorrow, but I'll definitely be done with the whole thing by Wednesday, then I get to pray that technology doesn't fail me and the submission is easy. The project's purpose is to give Seattle U reason to consider the classes I took actual graduate credits at Seattle U. They were graduate level classes, but Seattle U is reluctant to actually give us the credits unless we do this project. I guess they don't like the fact that we earn so many graduate credits for such a relatively small sum of money (a small fraction of the cost it would be if I had done this actually at Seattle U).

The Shed:
I worked on my grandpa's shed more recently. I had to wait for some screen door guys to install a door on the back of my aunt's house because they needed space and I was going to take up that space with crap from the shed. This year is much better than previous years for cleaning the shed. In previous years, I had to wait on my uncle (who was terminally ill and could very infrequently make it out) to determine what to do with objects I wasn't sure were garbage or not. Now I feel better informed on everything in there and he is no longer able to make it at all (he passed away in January) so I made sure to assert to the whole family that they are welcome to take things from the shed and I'll help, but they have to make time or specifically declare things they want because I have final say on everything in that shed and I'm not waiting around for everyone to go shopping around in the shed. I'm getting it done this summer. Also nice is this year we finally got a canopy that I set up outside the shed. In previous years, I would have to spend an hour or more on either end of my day's work on the shed to unpack and pack it. Now, I just put things under the canopy and dive right in when I start and just stop working when I'm done for the day. I plan to pull everything out of the shed, sort through it, then add real shelves and possibly insulate the thing. If I get time, I'm considering fixing or building a new door for it too. I want it to look excellent when I'm done. I'm conquering this thing this year.

Sam & Jared's Wedding/Ocean Trip:
I planned to go to the ocean with Grandpa and my aunt on the second weekend of August. It had been in planning for a long time and I was able to even include the other grand kids (Kathryn and my two cousins) as well as my grandpa's sister (who is turning 90 in a few days) to come as well. That ensured a more interesting time would be had than in March when we went. Unfortunately, when I figured out a day, I didn't realize it overlapped with Sam and Jared's wedding. The date I thought that was on was apparently a Wednesday (should have checked) so it meant I would have to get to the ocean in my own care and late at night, missing the first few hours that they would be there (since they would get there at about 6pm on Friday night). It worked out really well actually.

The wedding was super cool. I got to hang out with cool people there that I hadn't seen in a while. I got caught up with everyone and brought back peoples' plans to tell mom since she keeps asking about everyone. I got to talk to pretty much everyone I wanted. The ceremony was nice and hanging out after went well too. I had originally planned to leave at 9 or 9:30 because I wanted to make sure I got to the ocean before it was too extremely late, but I wound up staying until the end at about 10:30 or 11:00 when everyone went back. From there, I dropped Orion off and continued to my house and pretty much dressed down, threw my stuff in the car, and took off to ocean shores. I got going pretty fast and I'm impressed I didn't get pulled over or anything. I wound up making exceptionally good time and got in at 2am (so about 2.5 hours for a normally 3.5 hour drive). The next day was our full day there and we spent it doing pretty much everything we could do. We got into ocean shores and Grandpa rode the go-karts and my great aunt got to finally see that he could actually do that. People clapped for him a bit because I guess it's not every day they see an almost 89 year old man using a walker getting in and out of and handling a go-kart pretty well. On Sunday, we headed back home, going via Forks to drop my great aunt off at her house. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.

Other Stuff:
I'm still playing League pretty often. Even now with Guild Wars 2 out (which is really good, but more on that later), I still have a huge desire to be doing ranked games. The season ends soon and all I want to do is get to a higher elo. Fortunately for me, some people (mostly just Eric Canada at this point) are working on their second accounts so they can duoqueue with me which will ensure that at least two people in my games are competent. That will be nice. Keir also started playing recently which was really fun while it lasted. He seems to like it a lot, so when he's settled into his schedule at law school, I look forward to playing again. He's getting pretty good and I anticipate many good times in the future.

Guild Wars 2 came out last Friday and it has been pretty fun so far. There's a World Completion which kind of gives me a clear definition of when I will be done with the game. It's nice to have that definitive end for me and at the same time, it's far enough out that I'm not concerned about hitting it too quickly. Steven, Chris, and I have characters that we only play with each other, so that is fun. Other than that, I play on my main character. I plan to do less of that though and continue playing League more often so I can raise my ELO.

I haven't seen my friend since class ended at all due to conflicting schedules. We had plans to go out last Saturday (a couple days ago) and she was bringing a friend of hers who I assume she was trying to set me up with. Unfortunately, they couldn't do Saturday and asked to switch to Friday about a day in advance. I had to say I couldn't go because GW2 came out that night and I had made plans to hang out with Steven and Chris months and months ago, so it's not like I passed up meeting a girl for a videogame (at least not entirely, there was also commitment to friends involved so its more legitimate righT?).

Outside of those things, I've been mainly relaxing around the house, enjoying my remaining moments of free time before I eventually have to start real work. I got to see ZZ Top in concert last night. It had been a long time since I saw them. I last saw them in September of 2004, the first September in my now very long streak of wearing shorts. Last time, dad had to drive us there, now it was at a casino and I could drink before and after. Needless to say they rocked pretty hard and it was a great concert. Totally worth the money too because I wound up winning my ticket price (and half of dad's) in the casino afterwards while we waited for traffic to clear out.

So in the coming weeks, I'll be working more. I am going to spend most of my time doing this project until I submit it. Then, I'll be working or playing League during the days between then and when we go camping around the 7th. After that, I start looking applying for jobs and I'm going to start my regiment of Korean language study for a couple hours every day. Looking forward to all that. Until later, peace out.

4.0

Well the class is done and once again, my life shall slowly return. I managed to weather the storm pretty well (as you may have surmised from my title, I 4.0ed the term). I called it my class, but in actuality it was a 12-credit term of graduate level courses just condensed into a month. This is the first time I've ever gotten a 4.0 on a term anywhere, so I was pretty happy when I did it. And it was especially good because I don't know how much more school I have left in my life (at least as a student anyway). I feel like I'm actually ready to teach now that I'm done with the class. But since Korean schools are on semesters, I will have to wait a little bit before I can get out there. I doubt this post will be too long, so I'll just get on with it now.

The class:
The 16 students in the class all became pretty close friends and it was sad to see everyone go, but I think we'll all be in touch to some degree. I made good friends with the guy from Mongolia, and if I see only one other person from the class in the rest of my life, it will most likely be him. I might try to find time to travel over there from Korea since he said I should. The night class went pretty well too, it was nice to see the students making progress using methods we were learning to teach them. Other than that, the class was just a lot of work. I didn't play many games at times (most times) throughout the duration of the course, but now I can get back into that.

Tournaments:
There were two LoL tournaments during the class term. One was at the end of the week I last posted on. Eric and Steven were on a team together, but then someone was added to that team who had a higher priority than those two, so Eric said he was fine being an alternate since he didn't want to steal Steven's spot. A couple days before the tournament, another team posted on the facebook page for local LoL players that they needed players for their team due to people not being able to make it. Eric signed up since his other team wouldn't need him (the captain of that team actually referred him) then Eric signed me up as well. Then the next day, Steven said he couldn't go to the tournament, leaving the other team one Steven down. Eric and I wound up playing on the fun team we were on and we got unlucky and got put against the best team in the bracket. We lost by some crazy amount of kills, but we had fun just messing around because we wanted to not be too pathetic looking in defeat.

This week, we had another instance of the same tournament (it happens every other Friday), but this time we had our ranked team with us. It was Steven, Eric, Albert, Eric Canada (filling in for Chris who couldn't make it) and myself. We lost in the first round again, but we really should have won. Nothing much else to say. Next time we got it.

Plans after class:
Well now that class is out, I have a fair bit of time before I can really start working. I figured I didn't want to just work somewhere and only be there for 3 months, so I'm doing odd jobs in the meantime. I will be finishing the shed and my Aunt's backyard this year finally. Also, my other aunt is moving into a new house, so I'll be helping with that. Then, my cousins occasionally need my help with their yard work. Additionally, I have one weekend worth of things to help my Grandma in Vancouver with. And I now may be going to my uncle's house in Kennewick for a couple weeks to help him out there. In addition to all this, I'm still working with Grandpa once or twice a week for pretty much the whole day. Then around all that, I'll be studying Korean and playing League to try to raise my elo. I sound kind of busy with all that, but I doubt it will be more than I can handle. It will feel like a vacation compared to the last month.

Hanging out:
I spent most of my free time since the last post just playing League here and there. I did manage to hang out with my friend a couple times. She suggested throwing a party at her place and inviting just a bunch of girls and I be the only guy. That was kind of an intimidating thought and I don't know if it would happen, but she seemed convinced it would be a good idea. Either way, she has begun looking for people to set me up with so we'll see what happens.

Other than all that, I haven't gotten to do much. My family took a trip over to the tri-cities this weekend to see my cousin's new baby that was born on July 4th. It was pretty cool. I am now facing a lot of promises I made to do things coming up before I leave so I'll probably be starting all that up tomorrow. For now though, maybe I'll finally find some time to have to myself for however long I can get. Until next time, peace out.

Warning: Long Post Incoming

I was hoping to get a post in before the class started, but I wound up being busy that weekend. Unfortunately, my schedule quickly filled up from there. But no worries, I have returned to make a long (but hopefully not too long) post! Take your time reading it if you don't want to read it all in one sitting. I can fully guarantee you that this will be my only post in July. This class has me too busy to do anything else. I happened to get lucky today because we finished one of the classes today and have a light homework load going into the next class. But I also did things before the class started, so it seems logical to jump in way back there. On the PC pictures, I may get them up here, but it would be next month. I haven't put my backed up files on this computer (because organizing them would take an hour or two and I would absolutely feel compelled to do it as soon as I put the files on (and I don't have a spare hour or two that I care to devote to that at this time)).

PC Completion:
Well it turned out that every problem with my parents' computer was just a slight mistake I made at different parts of setup. All were resolved though and the computer now runs well. I haven't taught them how to run the new SSD/HDD combination they have, but they're in no particular rush to learn since they can use the laptop upstairs for now. In the meantime, nobody really comes downstairs anymore. They have new furniture upstairs and a new TV and with the laptop, nobody really needs to come down here except once a week for laundry. It's kind of nice to have the whole floor to myself, especially in busy times like these.

"Work:"
I did what I could, but my Aunt's backyard is not yet complete. I knew it wouldn't be, but I did less than I had hoped. Her neighbor who was going to help pour concrete had an unexpected death in the family, so we scrapped that plan last minute and will probably be doing it in August. Either way, I'm not too concerned because I'll get all the things done that I need to do. It's just that I may not get them done in time for the outside area to be any good for this summer. Oh well, there's always every summer in the future.

Videogames:
I played (and streamed) some SC with Keir shortly after finishing my PC. That was unfortunately the last I've been able to play with him (it was the first couple of days in July, somewhere in there). Given my schedule, I don't anticipate playing with him until early August and then, we'll have only a few days before he heads off to law school. I'm going to help him shop around for a decent laptop though and he's expressed interest in starting League of Legends, so that will be exciting. I'm going to create a smurf account to level with him. Hopefully someday he'll be added to "Get Carried," our ranked 5s team. In other news in League, Eric and I have decided to become a good duoqueue group. We try to practice bottom lane together (he AD carries which is his strongest role, and I support). We're getting good at predicting each other's play styles, so hopefully we will be able to queue together and increase our elos when I am done with the class. Currently, I average time for two to three games on school nights, so I've been using those to soloqueue to increase my elo or to practice with Eric. It's not as much playing as I would like, but it's enough to make sure I stay in practice. Steven meanwhile is starting to knock on the door of 1900. Congrats to him on his ding.

Because Chris' laptop has been broken, we haven't been able to get our ranked team going as much recently, but that will be soon remedied. Our team cohesion is starting to get better. I'm still a little frazzled, but that's because I have trouble getting settled on one role. Since I'm the greenest player, I came onto the team when everyone else had established their roles. Even though I'm one of the three regulars, I still am a utility that fills in what role we need depending on who's absent. Steven, Eric, and I are the regulars. After that, it's Chris, Albert, and Albert's brother. They all have their roles and depending on who's not playing with us, I take their role. If Chris doesn't play with us, I play support. If Albert doesn't play with us, I play jungle. If Albert's brother doesn't play with us, I play top. Steven always has mid and Eric always has AD because those are their best lanes. I don't mind being utility, it's kind of fun. And I generally play tanky champions, so there's some role consistency between my different lanes.

Oh and on that note, you can sometimes catch me streaming here.

A life? I have one of those?
Yes I do! I don't know if you guys know my friend from school that everyone keeps saying I should ask out (well don't worry that's not going to happen). We like to hang out because we are both big on drinking a lot and we like that we validate each others' alcoholism (that doesn't exist >___>). Anyway, I got to hang out with her at her birthday party back the weekend before graduation. It was really fun and I got to meet some people that went to Shorewood (she was in Shoreline until leaving right before high school). The party was cool and I got to actually meet her ex-boyfriend (the guy she was dating when I met her who she's good friends with still) who I actually knew through the frisbee circle. We had a good time hanging out and it was a cool party. Since that, her and I have tried to hang out more often even if we don't necessarily have anyone else around. Now I know what you're thinking and my God yes I would love to date this girl, however it's not possible. While I was in Korea, she started going out with this girl. I thought it was just one of those not serious things that you post on fb for shits and giggles at first, but it's become apparent that they're in a legit relationship. So that kind of takes that off the table. However, she keeps insisting that I would be an excellent boyfriend and is dead set on setting me up with someone. She even got my preferences out of me (I told her preferably Asian, short, fairly smart, and tolerant of my gaming habits). I know she knows I basically described her right to her face, but I'm glad she knew I was speaking generally and not trying to imply anything (or was I???). Anyway, she's determined to set me up with someone (or some people depending on how many attempts it takes) after my class ends so I'm tentatively looking forward to that.

This last weekend, we had a pretty fun drinking adventure across downtown. She's kind of a lightweight, but is still fun to drink with. I even got to meet her girlfriend who failed to make a good impression on me. She doesn't like my friend drinking (since she does it a lot (which confuses me because you think you would have to be okay with that to be with her, but whatever)) and she was kind of rude to my friend when we met up with her. My friend got mad at her, but I insisted she not be bitchy back at her. Bad first impression of the girlfriend, but I'm sure she's more cordial normally. After that, my friend got really tired (because she's a lightweight and I could probably drink her under about five tables (but that's what you get for being about 5'2" and 100 pounds) so I took her home. We had planned to make a stop to see a couple more friends of hers who I met at the party (and one of the girls is actually the girlfriend of...THE REID!!!) but since my friend was sleeping, I took her back to her house instead.

Oh and on other alcohol adventures, Grandpa and I bought a bottle of bourbon at Fred Meyer. He wanted to check prices of alcohol for fun and one named "Wild Turkey" caught his eye. I thought it would be really shitty and cheap, but it turned out to be really good (and cheap!). After taking a shot with him, I realized I have now done shots with both of my grandparents. I am so....cool?

And now to the important thing!

This class I'm taking:
This class has kept me really busy. They said it would be 3-6 hours of homework a night and I thought they were full of it (my other professors in college often said things like "You will spend 15 hours a week working on this class" which was never true and my grades were fine). They weren't kidding though. I'm not sure if its the intensive nature of the class or the fact that it's a graduate level course, but the homework actually does take up a lot of time. This has been my schedule for the class on weekdays so far:
7:00am - Wake up, eat breakfast, get ready
8:15am - Leave for class, find street parking
8:40am - Enter classroom, wait for class to start
9:00am - Class
3:20pm - Arrive home, since I'm burned out from so much class go ahead and browse Reddit
4:30pm - Start homework, eat dinner within a few hours
9:00pm - Finish homework, play League of Legends for a couple games
11:00pm - Go to bed
And it repeats. I don't get much time to do anything on weekdays, but it's fine. I'm getting a lot done and soon it will be over and I will have earned a cool certificate in just under a month (and I'll have 12 graduate credits). The class itself is really fun actually. Though it's 6 hours, the day just flies by. Despite that though, it still feels like the week drags on (mostly because I can look ahead and see how much class I have left for the week). And we go for the full 6 hours too. We get one bathroom break of about 5 minutes around 10:30am, then for lunch, we have projects to work on during lunch so that's not really an "official" break. The worst part about that going for 6 hours is definitely the fact that I have to hold in a fart for 6 hours. TMI probably...

The homework isn't too bad. It's much simpler than my econ stuff, just more time consuming. I really like the teacher and the school actually seems like their first goal is getting full employment for all their graduating classes. That will be nice for me. They're even doing a big employment seminar on the last Wednesday of class just for us, so that will be helpful. Also, since it's technically a teacher training as well, they're really big on assigning homework and doing tasks in class that we can then turn around and use in our own classes. For example, our weekend project this weekend was to make a 10-12 hour unit plan for a hypothetical class with a specific learning objective in mind. We each brought in enough copies for everyone in the class to have one, so now we all have 16 more or less ready to go unit plans that we can take with us when we go off to teach. Stuff like that is really cool. The people in the class are nice. Two actually dropped. One was a girl after the first day. She had been teaching in Seoul for a year and I wanted to ask her about that, but I never got the chance since she dropped. The second came after the third day. It was this really annoying guy that tried to use fancy words to seem smarter than he actually was. He also liked to talk a lot and it took away from some lessons, so it wasn't so bad he dropped. Everyone in this class is becoming like a big family since we see each other for so much of the day and then hop on our google group at night to talk about homework. Shared pain makes for strong bonds I suppose. Anyway, I'm going insane slowly over the workload they're giving me in this class, but since the end is so near in sight, I can already see how good this will be for me. It turns out it wasn't technically required of me to go teach in Korea, but as an Econ major, I had no idea how to teach students. This can only help. And the certificate I will be earning can significantly up my paygrade, so that's a plus too.

Twice over the course of the four weeks, we have to sit in on an adult ESL class offered there in the building. I actually had a lot of fun my first time there and I might do it an extra time. I met a young man (about 30) from Sichuan Province in China. We were able to use the Easy English times to generate material to talk about if we wanted, but I just talked to him about China and what he thought of it here. The teacher and him liked that because he doesn't get the chance to use relaxed conversational English much since he works as a custodian. Also in that class, I met a couple from Russia (the husband is a Boeing engineer in Moscow and they're here for his training and they figured they would learn English while they were here). They were really funny and cool to talk to. There's a really really cute girl from Colombia in the class and a Tibetan Monk who is funny as hell. I didn't get to meet either of them (I'll get to that in a second), but I will try to meet them next time I go. The reason I didn't meet them is because I wound up spending most of the time with an older gentleman from Korea. He was impressed when he learned I had lived and studied in Seoul. I got to use some Korean with him to help him translate some things and he was really impressed with my pronunciation and penmanship in Korean. He is a children's songwriter who wanted to learn English so he could write children's songs in English. He's been here for a couple years, but he will soon go back to Seoul. He gave me contact info in case we're both in Seoul at the same time. I'm looking forward to that if it comes up, it would be cool. Anyway, he was a really neat guy and it was also interesting to learn we studied at the same university in Korea.

Outside of that class, I've been doing my usual stuff. I help Grandpa with groceries on Wednesday still (which cuts into time, but it needs to get done and somebody else might get it wrong) which works out well since my classes are pretty near his place. Also, I helped my cousin out last weekend. We moved 2 loads to the dump (one 400 pounder and one 800 pounder). We also hauled back about .75 to 1 ton of topsoil (in two loads) from my aunt's house to his house. And to cap it all off, we put the heaviest load ever into my truck. It was a bunch of big cement blocks that all together weighed over half a ton. The truck had some trouble braking on the last hill going towards the blocks' final destination, but luckily I'm a good driver so I was able to keep us from dying.

Me: So we're pretty much an unstoppable object right now. I really hope I can make this turn, otherwise sorry if we die.
Kevin: Oh well, at least we got a record load in the truck.

We didn't die because I'm pro. When I finally got the truck stopped in the driveway, it reeked of burnt brakes. They're fine now though, I just need to wait a while before loading the truck up nearly that heavy again. I probably won't reach that much weight again though because the stuff in the shed takes up a lot of space and is light. These were compact and heavy. Rolling those things down the hill behind my uncle's shed (to prevent landslide by building up the hill!) was extremely fun. After that, I went back to my cousin's house where they were having a BBQ. My cousin (his sister) and her cousin from their other side of the family had been at the military base in Port Angeles and brought back actual shit tons of alcohol (8 half gallons of Smirnoff and then 10 other assorted bottles of things that were equally as large) since it was so cheap there. I had some drinks with them, then went home to my parents having Margaritas, then out to hang out with my friend where I still drank her under the table. I look forward to hanging out with her more in the future and anyone she might set me up with (if they're cool). Also, I need to party with my cousins more, they keep a well stocked liquor cabinet!

Well I've eaten up enough of  your time now. Enjoy your July for me!

A much delayed (but much appreciated?) new update

Hey, sorry about the delay in updating. I quickly began to enjoy my free time which led to me forgetting to post. From there, I was putting off updating until my computers were completed, but now that I'm remembering how much crap I have to download, it seems better to use that time to make an update rather than browse Reddit for several [more] hours. I'll go ahead and quickly go over what's been happening.

School Ending:
Looks like my quarter wrapped up well. It was a long, busy finals week what with my multiple finals and essay due. On top of that, I was trying to practice for the League tournament which made me have no free time (though one could argue playing videogames is free time whether im training or not). It seems that I clobbered my final project and exam in Microecon because I raised my grade significantly in that class. Oddly enough, my worst class was the one I didn't care about (though it was my easiest one). Usually my easiest classes are just the highest grades, but this time I cared so little about this class that my grade actually fell for it. In the end it doesn't matter what grade I got because I didn't need the class to graduate. In the end, my final GPA is somewhere around a 3.44 so not quite the 3.5 I was hoping for, but not terrible. I don't think I would have been able to raise it to above 3.5 unless I 4.0ed every class this quarter (though that may have not actually gotten me there) and with two of those classes being as hard as they were, it was but a pipe dream. Nonetheless, I was happy to be done with school for a month before I start again.

League Tournament:
This will be short. We lost an embarrassing game in the first round. The enemy team counter banned our best player's champions and despite counter banning their top lanes champions, he was still able to outplay me (he was really good). I actually wound up getting our team's only kill. The other team did some tricky stuff and it paid off for them. In watching the cast of the game, I was happy to notice that whenever the announcers talked about me in my lane, they didn't ever say I sucked, it was always about how great my opponent was. That was a bit of a confidence booster that I've used in playing since then. I haven't gotten too much in recently though because the servers have been critically laggy and buggy since an update implemented on fathers day weekend that went awry.

Graduation (Mine and Kathryn's):
My graduation was the week before Kathryn's. There were 1,100 people graduating in my class, so it took about 3 hours. It was a nice ceremony though. One stupid moment was our only student speaker who talked about having been awarded the *GATES* scholarship which gave her a full ride to the institution of her choice. Not 3 minutes after that, she quoted Steve Jobs. I thought it was not only silly, but actually pretty stupid of her to do that. The awarding of diplomas expectantly took forever, but eventually it finished and we all got to go outside (after I ran across my Econ thought professor and said goodbye to him). Afterwards, I got to see people I knew to say goodbye. I missed seeing Wennie, but we're going to hang out this summer anyway, so I didn't dwell too much on it. I had also gotten to see her the night before for her birthday party which was nice.

Kathryn's graduation was also pretty good. Senorita Stoker was the senior class adviser so she gave one of the speeches. It was weird to see her speak English. In Kathryn's graduation as well, several people quoted Steve Jobs. I didn't realize he was Jesus Christ reborn until now. Afterwards, I ran into a bunch of people I knew who had siblings graduating as well (including Willie, Oliver, Katie, Sam, and others). It was cool to catch up with some of them. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture with Kathryn's boyfriend because it was too hectic, but they had spree for that so it wasn't a big deal.

Oh right, Kathryn has a boyfriend. I kept forgetting to mention that. He asked her to prom (the weekend I was gone at a tournament in April) then took her to prom (on the weekend I was gone for the tournament in May) and they started "officially" (or whatever the hell it's called) dating shortly after. Going steady, that probably still works right? Not too outdated? Anyway, he's a cool guy (they've known each other for a long time and I know him moderately well already so no vetting required). Kathryn ditches us a lot to hang out with him now which is okay, but it is foreshadowing what life will be like for me when she leaves for college and I'm still at home alone with mom and dad for a few months before I leave to Korea (fingers crossed for that). It does not look pretty T___T.

Since Graduation:
I've spent a lot of time working in my Aunt's backyard. It's getting closer to being done which will be nice. I haven't touched the shed yet because that is a multiple week venture that I need to start after I have finished my class in August. Mostly for now there has been a lot of gardening, landscaping, and things of that sort going on. It has been fun.

I've been playing some videogames, but mostly League since that's what this laptop can handle. I try to play SC with Keir and Mike (one of Keir's friends who I have established a good rapport with), and sometimes Martin or April (two of Keir's friends, one of them is funny and one of them is attractive and both are really cool). I can't do too much SC though because if we get into a long macro game, I get about 1-5 frames per second making my army uncontrollable. Fortunately I can sometimes give Mike or Keir control, but that puts more work on their shoulders. Mike can generally handle it, but it's not too fair to Keir. Macro is my weak point, so I'm looking forward to getting my micro back so I can at least contribute to teams in some way. I play more League still, but not as much recently because the servers have been super messed up. It has been moderately to extremely annoying at times.

I  built/am building myself and my parents computers. Since I had to order parts for mine, they finally caved and decided it was time to get a new one for themselves. I built myself a top of the line rig (keeping only a few components) and built them an economic model that is a bit better than what they need,  but still a moderately powered PC which cost them just shy of $300. I was pretty happy with it. At the moment, my PC is running and I'm currently setting it up with everything it needs and trying to get my SSD situation figured out. I got my parents one too, so I'll be familiar with the process of loading an operating system onto one of those by the time both computers run. At the moment, their computer is having some power issues, but I'm still trying to determine whether it's something I did (I might just have to rearrange what is plugged in where) or if it's the Power Supply that was not good enough. Looks at the moment like I can fix it by just plugging things in differently, but we'll see. I'm happy with their computer because I weighed it yesterday and it is 57% as heavy as their old computer. It also came at about half the cost, which is nice. I'll be putting up an album of pictures on Facebook eventually and I might include a couple here.

So that's been about all I have done recently. I'm currently just awaiting my class to start soon so I can get it over with faster. The schedule will be brutal, but it's only a month, so I can handle it. Mom and Kathryn absolutely had to get out of town (though I'm surprised Kathryn was willing to be gone from her boyfriend for 10 days) so they went on a cruise up to Alaska, leaving dad and I alone for 10 days. They were worried that I wouldn't want them to be gone over my birthday, but I told them that their absence would be my present! And there's a kernel of truth behind every joke...

So not much is going on until class starts. If anyone wants to hang out, let me know.