::A Geek in Korea::

Glow has grown tired of her mobile and her animal dolls, so my wife asked me to look at blocks. Glow went on a play date at a friends house and was very active picking up and destroying different bits of blocks, so my wife thought it would be a suitable purchase to keep her entertained.  There was no doubt. This was my chance to recommend getting her first set of Lego bricks as soon as possible. We found a nice starter set of Lego bricks for her to use with proper supervision. She and I will be making cute little houses and blocky cars by the end of the week.

Glow wasn’t the only one getting bored by her animal dolls. She’s had those things for eight months now, and besides making the occasional sound or being chewed on, they don’t do anything interesting. We’ll be able to make some new things to play with, and then Glow will be able to play Godzilla and destroy them. Later, she and I can sit around building things together. I’ve still got her giant Lego Dinosaur kit assembled, but if things get desperate we can always run across the street and pick up another few buckets to play with. That’s the great thing about being an adult with an income. You can just go out and buy more Lego bricks when you need some for whatever project demands it.

Lego bricks are my favorite toys, bar none, ever, and I don’t know if I will ever outgrow them*. My brother and I would play with them for hours on boring weekends building different things, but we never, ever ran out of things we wished we could build with a little more time or imagination. Before the Internet was invented, that’s what everyone did with their free time right? I’m sure my entire generation feels a strong nostalgia for the classic building toys, and I can’t wait to start sharing it with my own daughter.

*(I say this now, as a person that hasn’t stepped on one of those studded bricks while trying to walk to the bathroom at night and had it embed itself into my foot in a few decades. Painful foot injuries aside, I really love Lego stuff.)

My wife and I have to change our daughter’s diapers from time to time. It’s just a fact of life with a baby. While in the bedroom when we’re getting ready for bed, or in the middle of the night, we occasionally don’t have the energy to dispose of them in the trash in the trash can over in our veranda. Sneaking through the house at night with dirty diapers could surprise Yoshi, and if he barks and wakes up Glow, say goodbye to the little sleep we do actually get. We just want to rest, so we clean up later.

As a result, at any one time in the bedroom in the morning there might be two or three diapers wrapped and ready to be disposed of somewhere in the bedroom. They usually end up on the floor, under a makeup stand, next to a night stand, or sitting on a shelf. No one has stepped on one by accident, or forgotten about them for an extended period of time, so there have been no disasters, but every morning it’s like a shitty diaper Easter Egg hunt. “Did I find them all? Will I find one later that I missed? What if one gets lost?”

On the parenting front, this is the last week I get to spend at home with my daughter and wife during the day before my four month long university schedule starts and I lose all track of time trying to keep up with tons of different classes for months. The cutest thing Glow has learned how to do is clap her hands in excitement. It is adorable. It’s fantastic to walk into the room and get applause from your daughter for anything you do. This is all from my wife trying to get her doing finger exercises with cute Korean songs.  Glow doesn’t have the fine motor control to do something like “Okay” or “Thumbs up!” yet though. I’ll be excited when she finally learns something like that from me.

My wife and I followed through with our plan to price compare strollers for Glow. We went to an upscale department store to look at a higher end stroller we plan to use for a few years. We got to put the baby in the chair, see how it folded up, and how much of a discount we could get at a physical store. The plan was then to check online to comparison shop and see if we could get a better deal. If we could get a better deal while it was on sale while at the department store, we’d pick it up in the brick & mortar store.

The lady at the baby stroller shop let my wife see that the sale they were running was having an impact on the demand for the strollers available in the country. It was on back order for a week all around Korea, but they still had two left in stock. She told us the sale ended today, and if we didn’t get it then we’d need to wait at least a week for a new shipment to arrive and put in a reservation to get one when available.

If I had my Motoroi Android Phone, the process for checking the price to know if getting this stroller immediately would have been finished in a minute. I’d have gone online, checked the price, and just told my wife where to pick up the stroller. We don’t need it immediately, but if we were getting a good deal walking home with it wouldn’t be a bad thing to purchase it immediately either. Since my phone arrives later in the week, I was unable to price check while in the store to see the proper course of action. We had to go searching for a place to check the Internet. I felt like I was a character in an episode of South Park.

Seeing as this is Korea, the chance to use a high speed connection to the Internet in a public area for a low price is about as good as finding a public toilet. The opportunities exist, if you know where to look, but just like the toilet always feel dirty and worried about picking up a virus after using it. I went to a few coffee shops to see if they had any PCs available to use for customers. Nope. Since Starbucks moved into the neighborhood they only offer WiFi service, if that. There was a hair salon that had PCs for bored people to use, but no one in the party needed a haircut. We weren’t willing to go in just to beg for a little time on the computer. We just needed five minutes, so we decided that even though we’d waste 55 minutes at a PC room, it was better than searching high and low for another place to go.

We ended up at a PC room within walking distance of the department store. This is the first time my wife had actually needed to use a machine at a PC room and she didn’t know the procedure. Heh. I stood outside with Glow since the place smelled like smoke. People must have thought we were the worst parents ever. Mom was inside getting her gaming fix while dad waited outside with the baby. She checked what we needed for the stroller pricing, determined the Internet was more convenient, and we left without spending the money at the department store after all. This process took an extra thirty minutes total. While annoying, this still beats the crap out of shopping in the United States, where PC rooms do not exist where I am from and checking the Internet involved DRIVING 30 minutes both ways to price check items.

I can’t wait for my phone to eliminate that sort of inefficiency from my schedule. I’m also  worried about the time I’ll spend playing around with my phone constantly being online. Between the house and work being wired for WiFi, and coffee shops and other places starting to offer it ubiquitously, the chance that my Internet addiction becomes free and portable is fairly disturbing. I’ll end up losing far more time just playing around online than I will save running around trying to comparison shop. Hopefully my limited data plan will cover whatever I need to do when I am online with my phone and I won’t end up with outrageous bills. Then my time and my money will both be gone.

Last night the family went to a Vietnamese noodle place for dinner. I had some mild Pho noodles and some Jasmine tea which sabotaged my weekend. The caffeine from the tea, imbibed too late in the evening, caused me to stay up two extra hours than I had planned. My sleep schedule still being wrecked from morning classes means I get up earlier every day regardless of what time it actually happens to be. I was up after only four or five hours sleep. My wife had much the same luck sleeping I did, but her troubles were causes by Glow, and not the tea, which she didn’t drink. This ruined our morning, as everyone was sleep deprived and had a headache.

When we finally got mobilized for lunch, we made a plan to do two things. I’m upgrading my phone to a model running Android, and we were going to go shopping for a new stroller for Glow. We were going to do our typical routine of trying out what we liked at a department store hands on, then going online to get the best deal. Since I had been so busy at work I hadn’t been grocery shopping in a week. We planned get dinner out, then head to the department store. If we could get that done, we would return and go grocery shopping to resupply. We had this plan worked out, but we both crashed and needed a nap in the afternoon after lunch. By the time we woke up, we had to weigh our priorities. Comparison Shopping? Phone reservation? Food tomorrow? Dinner?

None of that was going to happen on an empty stomach while holding Glow in a department store about to close if we didn’t hurry. I volunteered to cook some food we had left, while my wife went for emergency food supplies for tomorrow. When she got back, dinner would be ready and then if there was enough time we could leave to take care of business. Things didn’t work out that way, so my wife had to go out on her own, again, and make the phone reservation while I watched Glow and write this post. The phone came first, because I want to receive it in a timely manner before the Lunar New Year holiday if I am going to be taken out to the countryside and forced to spend three days in absolute boredom with my Korean relatives. Also, it followed two months of patiently waiting for my choice of an anniversary/Christmas/birthday gift, so I had put in my time and deserved to get it taken care of before I changed my mind. Tomorrow she’ll probably do the comparison shopping on her own, or with my mother in law.

We didn’t get much done today, but in a few days time I’ll have something new to play with.

Through the demands of my working hours, and the ceaseless sleep deprivation brought on by caring for an infant in the middle of the night, the situation of separate rooms used by different parents for sleeping has arisen. While during the week I have a very good reason to need all the sleep possible, on Friday and Saturday night the agreement was that I’d take a role in trying to comfort Glow so that she might sleep a longer time. We could split the comforting between both parents, and more easily bear the load. Of course, all this really did was keep us both awake all night whenever Glow demanded attention. We lost several hours of sleep to Glow, and I lost several more compared to when I am normally able to go to bed. I got half the sleep I am used to when I rest in our spare bedroom.

While I could continue this pattern of work weekdays, sleep weekdays, then staying up all night with Glow to help and never rest on the weekend, I think it would increase my chances of burning out on the job tremendously. I’m a week into this schedule and I’m fairly frazzled as it is. Any chance I got to rest on the weekend would be great. The only things I usually do on the weekend are walk and wash the dog, clean the floors, and prepare for my upcoming week. All of that is easier when I have a head full of sleep and don’t have the urge to take a nap all day.

My wife agreed that since I was going to need to prepare for my classes and I was going to clean the house while she was out, I could sleep in the spare room and forgo trying to help her tonight, on one condition. I needed to clean “her way”. In the past I’ve been able to clean on my terms, since I was the one sacrificing my free time to do it. If I wanted to get sleep, I needed to tweak my routine in a few minor ways to meet her Korean cleaning rules. I have to open the windows for a period of time while the vacuum is running. I have to tackle the rooms in a particular sequence to minimize the amount of dander that might be left if Yoshi shakes before his bath. It’s not that I didn’t leave the house in a state that was better than it was when I first started. It’s just that I wasn’t cleaning the approved “Korean Way”, so I had to hear about it far too often.

I have to follow her cleaning rules, otherwise she’ll threaten to do all the cleaning again. It will make the short cleaning ritual I’ve developed into a highly procedural undertaking with twice as many steps for roughly the same results for all intents and purposes. All these hoops just to make my wife feel happy I cleaned it the “Korean way.”* As long as she’s happy, and Glow doesn’t have any more dust allergies, I think I can deal with this annoyance. Sleep is really nice, and staying up all day, then all night, leads me to have nasty headaches. The work has to get done eventually. My wife is still going to be tired either way, because Glow isn’t going to sleep through the night because of hunger, so she needs to be available. She doesn’t win anything other than having terms over how the house is cleaned, which, while annoying, is a minor thing if I get some sleep.

As soon as Glow can actually sleep through the night, my wife and I won’t need to make these sorts of deals. Hopefully then we can give Glow the extra bedroom and go back to sleeping like normal so that neither of us needs to deal with sleep loss. I can’t keep sleeping so poorly and getting up early in the mornings to help out on the weekends. I need a break. Ironically, I’m on “Winter Break” between my semester and I’m working harder than ever.

*(To date, the documented cost of cleaning “The Korean Way” to make my wife happy has cost us 30,000 won on our heating bill AT LEAST this winter. Opening the window in winter is dumb, and wastes all the money we would have saved through increased heating efficiency with our weatherstripping.)

Gloria is a night owl, but eventually with enough luck and the right routine we can usually get her to sleep at a decent hour if we start early enough and keep it consistent. Because of all the birthday celebrations and Skype calling that took place this weekend, she hasn’t been seeing her usual bedtime routine for the past few days. Last night my wife and Glow fought out another night of attrition. Glow won.

I had gone to bed early in our spare room we’ve converted into a bedroom while I am working in the mornings, so I didn’t know my wife was struggling to put her down. Around 4 in the morning my wife admitted defeat, came into where I had been sleeping and told me to take over for her. My wife had done everything she knew how to do and just was at the end of her rope. It’s not always easy to deal with a baby when you just need sleep, but I had a few hours charged in my battery, while my wife was fighting to stay awake.

Luckily for me, I didn’t have much trouble getting her to sleep. Glow wanted to be held for a bit by her dad. When I put her down she and I both fell asleep almost instantly. So rarely do I accomplish something in the baby rearing arena my wife fails to do that I need to make note of it for posterity. Glow would get fussy if she wasn’t in contact with me, which required some awkward positioning, but other than that it was lights out for both of us. My wife got to catch up on some sleep too, thankfully, and was better off today for it. She doesn’t do naps as much as I would like to catch up on her sleep. Koreans do not value sleep in any way I can understand, from the smallest child to the busiest person. People just ignore what their body is telling them far too often.

I did sacrifice some deep sleep alone for some light sleep with my daughter, so I needed a good nap today to power through. I was worried that if I slept too long I’d be as messed up as Glow with all the changes to my sleep schedule. Because of my morning/afternoon schedule this next week, I’ll be back to sleeping alone in the extra bedroom for a bit to keep up with my sleep needs. I am barely functional when I need sleep, and I need to be on my toes because of the chaos of the first day of a new camp next week. The first day of a winter camp is never improved when you have a headache and need a nap like a fussy baby.

Glow loves this toy

Holding a big baby is tiring work, so bought this thing called a “Jumperoo” to allow her to play safely while we watched without needing to hold her the entire time. The seat is suspended by three bungee cords, allowing Glow’s feet to hit the ground. She does a little tap dance to bounce on the seat, strengthening her legs. There are animals, spinners, lights and music, and the fun of bouncing up and down to keep her busy. She goes into happiness overdrive in the seat. She can handle it for ten minutes right now, at most, jumping around and watching the other items light up or move before she gets overwhelmed. The toy is playing some chipper, cheerful music that doesn’t immediately drive you crazy, but will get under your skin the third or fourth time you hear it. Usually when we take a break from the Jumperoo it’s as much for us as it is for her.

My wife found a Korean escrow service that is used by parents in a Korean forum for buying and selling used children’s toys. She had looked into buying a “Jumperoo” from an online store, several times, but was shy about pulling the trigger to get one. She found this website that will hold the money, then when the toy is delivered, the funds get released to the person who shipped the item. It’s like eBay, without that pesky “scamming” issue. Turns out she actually skipped this step and transfered the money directly because the awful Korean “Security” ActiveX bullshit plugins from the bank DO NOT WORK. Either way, we ended up with a kick ass toy.

The toy scared the baby of the previous owner, so it was like new when we bought it. Sweet deal. Now that we know about this online service that moves cheap children’s toys around Korea, we’ll be able to resell this if we put it back up online in good condition and recoup some of the cost. I guess I can tolerate jungle music and elephant sounds for the next few months while Glow plays with this, especially if it means I don’t have to hold her the entire time.

I’ve had three weeks off work because I moved to a University last year. This has been the longest vacation I’ve had in years. The last time I took off this much time from work I had to finish my job contract, then get my job back when I returned to Korea. I’ve never had three weeks on uninterrupted vacation in Korea before. This is partially because if I did have a long vacation I would travel somewhere abroad. I just never had the chance to just relax for such a long time. Vacations didn’t come often in the past, so I needed to exploit every second of unpaid off time I had. This is my first paid vacation at a job ever that wasn’t a ruse by an academy to get free work out of my Korean replacement.

The fact that I have paid vacation means I don’t feel as bad sitting around and spending time with my family not doing anything in particular. It has been great spending uninterrupted time with my daughter for the first time since she was born. It just reminded me how busy I’ve been for the past few months before I got that time off. I had been working so long and so often that I didn’t realize how much time I had been putting in. Next vacation I hope we do get to go somewhere though. I don’t want to make a habit of sitting around the house every few months. The vacation has been good for my stress levels though. It has also given my wife a bit of a break from parenting while I was here too, not that she would admit it. She acts like she has two children to take care of now. Maybe she does.

Now that my vacation is over and I have to go back to work tomorrow I have this “first day of school” bit of jitters going on that I always get after a long vacation. I’ve got a new morning class that is making me extra nervous. I don’t know what possessed me to think signing up for a morning class was a good idea. I simply wanted to avoid working very late like I had been in the past. The only other choice is working very early. My situation at home has changed so that either time works for us, and I wish I had chosen the schedule that lets me sleep in.

I really don’t function well early in the morning. These will be the earliest classes I’ve taught in years, and I remember being brain dead on my feet the last time I was teaching before the sun was up. That was at a school far more forgiving than the one I work at currently. Of course this happens to be the high level class, again, and I always need to be on my toes. Otherwise I might end up with a cluster of bad reviews and be out of a job when my next long paid vacation comes along. Such are the ways of being the lowest seniority man working at a good university. I wouldn’t be happy about losing my job no matter how much time off I might get in the process. Hopefully I’ll be able to correct this scheduling mistake on my part and switch back to the evening schedule before the semester starts again and avoid any catastrophes.

We even set up a second temporary bedroom for me to sleep in for the duration of my morning classes. It’s either that or I develop a polyphasic sleep pattern. I’m sure that once I actually show up to class and get things started I might be able to wake up. If not, I’ll bring some coffee home with me and prepare for Tuesday with what I learned in mind. My schedule this winter isn’t too heavy compared to my nightmare shifts during intensive programs of winters past. The only thing I’m worried about is the time of my morning class being too early. As long as I can stay awake and improve my adult class teaching style for upper level students I’ll consider it a success. If my employers or my students feel differently I’ll just have to deal with it later.

This is the kind of game I could really get behind. (Context) (Side by Side)

Today was spent leisurely gaming. My lovely wife owed me a favor for giving up New Year’s with her family. A friend came over to the house and played two epic rounds of draft Magic: The Gathering. We played to a tie, two rounds split between us. After the game was over, I was invited over to someone else’s house to play Left 4 Dead 2. My zombie streak this vacation continues! While I’m happy to have Left 4 Dead on my PC, since I got it so cheap on STEAM, I don’t think I could handle Left 4 Dead 2 without some upgrades to do it justice. I’m also just too cheap to buy it without a much heavier discount than the sale they are running right now. Call me greedy, but I won’t pay more than twenty bucks for any one game ever again. The difference between me before having a child and now is that I can always wait for a sale.

I liked playing L4D2 split screen on the XBox 360 though. That’s how the game should be played, blasting away with a few buddies on a big screen television. The single player or online modes aren’t nearly as fun because you are the only person in danger. What’s the fun when you can’t accidentally shoot a friend in the face? The game is radically different and far more advanced outing. The addition of melee weapons is the thing I will miss the most when I got back to L4D at home. I was a katana slicing fool most of the game. Lots of large maps, lots of new weapons and new infected. It’s great. Too bad I won’t be playing it for a while. I doubt it’ll be on sale any time soon.

Tomorrow I’ve actually got to buckle down and plan out a few classes for my morning schedule. I tend to get overwhelmed when I have a daily class with adults, so I really want my first week to go as smoothly as possible. Also, I need the class to be on autopilot because it’s very likely I might fall asleep otherwise. I might even try to nail down more than a week’s worth of syllabus for once. We’ve also got to work out the sleeping arrangements for my new morning schedule. I think that our daughter isn’t going to like going to bed four or five hours earlier than normal to let me go to work comfortably.

My mother in law has been looking to start a family tradition on New Year’s for as long as I had been involved with her daughter. Coincidentally, that also gives her an excuse to spend more time with her granddaughter. I’m totally fine with her coming over and hanging out, but for the past few years she has been trying to get my lovely wife an I to go to a church service at midnight for New Year’s eve. There is a family blessing ceremony she wanted us to be there to witness. She then offered to let us sleep over at their house, then cook us breakfast and lunch on New Year’s day. Since we always go over to her house on New Year’s to eat rice cake soup (the traditional meal for New Year’s) we decided we’d finally attend the midnight family blessing ceremony.

Since it’s brutally cold, we got a ride from our brother in law to the church. We wrapped up in warm clothes, then headed to the children’s room of the church. There is a heated floor, a speaker, and a window looking into church. I’m also allowed to read a book in that room, as it is incredibly boring to sit through a Korean religious thing that I can’t follow a word of, or have any interest in, for an entire evening. We arrived an hour early because of my mother in law’s duties greeting people. A few old ladies made silly faces at Glow for quite some time before the whole shindig got started.

One other family with a baby ended up keeping us company during the long ceremony. Since the children’s section is in a soundproof booth, talking is allowed. We had a nice little conversation and generally just watched the children. After the pastor ran 20-30 minutes into the new year, the best quip in the room was, “Man, this ceremony is running long. This is going to be finished before the end of this year, isn’t it?” If we weren’t in the sound proof room my wife would have been thrown out of church for laughing so loud.

At the end of all the music and chanting there was a family blessing as advertised. We had to line up at the front of the church, take off our shoes, then kneel down on the stage. Luckily for us a family member saved us a spot in line and we went up first. They were working through the entire assembled congregation at a quick pace. Two minutes a family tops. Prayer assembly line. We went up on stage and were placed in a line on our knees, facing the cross. The only instruction I got from my wife was that I was supposed to look forward with my eyes closed and look like I was praying.

A guy I didn’t recognize came over and put his hand on our heads. We then had him pushing down on our head while he spouted off Korean prayers very intensely. They do the quick, raspy prayers where they are shooting out so many ideas at once you can barely hear one before the next one is being spoken. He was asking for something for the family and the individuals. The guy was very forceful with his insistences about the coming year. After he was done with our heads, he put BOTH hands on Glow’s head, said something that made her cry, and we were done. We just were blessed in Korean church? Okay then. We got our shoes on, got our stuff organized, and we were whisked away back home. It was…a weird New Year’s Eve.

The reason we went back to our house instead of their’s was because their house isn’t big enough to hold the entire family company. That meant we had to get up extra early on New Year’s Day and go over to their place for lunch. We didn’t get a bit of sleep because Glow’s sleep was disturbed with the late night church service. Truth be told, so was I. What the heck was that guy saying?

We were ragged this morning. We got picked up again and taken over to eat. We had a nice meal with the family, then I went for a nap. At different points in time either Glow, or my lovely wife joined me for the nap. A few hours later we ate a nice lunch/early dinner. I also went out and got some weather stripping for my mother in law’s windows. We put that up for her to save her some cash since she didn’t know about how it could keep her house warm. That earned me huge brownie points with the family. Increased efficiency makes me hot, so I was happy to do it. Eventually we ended up back at home, sleep deprived and ready to start the new year. It was the strangest New Year’s Eve/Day I’ve spent in Korea, but it was good to let other people spend time with Glow, so we’ll probably do it again next year.