::A Geek in Korea::

My wife and I had the day off work today because of the local elections. A few days earlier we had made plans for today for a spring picnic in the park. We would bring out gas range, cook up some pork, and drink the day away. Then my wife tells me that it’s supposed to rain on Wednesday. We haven’t had significant amounts of precipitation in a month, yet it was going to rain on our day off? What crappy luck.

Before we had planned for the barbeque, she had promised to meet some friends at a coffee shop to chat. It was a Korean ladies thing, and I wasn’t interested in dropping by.Since it was raining today, she had no reason to cancel her promise with them, so I was left to entertain myself. She went off to vote and meet her friends.

After a long nap, I got around to the whole “doing something fun on my day off” plan. The only movies in the theaters were awful, and the Rifftrax guys latest was Spiderman 3, which I would never, ever pay any amount of money to ever see again. I had finished my 900 page book yesterday, and I wasn’t going to finish a second book I was half-way through in a hurry.

I played some Brawl and unlocked a few new levels. The Internet connection on the Wii was not being friendly today, so I didn’t get to play online for some reason. The Internet wasn’t going to entertain me long today anyway. I was feeling a little more passive than usual after my long nap, and really wanted to spend my rainy day as lazy as possible.

I decided to check out what was available on MegaTV, my IPTV service box. For some reason I had never noticed the “Singing Room” feature before. It turns out that I have access to Midi-quality music and lyrics to all the songs I like to sing in my very own apartment at any time I would like. Of course, there is no microphone, and the machine doesn’t output a score, so really you are just singing a song on a television. If you really tried hard, you could use the remote control to stand in for a mic, but really it isn’t the same without the atmosphere. For someone that only sings in singing rooms with disco lights and loud microphone feedback, sitting on a couch, sober, and trying to sing the lyrics of “Optimistic” seemed unbearably lame.

I ended up watching “Ripley’s Game“, a thriller movie I’d never heard of before. It had John Malkovich and Lena Headey (Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles Mom!). It was an average movie, but hardly much of a thriller.

Once my wife got home, we ate dinner together, and she’s back to watching her dramas. I might finish up the book I had put off earlier, or try to sleep. It hasn’t stopped raining the entire day, and I didn’t get a chance to walk Yoshi or do anything else I had planned on. Sometimes the weather is so unhelpful, but at least I got a day to relax. They don’t come often during the week these days.