I’ve had a bunch of posts knocking around in my head but for various reasons, didn’t post them. I should have posted them then (that’s why you have a blog, dingbad!) (shut up, scolding voice in my head), but I didn’t, so I’m posting them now. Can I get half-credit for doing the work, at least, even if it’s way past due?
A few weeks ago:
The thing with the cabs here, I’ve noticed, is that the people driving them tend to listen to either cheesy pop ballads or sowme sort of talk radio. The cheesy pop stuff is as annoying here as anywhere else, but I don’t really notice the talk. Well, I thought I didn’t. This morning, I got into a cab in which the driver was listening to classical music. It was so calming, so familiar, so very unlike the talk radio which all of the sudden seemed extremely loud and shouty to me. It actually made me cry, right there in the cab, because it reminded me so intensely of home, and more specifically, of my dad.
Hi Dad. I miss you!
On the 22nd of October:
So. I’m 27 now. Sheesh. I thought I’d be more of a grown-up at this age. I mean, 27? That’s late 20’s. That’s like, almost 30, which is, like, old. Or something. I got cake at kindy and lots of fun new clothes from home, though, yay! Also, a fever of 104F on Friday, so no going out on Saturday for me. I’ve been sick practically every other week. Fevers suck. Kindy kids with multitudes of germs suck. Taiwan sucks. When is this culture shock crap supposed to go away?
The week following my birthday:
Holy crap. I don’t know what’s happened, but all of the sudden, kindy doesn’t suck so much anymore. Granted, I’ve been 4 students short of a full class most of the week (including one of my more difficult students), but it seems clear that something has clicked with me and the kids and the routine of class. It’s a good thing, too, since it seems like maybe that’s helping the feeling of despair go away. Maybe it wasn’t culture shock - maybe my job was just sucking dead bears and now that it’s not I can feel like a person who doesn’t hate attending a good third of my current life? Huh. Either way, things seem better. Plus we’re getting scooters soon!
Last friday afternoon:
Scooters! Scootersscootersscooters! We’re getting our scooters tonight!
Last Friday night so late it was probably Saturday morning:
Wooooo! We got our scooters! Scooters are magical! Scooters are wonderful! I love my new scooter! This might be the final nail in the coffin of the craptacular time I was having adjusting to this crazy new place!
Monday, 12:30pm:
Stupid scooters. I know we bought used and all, and that means I expected we’d have to deal with problems sooner or later, but 3 days after we got them? That’s crap! My scooter won’t start, at all. I mean, I stick in the key, grab the break, and push the starter button - nothing. Not even a wheeze. Stupid scooter.
Today:
So, Seth got my scooter going by slapping it across the face and saying “I’m the boss, you dumb scooter, and you better start right now!” and it worked! Well, really he just sort of hit it really hard a few times right by the starter, and then it started up just fine (I don’t know if any harsh words accompanied the beating - I was just making that part up), leading him to think perhaps my scooter’s got a short in the wiring. Or, rather, his scooter’s got a short in the wiring, because he decided I should be driving the one he was driving (it’s the newer one, but the one I was driving has big “Herself 125″ stickers on either side, so we figured it had to be mine, right?). I have the newer one now, and it’s got a lot more get-up-and-go, which is a little freaky just now when I’m starting it up, but otherwise, lots of fun! Of course, it rained today, which makes riding the scooter a little less fun and a lot more wet, but it’s not as if I didn’t know that was coming. Rain is an almost-constant. Seth loves it, but I am underwhelmed.
In other news, tomorrow is Halloween. I’m short a few key items for my costume (it’s not exciting or anything), but I’m still trying to make it happen. I’ll post pictures of tomorrow’s festivities tomorrow evening or the next day, I promise!
Maybe, maybe not. We got scooters on Friday night. We’ve been thoroughly enjoying them, I have to say. Being freed from the tyranny of the ridiculous bus system (have we talked about the buses? Maybe another time,) is superb.
Lisbeth’s bike already quit, though. We drove them to work this morning, we just hopped on them to come home, and Lisbeth’s won’t start. It’s frustrating, since we knew there could be problems with used bikes, but they came with assurances from a friend of some of our friends. She got them bikes, too, and they’ve had no problems, so here’s hoping it’s just a dead battery or something, which would actually make sense, since it doesn’t do anything at all when you press the starter.
And Wes:
smartass 
Still on the lookout for a US copy of BR, btw, if you run across one. Say hi to LW for me 
Pretty sure I’m not brain damaged from all the poison I inhaled today. We did make it back to work. Now I’m just sleep deprived, and still in the throes of culture shock. I thought the very idea of culture shock sounded crazy when they described it to us in our initial training here, but tonight I found myself getting misty-eyed over a not-particularly-well-written history of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast! I mean, I have one at home, I’ve had a few actually, and I like it a lot. In fact, lately its nostalgia value has surpassed even the Saturn, which has been my absolute favorite console (don’t look at me like that, you have dirty secrets, too, and if you haven’t played Burning Rangers you have absolutely no room to judge) for a long time. But actually making me sad enough to have to deliberately *choose* not to cry? Yeah, I’m going to have to assume that’s not really my brain speaking to me anymore.
So right now I’m experiencing an amalgam of culture shock, illness, sleep deprivation, and abject terror. I’ll address the last of those. We’re at our apartment right now. We came home for lunch, which we don’t typically do, as it’s inconvenient at the moment. We’ve just come back upstairs from *attempting* to go back to work. We noticed a strange sound as we were getting on the elevator, but didn’t think much of it.
When the elevator doors opened on the first floor, smoke rushed in. I yelled, “The building’s on fire, run!” Then I realized I couldn’t see light through the doors eight feet away. I turned to the door around the corner, less than five feet, and I couldn’t see light. Then I realized I was breathing chemicals. We jammed the “close door” button over and over and tried to hold our breath all the way back to the eighth floor.
So now we’re sitting at home. We need to be back at work in a hair under 30 minutes, and we can’t leave the house, because the lobby is tarped for fumigation. We’re both shaking, and though we know we aren’t going to burn alive, it’s still a little nerve-wracking. I’ve just recieved a call from another teacher, though. She and our kindy manager are on their way to try to figure out when the sparying will end. Cross your fingers!
My big birthday box from Mom got here today. Inside were things so wonderful, so needed and yearned for, I couldn’t help jumping up to go try it all out right away.
Mom sent me new clothes. When I was living in KS, this was certainly cause for happiness, but not quite the level of elation I’m getting now. But here, where everyone is freakishly tiny and I’m an XL if I’m lucky, I haven’t really found any clothes I can wear for working, and since I’ve continued to lose weight, that’s a problem. I’m down to 165ish now (and still on a downward trend), and even 12s were too lose. So, from halfway across the world, I’ve got 2 new pairs of jeans in a size 10 that fit perfectly. I’m finding that even though I’m wearing a pair right now, I can’t really believe I’m wearing a size 10 anything. I don’t remember a time that I ever wore anything smaller than a 12, and even that was a squeeze. I’m almost afraid that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it will all have been a dream…
mmm…brown gravy on noodles. One of my favorite I’m-too-tired-to-cook meals. One of the things I’ve missed. Washed down with peanuts and candy corn - I can almost forget all the stress of work.
Thanks mom - birthday box #2 got here a little early. We opened it up and I’ve demolished the peanuts and candy corn, but I’m not going to open my card until Monday!
I just finished watching the first episode of Pushing Daisies that we, er, “imported” from home. While I liked it, and will probably continue to watch, I didn’t love it. I think I was hoping it’d have a feel more like that of Dead Like Me, which. is one of my all-time favorite shows. It was fun, though, in a very fairy tale sort of way.
It’s Sunday night, which means we’re back to work tomorrow as usual. I’m not completely dreading it, but I still don’t feel all the way better yet from the pinkeye and other accumulated crud. It’s interesting to consider something that I think tells me just how much we’re working - I found out that Al Gore had recieved the Nobel Peace Prize via the Apple’s website.
Yeah.
I wanted to take another look at the new fat nanos, as mine is currently acting like teenager (randomly refusing to cooperate and then just not even turning on the display sometimes) and we’re talking about possibly getting a new one. I type in apple.com, and there on the front page, Apple’s congratulating Al like he’s a childhood friend or something (of course, he did invent the internet, so I suppose Apple and Al might be tight like that from way back). I’m looking at it thinking “Really? Did I just learn this fairly important snippet of international news from the freakin’ Apple website?” And then I realize that in fact I did, and perhaps that’s indicative of the fact that I’m working so much I didn’t even have a chance to learn about it from a real news outlet. I guess it could be indicative of the fact that I don’t actually follow world news much. I’m going to stick with the interpretation that indicates I’m overworked, though, I think.
I just got off skype with my parents. Mom tells me that I’ve got a notice from my od job telling me i need to rollover my 401k out of the company-sponsored plan thingie into my own personally-owned account. After some noodling around on Transamerica’s site, I finally found the right place to log in and discovered that, much to my delight, I actually have some money in there. Just under $1600, actually (not too shabby for just a year, I don’t think). So, I guess I need to find myself a 401k account. It looks like I actually even create a “Transamerica Premier Funds Rollover IRA” that would probably make the rollover pretty easy. The work rollover is in the name of the account, so it must be what I’m looking for, right? Or, perhaps tomorrow, when my eyes aren’t so tired, I’ll do some digging online to decide where to stick it all. Last time I was researching IRAs, I recall there being a bunch of different companies offering them. Truth be told, I’ll probably end up picking the one with the web interface I like the best. After all, that’s what’s important, right?
Oh, my. the pinkeye continues to annoy. My eyes don’t itch - they hurt, a lot. They also have apparantly given up trying to focus now, too, instead turning all their power towards producing gunk and, I hope, healing. So, short post tonight, as I’ve got to go close my eyes and give them a rest.
At Kindy this morning, we were supposed to go on a field trip to a farm. Seth and I planned accordingly. So, when this morning was wet and drizzly, and the CTs confirmed that no, we wouldn’t be taking the field trip, I sort of freaked out. I wasn’t mentally prepared to actually teach a class this morning, so it took some doing to get into the right mindset. Even then, I felt pretty bleh.
And then [inspectors? observers? I don’t know exactly, but peoople with clipboards and cameras and a very official presence] showed up, so I felt like I had up the super-duper teacher enthusiasm. Again: bleh. So, once class was over and I was looking at a pile of communication books 14 high, you can imagine how I felt. Everyone, say it with me!
“Bleh…”
So, if you’re reading both our columns of bloggyness here, you know Seth got pink eye (they call it red eye here). Suprise! I got it too. I think the automatic, unquestioned tranmission of illness from one of us to the other is surely one of the less wonderful things about being married. My eyes are super gross. I came down with it on saturday, the day the super typhoon hit (”How was your typhoon?” “Super!”), so no doctor visit then. That meant I couldn’t get to the doctor until Monday night after class, aroud 9pm. So, about 3 days of untreated pink eye. Yummy. My eyes are a lot less pink to the casual observer now, but if I lift my right eyelid, it’s completely red. Like I got punched. Also, they hurt when I yell, or squeeze my eyes shut, or lean over and talk (these are all things I find I need to do on a fairly regular basis in at least on of my classes every day). And, because of all the drops and nightly goop I’m putting in them, my eyes seem to have lost their lubricatal balance (is that even a real phrase?) - they feel all dried out and out of focus.
Bah. Enough of that. It’s boring, listening to a person whine about their aches and pains. Unless I’m doddering and senile, I don’t really have any reason to think anyone would be interested.
I find that one small thing I really miss is reading material for the bathroom. Before, Bathroom Reading Material (henceforth to be called BRM) was supplied through the mail, random bookstore purchases, and in a pinch, one of our numerous bookshelves. Now, BRM is pretty much nonexistant. Oh, sure, I’m reading the GURPS Characters books there, but really? It’s not the light, easy-to-put-down sort of fare I’m looking for. So, you know, if you’ve got any old magazines laying around that don’t weigh anything, ship them my way, mmkay?