Packing, along with the requisite procrastination, is really pretty boring. Well, maybe not always. But it was today. For me. So, I’ve really got nothing today. I’m sorry. I really hate coming here and not actually posting any content. It’s boring for you. But I also hate not posting at all. I’ve gotten into a groove, and I’m actually posting regularly, and I’m afraid to miss a day for the fear that it might just spiral into a week that morphs into a month and all of a sudden, I’m just some girl with a dead blog.
So. The boring post in which I write about how I have nothing to write about. So boring. So meta.
Things I Can Do In The US That I Can’t Do In Taiwan:
- Speak the native language. Oh, what joy, to be able to ask where things are, to be able to know that I can go do whatever needs doing without worrying if I know enough words or if the person working knows any English or if there are picture menus or whatever. Kato tells me that I’ll be overwhelmed with all the conversations I’ll be able to hear and understand, but I think it’s an okay trade. I may think differently in a week or so.
If only because I haven’t posted in a seriously long time. Not much is new with me. We haven’t taught kindy all week, we have most of next week off for Chinese New Year, and we’re finally beginning to catch up on our sleep debt. I went to sleep around midnight last night, and Lisbeth around 1:00, and we slept till a little after 11:00 this morning. We could have used more sleep, too, but we figured we wanted to be able to sleep tonight.
So we spent the day rearranging the living room(s) and cleaning the kitchen, and now we’re watching BSG. Man, I really love that show. We need to find a good follow-up, though, since we’re already into season 2 and we haven’t been watching it all that long. Firefly won’t work, we’ve already seen it, and we’ll probably watch Earth2 soon, but no matter how good it may or may not be, it’s what, 12 years old? Fifteen*? Good or not, can it stand up to Battlestar Galactica, particularly as the following act? Somehow I doubt it. I’m hoping to convince Lisbeth to watch The X-Files with me, but since the only episode she’s ever seen is the single most disturbing episode ever I somehow suspect that’ll be a hard sell. If you watched The X-Files, you know the one. When I told my dad she’d only seen the worst episode, he said “Which one? Oh! With the… With the mom under the bed, and the… Oh, God. I wouldn’t want to watch it ever again either.” So maybe we’ll do Sliders, but that seems like pretty light fare after the loss of Caprica and the search for a possibly mythical Earth. Suggestions, anyone?
Also, someone is reading this blog from Mission, KS, and I’m curious who it is since I know only a handful of people in that area. If you don’t mind, would you let me know who you are either by commenting on this post, or by emailing me at sethcwhite(at)gmail(dot)com? I’d really appreciate it!
*IMDB says 1994, so that’d be 14 sometime this year. I suppose I’d know that if I’d brought my DVDs from the US instead of just loading them on my hard drive.
Mmm….a Sunday without the dread of Kindy on Monday morning. We slept late, we puttered, I did some laundry and cleaned up the house, listened to an entire audiobook, and I’ve even knit a good chunk on Lexi’s wedding afghan (oh, it’s pretty).
Seth and I talked to Caleb again some last night, and I think I may start the resume polishing tomorrow morning while I’m not working (woo!). He thinks the place he’s working might be hiring, and I think I’m probably qualified. He seems to like the place lots, and says the workload isn’t completely insane. It might be nice to have a relatively sane work schedule, for a change.
In the mean time, I’m going back to knitting, and I think I’ll be staying up later than I normally would. Mmm…..no work tomorrow until 1:30or so!
Today, I:
- Saw my parents and the older of my two younger sisters (yay for Skype and webcams!). During the visit, I:
- learned my mom has cataracts, although the webcams aren’t really good enough for me to see them
- remembered just how big my parents’ kitchen is
- Amost, sort-of, maybe liked my kindy class
- Tolerated my Treehouse and Clubhouse classes
- Got home at a decent hour, and:
- did 3 (three! woo!) loads of laundry
- did the dishes
- cleaned the stovetop of all the baked on nasty
- boiled water for drinking
- tidied the living room
- tidied our bedroom
- swept the tile floors (that would be all of them, really)
- took out trash
- sorted my coin jar into the $1 dollar coins and the actually-useful-if-you-need-to-grab-some-money coins
- paid the plumber for fixing our hot water
- interneted
Holy productivity, Batman! I got stuff done today!
So, we spent the better part of our waking weekend in Taipei. While my wallet is most certainly lighter now, we’re also pretty happy with our purchases - a birthday present for Seth (I’ll let him write about that one - it’s a doozie), some new shoes for me, a new backpack for me, some new pants for me (seems like I got around to picking out my birthday presents a bit late, but am making up for it now). I’ll take pictures soon and write up a nice show-and-tell post.
We also picked up a bit of a gift for our new NST. See, yesterday, we went to Taipei with a coworker to meet up with some of her friends for dinner but N. (the new NST) had asked to come over to our place to do laundry. Of course she was more than welcome, but I haven’t been a model housekeeper in the past few weeks, and warned her about it. Before we left, we realized she had been quietly doing our laundry as well as her own! We protested, of course, but she said it made her feel better, and well, shoot, I’m just not too good at protesting when it’s something that needs doing that I hate doing. We did ask if there was anything she needed still, and all she mentioned was a mug, for her coffee. So, we stopped at Starbucks and picked up a nice travel mug, as well as a single-serving French press and some Christmas blend (as she’s been getting by on instant - ewww) for her. I don’t really feel like it’s enough, since when we got home last night, she hadn’t just done our laundry. She had cleaned our entire apartment.
It’s incredible, and I was (and am still) gobsmacked. I don’t know how to truly thank her - I mean, it was like if Mom came over and said, “Sheesh, Lisbeth, you are living in filth. I know you are working too many hours, though, and I love you, so I’ll clean it all up - happy random clean house day!” A coffee mug seems insubstantial, somehow. But for now, that and about a million thank-yous is all we’ve got.
I can’t be bothered to look up the posts since I can’t recall which blog I posted it to, but I’ve announced to those of you who’ve read me that Gilda Radner’s Endangered Feces bit is inarguably one of the funniest jokes ever. Poop is funny. This was a correct answer in a Fiction Writing class once, no kidding.
Dr. De Grave to one of my classmates: You need to find another word to use here. This is a serious passage, “poop” doesn’t work.
Classmate: Why not?
Dr. De Grave to class at large: What is poop?
Me: Funny.
Dr. De Grave: Exactly.
Yesterday I learned that poop can require a bit of aging to become humorous. While Lisbeth and I have been working on the house and traveling to Michigan, I’ve let the back yard get somewhat out of control. Our lawnmower is one of the human-powered variety, and must be used every 5-7 days to be effective. After about three weeks of disuse, I had to leave it in the garage and use the weed eater over the entirety of the back yard. Sometimes big, wet piles of Labrador leavings nestle cozily in the high tufts of grass, entirely concealed from view. Sometimes, when said leavings are contacted by quickly moving weed eater string, they cease to be stationary. Less frequently, they do slightly more than simply lose their quality of stillness. Once in a great while, they become chunks large enough to land with an audible splat, and simultaneously discover a trajectory whose apex would, but for my presence, have been slightly behind and above where my head in fact was. Fortunately my blink reflex works well, and my sense of humor, now given some 20 hours of rest, has made more or less a full recovery. It’s still not that funny though.
I started cleaning the garage the other night. I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat, and though I have a theory or two on the reasons for that, they don’t really merit mention here. What does bear attention is that I have so much crap that if actual rats were to literally nest in it, serendipity alone would lead to their discovery.
On the plus side, I’ve finally started to think of this crap as such, and have begun throwing out trash. Tonight I spent a while rummaging through a rather large box populated mostly by old telephone bills. This would have been useful at tax time, except that they were all for a cell phone I haven’t had for four or five years, not for a land line. Those I threw away years ago, naturally.
But I’m making progress, even if it doesn’t show. I’m still in the stage of cleaning in which every thing I does looks worse, but is necessary. I’m really looking forward to being finished.
On a lighter note, I’ve rediscovered Sgt. Keroro/Keroro Gunsou. I found a few episodes on my hard drive, and a few more online. While I was looking for the ones online though, I discovered it had been licensed in November. The bad news is that the DVD release dates aren’t announced yet, but the good news is that the licensing company was ADV. I’m in the minority of anime fans in that I prefer a well-done dub to a sub whenever possible. I’ll take subs if the dub is bad or non-existent, and if TokyoPop, 4Kids, or any number of other outfits had picked up Keroro Gunsou I would be supremely disappointed, but I think ADV is one of the best two chances the good sergeant has at a respectful translation, the other being Geneon. Of course, I think ADV did Super Milk Chan, now that I think of it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.