Soupy Soupy Deliciousness

Went out for soup and it was rich with kimchi flavor and delicious goodness.  It definitely was good on a chilly night. :-)   yummy yummy very full tummy.

On a side note : This little soup shop that I score this at is the cozy kind and I've been here more than a couple of times and I get this cute little smile from the little old lady that helps us every time. She smiles especially big whenever I asked for more of the red bean paste or for something else that's especially Korean and she thinks that perhaps not many foreigners would enjoy. 

All Those Things Your Mom Tells You To Do and You Don't then Karma Gets You

My butt is completely gone today because my mom's words have come back to bite my butt so many times in the past 24 hours.

Situation A:  Don't just kick your shoes off in the middle of the floor.

Karma :  Woke up to relieve myself this morning and hopped out of bed and was rushing to the bathroom and low and behold my pinkie toe meets my boots that I had kicked off last night. Owwwww!   What was worse was my pinkie toe was cold as I had kicked off my socks during the night.

Situation B:  Don't just throw things in the fridge.

Karma :  Just had tossed a couple small bottles of orange juice into my fridge I guess the other day or so.  Well when I went to go get eggs out today for breakfast, guess what rolls out and lands on someone's cold toes. Luckily not the same pinkie, so now I'm sporting several red piggies.

Last and certainly not least as this was the hardest lesson.

Situation C: Don't put knives into a soapy sink.

Karma: So I was cleaning up after making breakfast and lunch today and I know for many it might be hard to believe but I had made a mess.  Anyways, I'm cleaning up and have my nice hot soap-filled sink.  As I go through everything I'm getting close to the end and I throw two knives, a few platss and a cutting board into the sink without thinking.  I start scrubbing the tar out of this cutting board and sweet beezlebub you can probably guess what happened.   I definitely lost a corner of my Totin' Chip with that little incident. Not bad enough for stitches, but a lot of pressure and a decent application of super glue and I was good to go for the day.

Needless to say I learned my lesson today to try to always remember my mother's, father's and grandparents' pearl of wisdom.  Except peeing in the backyard after midnight. I still think that's ok. :-)   That kind of makes me miss our backyard. 

"F" Computer, "F" Computer

Ok so this weekend just wrapped up a week and a half of the term testing our upper level students. Lots of just walking around (with quieter shoes than my boots as I was reminded) and kids walking off with my erasers or mechanical pencils after the test is over. Anyways I was having computer problems where the computer froze up during the listening portion of the test and so quit playing the mp3's. I rebooted the computer and then waited a moment before reinserting my USB where the listening files were. It was taking abnormally long and I had My Computer open and at one point I was quietly yelling at the computer "F SHOW ME F. SHOW ME F!!!" Now this class is my highest level students and there are two girls on this day and one boy. The boy was just tuned out but the girls had this look of shock and horror mixed on their faces. I started laughing and one goes "What was that?" And I was like "F is the letter of the drive with our test on it." OMG me and the girls laughed for like 5 minutes because they apparently had the idea that I had sat there cursing at my computer in the middle of class. The boy coming out of being tuned out was so confused as he had no idea what we were laughing so hard about. After the test with each of the classes I played a game with the students. I'd write a four-letter word on the board and then have the students on teams run up to the board and change one letter at a time and create a ladder of new words. One team quickly figured out that as soon as you got a word changed to a four-letter word ending in -ATS that it was easy as pie to win. Well they did that the first round and I was hoping another team would catch on. Then they were once again the only ones that did it during the second round and the third round. They ended up winning with 63 words with the closest other team have 27. They had a blast though. One of the other teachers was like "how'd you think of that game?" and I was like "my mom and I are always playing weird word games on our computers or on my tablet so I just thought of what would be the most practical in the classroom."

A Kiddo's Drawing of Me(Or at least that's how they labeled it after-the-fact)

So on Thursday the students were taking a practice test later in the class, but early in the class we were doing their actual speaking test and it was a one-at-a-time in another teacher's room while that teacher had his students come into my classroom to do the test with his students.  Anyways, after the test I walked into the room and I asked how my girls were and his first response was "they're mean!"  I was like "they drew pictures of you didn't they?"  And he was offended and he was like "they drew one of you too."  When the students handed it to me all proud all I could think was "hey they drew with a full head of hair.  I've got no complaints after that."   In the past whenever students try to draw my short buzzed hair I end up having the head of the demonic robot baby in the original Toy Story at Sid's house.  This is definitely an improvement I believe. It also made me think of one of my favorite animated movies of the last couple of years. I'm a big Chris Rock fan and this scene always makes me laugh hysterically.

Fantasy Baseball

So lately I've been playing this pretty fun baseball game on my tablet where you can trade,upgrade and buy (with game points) actual player trading cards from which you play games and try to accrue more points by accomplishing feats such as doubles, batters with multiple hits in a game, every person in the lineup with a hit, etc. Well in the game you pick a team and you get their players as your starting roster.  Naturally I chose the Astros who apart from Bud Norris, Bogeosevic and Altuve I didn't recognize a single one so I took that to mean they used current up-to-date rosters. Anyways, I'm about 30 games into the season and I've made some acquisitions that basically the Astros would never get.  They're never going to have Darvish as a pitcher, Jimmy Rollins playing short, Fielder at first or Quintero behind the plate. That's just what I've gotten to get me on a 10 game winning streak.  The Astros can only pray for that. I do have one of the new rainbow regime hanging in my lineup and that's Jose Altuve.  And unlike most Astros stats except for losses he's killing it and I find it awesome and hilarious.

Green Tea Caffeine High

I was riding a train on full throttle by the time my last class showed up last night and I was wired.  It might've had something to do with the fact that I was on my seventh cup of green tea for the workday.  And these weren't sissy English "can you fancy  a cup of tea?" cups either.  These were full on Astros cups. Yummy yummy. Needless to say class was exciting and there was tons of laughing, learning and silliness.

Beautiful People on my Classroom Wall

So a couple of days ago I get this awesome card from the Morrisons.  Inside was their New Year's card and a pic of all the kiddos.  Well I stapled it up behind my desk and so of course all my students ask who they are and I say they're my cousins.  Well this brought on two hilarious conversations with two different classes. 

The first one happened with ine of my older classes.  They looked at the picture and asked who they were and I said they were my cousins.  They looked a little harded and one girl pointed at Alex.  "He must've gotten your mom's sibling smile!"  I was like what?  And she explains further by saying that "you and him smile exactly the same."  And she was darn proud of her observation.  Then I told her that he was adopted and they looked at me and she goes "teacher you never told us you were adopted."  This brough on my telling them the story Mom told me about at the life insurance office and the lady asking "where'd Byron come from? In the midst of all the J's."  My students thought that was funny.

The second one was with one of my middle level classes. They saw the picture and then one girl asked if they were mine. And I said that I wasn't married and I didn't have any children. Then one of the girls goes "don't lie to use and hide them from us.  Samuel (another older teacher) shows us pictures of his child."  This brought on my question "how old do you think I am?"  I will admit the guess of 37 cut a little deep. Then when I was done showing them my driver's license just so they'd believe me one student said "Teacher at 28 you're still old enough to have a family."  I asked her why she'd been talking to my mother or my grandmother before she came to class and she understood that and laughed. 

Almost the Start of a New Year

Okay so I'm back on the peninsula and I was thinking that when I got back I'd try to be more consistent with these blog updates as my New Year's resolution, well seeing as today is the 14^th of the month I can't quite say that I've succeeded. However, if I go off of the Lunar calender then it isn't the New Year yet so I'm ahead of the curve. When I got back to Korea I made sure to eat the foods pretty soon that I missed in the short time I was gone. It's funny that here I was with a list of restaurants and foods that I almost had to eat get into my belly while I was stateside and then coming back to Korea there were foods that I had to eat when I got here. Jet lag didn't really hit me when I was flying to the states. I was up for almost 48 hours before my flight with a couple naps so I slept like a baby on the plane and then all I needed was the occasional nap on James's or Grandma's couch. When I came back however I suffered from wicked jet lag. I thought I was a bear there for a short period as I just needed to hibernate.

Before I left and since I've been back I've been riding the train and I used to ride the slowest train almost all the time, but then I branched out and road the medium speed train and then this weekend going to Scott and Heana's I road the KTX (the higher speed, less stops train). I've noticed that the stewards on the trains differ according to the price of the train tickets. The cheapo train that I usually take has dudes that come through to check tickets. Then the medium level and KTX have long legs, skirts and cute faces. However, the customers are usually the same on all three of them. I sat next to one gentleman that I swear I thought I'd have to midwife at some point as his legs were poised so far apart that he could birth a calf. Oh well, what can ya do.

When I was headed up that way after class on Saturday, I had a quick layover in a town for about 20 minutes. I decided since it was 9:50 that I could quickly run into Costco that was right next door to the station before it closed at 10:00. I ran in and was trying to tell the girl at the front I only needed one thing, but she didn't seem to care as long as I was in the store before 10. I was shocked when I got inside as there was no rush by people in the store to be making their way to the counters to start to check out. I grabbed my two giant blocks of cheese and checked out, got back over to the train station and got back on the new train.

When I visited Scott and Heana's I got my Christmas gift box of cookies from Joyce. Heana didn't enjoy them as much. She made Scott and I put them away because they were too tasty. My favorites were the lemon shortbreads. They were quite addicting.

What a deliciously addicting book to read.  Also please note:  This isn't the only type of book I've been reading lately.

There wasn't anything that said I couldn't eat the box.

Someone's belly is happy.

One of my classes this new term (I say new term, it did start in December) is a mid-upper level class that is filled with 3^rd and 4^th grade girls, 10 of them. They definitely make me smile and keep me on my toes whenever I have them. That being said, they produce some of the best quality work that I have seen by students of similar levels.  It's actually become something that I've started copying their homework out of their books and posting it on my walls.  This got my other classes to increase the quality of their work because they wanted their work posted as well.  Now I've got one of my five minute breaks every class making somewhere between 5 to 10 copies of pages in books that are just awesome.

The peninsula is unusually colder right now than it was this time last year. In Suncheon it's not snowing, but it's not warming up to melt the ice that's been on the ground since I've been back. When I got into Seoul after my plain landed there was black ice everywhere and it was hard as hell to walk around with my boots on. Since it was colder I bought a ceramic fan or my apartment instead of using my floor heater since my bed is no longer on the floor and it was one of the best things. Turn it on and have it oscillating and it has a timer on it so it will automatically turn off that way I can put it on, fall asleep, and not worry about waking up as a crispy fried onion.

Melanie and Cathy are making sure that my head and ears are warm.  :-)

Today we had a short meeting and I made barbecue chicken sandwiches with mac and cheese, bbq beans, creamy corn and bread pudding.  Yummy 

Ok that's about it. Love y'all and this will (fingers crossed) be the beginnings of a trend of posts to come. Here's to the New Year and a healthy blogging habit.  I just need to post whenever I tell my mom that I'm posting so that she doesn't give me flack about not following through on my promise of a post.

BBQ Sauce and My New Race Packet

So I was talking about BBQ sauce that I've been using as a chip dip too and decided to take a photo.

I also just got my race packet for my 10k in Iksan this Sunday.  I'm starting to think that green is the universal color for 10ks.  All my numbers seem to be green.  'm also glad that this race has the shoe timer chips.  The ones that are a box taped behind the number are annoying because they just hit you the entire time you're running.  I love though when they release books where all the non-Korean names are at the back of the list.

I think they know me too well as they only included 3 safety pins.

Mexican Catering, The Astros and Chickens

We just finished a week of testing for our students.  I was very proud at how well a lot of them did.  Running has been going well and working out in general has been going better now that my cardio work of doing sets on my punching bag before runs has started again.  I tore a nice size hole in my bag a couple of weeks ago, but with some sewing skills, some twine and enough Kelly green duct tape, it’s good as new.  I don’t know why Kelly green seems to be the only color available here, but I took advantage of it and branded my bag with a new symbol covering up the old Chinese one. 

Duct Tape and Permanent Marker have never looked luckier.

Cool chilly weather has happened here in Suncheon.  Still to quite cold enough to break out the overly puffy jacket, but a light jacket or a sweater are usually par for the course when I ride my bike home after work.  Wednesday night however I made an exception and donned a running armor shirt underneath my retro Astros tshirt to celebrate the leakage of the new logo.  I’m so happy that they’re taking a trip back to the good ole days.  I only wish I could’ve been in Texas so that Pizza, Craig and I could go to the release.  I wonder how long it will take before Korean copies are available.  I’m not overly a fan of orange typically, I’ll make exception for Poke orange unless Dad wears it 6 1/2 days in a row, but I’ve always loved the rainbow jerseys of old and so the Astros going back to the Orange and Navy color scheme makes me so happy.  My fingers are crossed and lots of hope in my heart to see a Navy uniform with Orange pinstripes as a potential alternate.  :-)  Made my day when the new logo leaked.  I’m so happy that brickyard red is hitting the bricks, pun intended.

Orbit sporting the batting practice jersey and the new unis behind him.

The new batting practice jersey.  Probably my favorite.

The alternate jersey.  My second favorite. 

The home jersey.  Very classic.  Very classy.

I've never been a fan of Houston's grey jerseys in the past.  This one isn't too bad.

In celebration of Dia de los Muertos I did Mexican day for the people at work.  I tried to do a rendition of Grandma Davis’s chicken tortilla soup.  I don’t know if it’s a perfect copy of hers, but it was yummy.  There’s not really chorizo in Korea and I wanted to add that flavor, but ground pork with fajita seasoning that cures overnight seemed to come close to remedying that problem.  Also I think this week’s batch of Mexican rice as my best batch ever.  I wish there had been leftovers.  Oddly enough chicken stock or chicken broth is not really available here in Korea.  So I was thinking of what to use and there was a big giant pot of it staring me in the face.  I used the broth from the finished soup and added it to the rice and OMG I’ll have to do that from now on.  I also threw some of the soup broth into my chicken enchilada casserole too.

The spread.

Rotisserie fajita chicken for the soup.

Chicken enchilada casserole.

Rice and beans of course.

I found this at Home Plus and was super excited.  It wasn't quite as tasty as Hatch salsa, but it was definitely better than just average stuff.

Tortilla soup.

After the staff hurricane.

Speaking of chickens, I always used to think the electric rotisseries on barbecues were a little ridiculous.  I wish I could slap my former self out of that ignorant mindset.  My poor little rotisserie got a workout in prep for the Mexican food day doing three birds in two days.  I can’t imagine the type of awesomeness I could create on a barbecue rotisserie where two, three maybe even four birds at a time is possible. 

There will be more chickens done next week for lunch meats.  Barbecue chicken sandwiches will be my lunches for a while as this delicious chipotle barbecue sauce is evidently not something Koreans like and instead of 5000won a bottle or $5, it was on clearance for 300won or $0.30 a bottle.  I lucked out indeed.  It also makes a splendid chip dip.  It’s like a blend between Smokey Moe’s and Bullseye.  It’s definitely not Rudy’s or Stubb’s, but it’ll definitely do for now.

One of the newer guys at work who hasn't been here for any of my other lunches was like “When I heard we were having Mexican food today, I expected just a mini taco bar. Dude this is like… catered.”  Well with tortilla soup, shredded rubbed chicken to top the soup, Mexican rice, refried beans and my boss and his wife’s favorite my chicken enchilada casserole, perhaps it is like catering.  Always fun trying to get into a cab on days I’m bringing food to work.

 After our fun filled Mexican day at work, the boss wanted to continue the fun at the bowling alley.  I usually am good for one game, but by the middle of the second game my arm is pretty shot bowling as Mom puts it like Pat, AKA throwing the ball down the lane as fast as possible making the pins fly everywhere.  This night I tried stepping it up in weight and slowed my stroke down significantly.  We bowled 4 games and my score was relatively consistent through all four and I didn’t have the sporadic open frame like I usually do because of the pure chaos that is me throwing it down the lane.  This time there was more control and so I think staying with this pattern I’ll start to see my score get back up to where it was when I was playing multiple times a week.  I just to put a little more power into it without losing the target control that I’ve gotten through this new method.

Kevin showed up as we were wrapping up our third game.  He noticed something that we all found truly interesting.  The teams were the under 35ers vs the over 35ers.  The first game was close, but the second and third games they truly opened up on us.  Kevin was the first to notice how drunk the under 35ers were compared to how little the over 35ers had drank.  Definitely an enlightened observation haha.

I got a backlight for my bicycle so I won’t become roadkill on my trips home now.  The best part about both my front light and my rear light is both have a cradle and are removable without removing the cradle on the actual bike.  This is nice because I know that nobody can turn them on and wear down my batteries if they’re in my key bucket at my apartment.

That’s about it for now.