the offWhites

Oh, my? What’s that there?

Ahem. Yeah….we went shopping today. But it’s really late, and I am practically falling asleep sitting here, so, yeah. Details later!

I feel sick still, but relative to most of the day, I feel quite nearly fantastic.  I woke up sick yesterday and got progressively worse until early this afternoon.  Late last night, I thought I felt a migraine coming on.  Eventually I had to take two Tylenol3 to even get to sleep, and a third one at 3:00 am when I woke up because my head hurt so badly I had to throw up.  The migraine passed around maybe 4:00 this afternoon, so despite a sore throat, body ache, dizziness, lingering normal-level headache, and myriad other symptoms, I feel pretty good.

So while I was busy trying to sleep off whatever virus is assaulting my immune system, we got a visit at school from our HNST, sort of the sub-manager who acts as a liaison between NSTs and actual managers.  As I wasn’t there to speak to him, I can’t say exactly what went down, but I’m having greater doubts all the time as to whose best interests he is concerned about.  Maybe more on that later, we’ll see how the next few weeks pan out.

This will be a short one: Lisbeth got me a PSP for my birthday! We aren’t home enough to play the Gamecube I brought, and we ran across a PSP at a night market shop in Shilin, with the newest custom firmware already installed. So now I can play some games between classes hopefully, and most importantly, with the new custom firmware it can run homebrew, meaning I can load SNES and Genesis games on it.  Woohoo! Sonic 2 and Mario Kart, here I come!

Just in case we don’t get back from Taipei before midnight.  I don’t think that’ll happen, but sheesh, you never know, right?

Blargh.

I’m really tired, Seth is sick, we’re both a little hungry but neither of us has the energy to do diddly about it. I’m going to bed.

Go read Mimi Smartypants instead, okay?  She’s a funny lady.

Every year, lots of my favorite blogs do this crazy thing wherein they all go and post every single day in November, and then they all go “Wooo! Look at me! I did NaBloPoMo!”

This year I’m joining them.

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

Tonight we are awaiting the arrival of a super-typhoon.  This one may actually be dangerous, as opposed to the last two, but we’re looking forward to it.  Why would we anticipate such a thing?  Honestly, because we need the sleep.  Lisbeth’s been sick off and on basically since we got to Taiwan, I’m sick now, and I have pink eye.  Argh, little kids.  You know what causes the initial infection, right?  Disgusting.

So now that we have internet access, we have enough TV shows to get us through a massive storm, provided the electricity holds.  Speaking of which, I’ve heard the water can stop sometimes.  Note to self: fill the bathtub when you finish typing.

In other news, (drum roll… )  we’ve sold our house!  Yay, no more money being sent home to keep an unoccupied house from being confiscated by the bank!  Also, we can afford a scooter now, so we don’t have to wait a half-hour for the bus, or walk to school.  It’s a whole, grueling MILE.  Okay, so that’s not so bad.  But when there’s traffic, the almost complete lack of sidewalks is annoying, to say the least.

That’s all I have tonight, I’m tired and my eyes hurt.  The previously promised smells will come soon, though I’ve adjusted to them enough that I don’t know if I can do their initial impact justice.

‘Cause we just got ADSL.  As a direct consequence, I’m going to continue the lack of legitimate updates for a while, so I can catch up with boingboing, slashdot, and the lives of cats with things stuck to their heads.   Also walruses.

I’ve been promising everyone a post and somehow not getting around to it, so here’s a quick breakdown of what’s up with us.

Taipei is gorgeous.  The city is great, there’s a seemingly infinite supply of stuff to do, and when you just need some comfortably familiar surroundings, walk a ways, that’s here, too.   BB, Naomi, Jez, Rosalind, Lisbeth and I went to Outback steakhouse a couple of nights ago after class let out early for the first time.  We’d been to Ikea to ogle furniture and other flat-packed sundries, and a mall so half of us could drool over computers and such-like while the other half were trying on shoes.  We’d had out final demos that day, so we had a couple of drinks at the Outback, which had a surprisingly cosmopolitan selection of beers.  It was also happy hour, in which drinks are two for the price of one, so I had two Boddingtons and Lisbeth had two margaritas.  Funny thing, after a couple weeks of eating far less than we’re accustomed to, and nearly no fiber or protein, two drinks behaves a bit more like four.  Fortunately we have no vehicles, and taxi drivers don’t care what shape you’re in if you have cash.

Today we’re packing up our hotel room to go to the town we’ll be settling in for the next year.  It’s a pretty small place, and very different from Taipei, so there’s more culture shock in store for us if we understand correctly.  Well, in addition to the big one that’s supposed to set in about three months after you move to a new country.  Also today, after joking around last night about all the Brits we’ve been hanging around and absorbing each others’ phrases and manners of speaking, we were mistaken at breakfast for Canadians by a couple of American guys who “just assumed, because of how you sounded, ya know?”  I was tempted not to correct them, but I was afraid then we’d have to figure out how to celebrate Boxing Day, and Lisbeth would feel pressured to try to like Red Green.  Meh, it’s just too much effort to maintain the “I’m not really American” facade.