Short and sweet today.  Mover of appliances and other big things coming at 1130 AM.  Lot’s of work left to do.  See pictures below.

• Exercise first thing is what gives me time to organize my day and think about what I am writing here.  Surely, that is what my father is addicted to.  (His running streak as of 1/18/2011: Days: 12,239.  Miles: 64,214.  When it started (3/20/1979), I was only 2 years, 2 months and 20 days old.)  The distractions on the treadmill almost kept me from getting my brain started today.  The only treadmill available today was in front of the blaring news.  The lack of technology in the upcoming experiment will not extend to my MP3 player; while I want to soak up every bit of ambient noise on my travels, I will need, like in Seoul, Busan, NYC, to have some control over when I hear these things.  Anyway, listening to Rush’s Counterparts, I was somehow sucked into watching the local news, trying to figure out what they were talking about, trying to see some footage of an area of town that I knew.  No luck and I was vapid.  Luckily I was able to move to another machine after 10 minutes.  It is for that reason that you read this here, clever title and all.
• HunJong is my hero.  I will take him out for hue (pronounced in one syllable as “who-way”; it’s raw fish) next week.  It is true that his wife Lindsay “Canuck” Neilands has been just as helpful, but let’s face it: she married her own personal http://koreanhelpers.org/ (HunJong’s website).  While I often feel bad for intruding on their lives, they have both have shown patience and generosity.  HunJong is my hero because not only is he tolerant of needy Americans and munificent with his time, but he also speaks both languages very well and takes great effort to understand cultural differences (which I guess he should, being that he’s moving to Canuckistan in a couple months).  I admire his desire to keep learning.
• Our social schedules are filling up.  Our celebrity status is a small group, but they all want a piece.  A group of Korean tea party ladies took Nic out to dinner last night.  Tonight, we’ll go out for dinner and a few drinks for Lynsey Bolin-Thorenton’s birthday (one of the few, the proud the truly kind/generous foreigners in Korea; she was elemental to helping me throw Nic’s surprise bachelorette party).  Tomorrow, an early Skype chat with Nic’s parents.  Sunday, we’ll go on a day-long hike with Pete.  Monday I’ll go watch a tape delayed AFC Championship game at Pete’s with a few others.  Next week, dinner with we’ll galbi with Songju (another generous soul); Wednesday, I’ll dinner with HunJong.

Okay, that wasn’t that short.  But, now I must clear off this desk: am moving onto an old beat up table I took from a parking lot a couple years ago to serve as a desk.  Now I must clean out the refrigerator; luckily for us, a neighbor-friend is letting us use their refrigerator while away on vacation; in exchange for feeding their cats, fish and turtles, we can escape the shame of not having made it through our frozen meats; reprieve in the waste management department.  Now it is required that I hang up the wet clothes from the last load of laundry; again, neighbor-friends Sarah McAdams-Hansen and Terry Hansen are giving us carte blanche to manage the emptiness in our lives; their generosity and timing of their Thai vacation is much appreciated by us, the nearly-devoid of stuff.   Now it is mandatory that I sit in my papa-san rocker for one last time.  I will watch Hobak Cat either go stir crazy because there’s going to be hardly anything left to hop up on, or discover a different level of beauty in hard-wood floor skating.