::A Geek in Korea::

I was sitting around with Yoshi before I had to go to work. Due to how our schedules work out, my wife was in transit when I got a call from a stranger. I dutifully answered the phone, expecting it to be either be an advertisement, or a wrong number. I was mistaken! It was a caller, asking for me, no less! She even used to polite “teacher” suffix for my name.

First thought: Someone from work was calling me because I had forgotten something like a meeting or my classes had been changed without me being told. We are doing evaluations and grading for the past few months, so something might have slipped my mind.

No, this wasn’t about my current job. This woman went on to explain that I used to teach her daughter at my first school which is nearly six years ago! This woman said, “Oh, my daughter loved your class.” I have no memory of students that drop out of my classes from last month, let alone a single child in a school of a few hundred from five years ago.

It seems that a woman I last ran into a few years ago that had a student in one of my kindergarten classes at another school had passed on my phone number to this complete stranger. She claims I’ve met her before, and that since I’ve taught her daughter I must remember her. I don’t have a clue who she might be.

Anyway, after she showered me with praise, she quickly proposed a series of classes that would be for her daughter later in the evening. My schedule is completely packed with legel evening classes at a school, and I don’t just arrange things with strangers that “know someone I used to know”.  She wanted classes for a speech contest for her daughter. I’ve coached a few students and made tapes as favors for friends that usually have positive results for the people involved, but this is “big time favor country”, not “called by stranger” land.

I was getting the wiggins from the creepy false praise. Eventually I pulled a move worthy of a superstar, I told them to contact my “manager” AKA, my wife, to see if there was something worth discussing. It was more of a “polite way to get off the phone without saying ‘No’ directly”. This is a skill I’ve learned while navigating the Korean rules of etiquette that used to infuriate me. Now I’m using it to deal with mothers that used to do the same thing to me. The tables have turned.

Anyway, I gave a quick rundown to the wife about the situation, and she called me back to report that she felt the same way. When asked to describe me to make sure I had met her before, the woman told my wife I was “Australian, Handsome, and Homesick.” No, maybe, and never that I recall.

My wife dealt with the the lady and basically explained that the class wasn’t going to be possible. I was getting messages begging for my time. It’s not often someone calls and offers money that you turn down, but she was that forceful about it that made it seem very “strings attached”. My wife managed to get across that I wasn’t interested far better than I could.

I don’t know what kind of impression I make on people when I teach. People seem to think they remember me five years after I taught their students, and that I’m worth hassling into a class I’m not interested in teaching. It’s kind of flattering, but scary at the same time.

I don’t like old student’s mothers handing out my phone number to people I don’t know. It’s also a testament to how interconnected the English community is in the city. One bad recommendation along the way can wreck contacts made through the grapevine, even if it’s unwanted. I’ll just do my job the best I can and try to steer clear of the people that think can win me over with false praise and lies.

I needed to go shopping to pick up a few odds and ends for the house. I had carried my backpack, because I’m eco-friendly like that, and I didn’t want a plastic bag. The only annoying part about bringing a backpack for shopping is that you have to put it in a locker before entering the grocery store.When I arrived at the store, there were no lockers. I went at “prime” shopping time, so I wasn’t surprised that this would occur. While I was waiting for a locker, a fight broke out in the store.

Several women were shouting, pushing, and being all rude to each other just inside the store, but outside of the locker area. There were dropped food items, people calling each other bad words in Korean, women shouting at each other in a very “Jerry Springer” manner. (Well, maybe not exactly.)

From what my limited vocabulary could gather, one woman was angry at the younger ladies about something they had said. There was another older woman pushing the angry lady away from the younger ladies, who were cursing and itching to fight the angry woman. I think there might have been something involving the angry woman’s son and perhaps the younger ladies boyfriend. Not sure if it was the same person, or if that was just a tangent to what they were angry about.

Anyway, with all the tussling and fighting getting everyone’s attention, no one was leaving the store. They were in front of the door, so while I had a great view of the action, no one was leaving for me to get their locker. I had no choice but to sit around and watch the fight. I wasn’t alone. There were probably about 10 employees of the store that had poked their heads out from various places to watch these people yell and push. No one was saying or doing anything, of course, but they did have a shocked look of concern on their faces that said, “Wow, I hope someone else deals with this soon.”

Eventually there were enough people backed up trying to leave the store that the greeter to the store sort of moved the fight over to one side of the doorway. People left the store, and I got my locker. I walked through the store laughing as there were way too many people casually browsing for fruit that just happened to be in earshot of the fight. No one had their camera phone out recording the fight, but I’ll just caulk that up to Youtube being lesser known here. People love to share their condemnation of the fight without actually doing anything about the scene.

By the time I had bought my items and gone back to retrieve my bag, the fight was over. I’ll never know who won, but at least it was an interesting trip to the store.

One of my long standing issues with moving to Linux was trying to find a suitable video conversion application for my Cowon D2. It had to churn out suitable files and let me transfer them without booting into Windows. I tried, and failed, many times to find a solution to this problem, and was content to just boot Windows from time to time.

My second thought was to try virtualization, running Windows inside Linux. This wouldn’t force me to reboot, but I’d have to get my Cowon D2 working with virtualization software. This wasn’t any easier to configure and I’d still have to convert files in Windows.

Not long ago, it seems that Iriviter became a Java application. Since it is multiplatform, it’s easy to run. I set it up and had it convert a video. I was excited to get it working, and send an email to the creator of the program thanking him for his work to make it easier to use. Sadly, this is before I opened one of the converted files. The audio for one of the files I converted was broken and sounded horrible. Back to the trenches.

I decided to try out Avidemux once again. Since I am not a codec/encoding junkie, I don’t know all the proper settings to get it working. I went to the iAudophile forums, hoping to see if there were any tutorials to get it working. I didn’t find anything particularly helpful, but a thread with some encoding snobbery mentioned that the D2 couldn’t handle “B-Frames“. I don’t know what B-frames are, but decided to poke around to see if that might have been the source of my problems. I find out that Avidemux had settings for B-frames. I turned off, unchecked, and lowered all the settings I could for everything I could find. I encoded a video and crossed my fingers.

Success! With blind luck I happened to have stumbled upon what was keeping Avidemux from encoding proper videos. Video settings are as follows:

In the main menu, select video and set it to Xvid. In the “Configure” menu, in the Motion & Misc tab, uncheck BHVQ and lower “Number of B-Frames” to zero. In the Quantization tab, I’ve been moving the “Type” to “MPEG” and lowering the B-frame quantizer settings to zero as well. I haven’t done exhaustive testing to see which of these settings do what. In filters, I add a resize to 320×240, and possibly black bars to keep the ratio correct and from looking odd. I don’t touch anything else. Audio is set to “copy”, and a save the output as an .avi file.

These settings work for me. I’m just a monkey pushing at buttons that get a desired result. I’ve successfully transcoded Xvid files with these settings to watch on my D2 with no problems. There is no “batch” setting with Avidemux, so I have to babysit the process to fill up my player. This isn’t idea, but it’s a start. Hopefully I’ll figure out what is causing my iriviter problems so that I can just cue up a lot of videos and not worry about B-frames and quantization, whatever it is.

In an odd twist, my current game of the week happens to be a Linux friendly old school style deathmatch FPS game. Nexuiz brings back the glory days of college LAN Quake 2 deathmatch sessions for me. Back then, I had a ton of friends that were heavily into FPS games, shooting each other from room to room in the dorm. I played Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake 2 and 3, but dropped out of the FPS scene after Half-Life became popular.

For whatever reason, realistic shooting games never appealed to me very much. I like my violence cartoon-like and over the top. Nexuiz’s creators have gone out of their way to recreate this exact style of FPS, and I’ve been loving every minute of it. Currently I’m working my way through the Campaign mode. There are Bots that are fairly decent, and different winning scenarios. One of the reasons I don’t play modern FPS games is that I burn out on the scenarios extremely quickly. Nexuiz’s campaign mode is a different game style each time you play.

The level design and look of the game is extremely polished. This could easily be a commercial game from a few years ago. It supports all the beautiful goodies that come from advanced video cards, but runs fine and looks great without it too. I’ve got my effects shiny and showy, but I’m still running at a constant 60+ frames per second.

I don’t play shooters online (I’m a LAN only kind of guy), so I can’t comment about the community. The bots are keeping me entertained, and the campaign mode is extremely challenging and different. The weapons and level design are extremely good.

I’ve been up late into the night blasting opponents for a few days, and I can’t believe this is a product that is free for all. It’s even in the Ubuntu repositories for easy installation! Search for Nexuiz and give it a try. For those of you that think running Linux means nothing to play, this game is more than worth checking out if you love classic deathmatch like I do.

Koreans have a penchant for wearing shirts emblazoned with gibberish:

This sort of thing is common in a store selling cheap clothing. It’s got a load of English. Who cares if it makes no sense as long as it has a bootleg Mickey Mouse?

This is also common. My students wearing a shirt that makes absolutely no sense, but is funny at the same time. I asked her if she knew what “foppery” was. Of course she had no clue. I really do try my best with the foppery, but I guess I wasn’t bringing enough for her satisfaction.
My personal best sighting for stupid T-shirts will probably always be the couple wearing matching shirts that say “He (She) loves the cock”. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to beat that, unless I actually get a picture next time. Damn my lack of a telephoto lens on my camera phone. (LG, Samsung, are you listening?)

My coworker, who happens to be named Paul, had a very strange T-shirt experience in class. A girl was wearing a shirt that said, “I’m sorry Paul, I’ll never make that mistake again” in large bold letters. It’s the only thing on the entire shirt.

He asked her if she was wearing that shirt for him. The girl had no clue what it meant. She said her mother had bought it for her as a gift. Paul, of course, wanted to know where to get another one…for his girlfriend. I wanted to know if they could be personalized so I could get another one for myself. I’d say the coincidence of a girl wearing that shirt in his class is astronomical.

My wife was walking with a coworker after she left her school. My wife mentioned she wanted to buy some clothes for summer, and her coworker wondered why she didn’t just do it then, since she was downtown in the cheapest area to shop for fashion. My wife declined the chance to go shopping, since her proof reader wasn’t available. My wife explained to her coworker about the strange things that people have on their shirts. Her coworker was amazed to hear about the bad shirts. Slowly the message is getting out.

Over the course of my formal education, I’ve taken a large number of geology classes for someone  that only has a passing interest in the subject. This occasionally has come in handy in class, but today I was struggling to remember some of the basics I learned long ago.

As a child, my dream job, when pushed, was to be a spelunker. I adored caving. I forced my family to take me to caves whenever possible. Sometime in elementary school, my father and I even spent the night in a cave for a scout retreat. I think I liked caves because it was technically in nature but it wasn’t hot and unpleasant. Since caves have constant temperatures, it was like “air conditioned nature”. The cave we stayed the night in even had a cafeteria and cola machine! Now that’s nature!

Sometime in high school, perhaps my freshmen year when I had to actually learn geology, I lost interest in caves. Perhaps it was learning all the different aspects of geology unrelated to caves that bored me. Perhaps it was my meat head geology teacher, who happened to be the football coach of the high school. He was more interested in recruiting fat guys from class than teaching about geology at 8 am.

Later though, that passing familiarity with geology and caving from my younger years came in handy. It turns out that it saved me in my senior year of college. I turned it into my “thematic sequence” in college. A “thematic sequence” is a series of courses not related to your major that you had to take anyway to graduate college. You could choose any three related courses and take them in order.

I had a series of requirements to fill that I had to do in a year that needed to built on each other. During my Junior year, I had taken a joke science class called, “Geography of US National Parks.” I took this with a friend. When arranging my classes senior year, I realized, “Crap! I need a thematic sequence!” Since I needed three classes that needed to be taken in order, I ended up taking two more geology classes. I took a “Water and Society” course, and something else that escapes my memory. As dull as those other two classes were, the third class must have been completely boring to have slipped my mind.

Today I had to muster up all my remaining geology know how to introduce “minerals” to my students. My students knew a surprising amount of vocabulary thanks to the Pokemon game naming scheme (They use Gems for versions). Who says video games don’t teach?

We had to make a list of different minerals and their properties. It was straight out of one of my old high school lessons, except we don’t have Bunsen burners in class threatening to burn your face off. We had a list of about twenty different minerals and rocks, and I think I explained metamorphic and sedimentary rock formation correctly.

The students seemed to understand, except for one girl that thought wood and cement were actually rocks. She also was sitting on the floor because her desk wasn’t where it usually was and she refused to sit next to a boy instead, so perhaps she’s just a bit “off”.

I’ve been running Linux full time for a few weeks now. I appreciate the ease at which upgrading and getting a new system up to speed. When I upgraded from Edgy Eft (6.10) to Feisty Fawn (7.04), I was literally done upgrading in 5 clicks. That’s awesome.

I had been happily running Feisty Fawn with absolutely no problems since the release, but ran into a snag today.  I had been watching a video on Google, but when I went to play an .avi file on my machine locally, I got no sound. Not only that, but my media players all choked when playing anything. Crash, force quit. They weren’t running due to some error with ALSA, which controls the sound in Linux (as to my understanding).

Since I have NO ability to troubleshoot Linux, I searched the web for the error. I tried some of the fixes offered, but no luck. My sound was shot. Conflict? Crashed Daemon? Who knows. I decided to simply download the Feisty Fawn installation CD and give it a fresh go. That’d probably fix whatever conflict it was and give me sound again. Or so I hoped at least.

The file finished downloading in a few minutes (I love my connection), and I burned the CD while I moved some files over to my Windows Partition to back them up. I wasn’t losing anything but some Gnome customization much so the reinstall was more of an annoyance than anything else. I set up the reinstall, then went to take a shower and get ready for work.

The install went smoothly, and I was back up to speed running what I usually do in under 3 hours. That’s fairly impressive. I even installed Innotek Virtual Box without a hitch, which lets me run Windows XP inside of Linux. That’s UBER-Geek territory right there. An OS inside another OS.

I’m doing this so I don’t have to bother trying to get Korean websites to play friendly with Linux. I simply let my wife run Internet Explorer in the virtual Windows XP. She gets Korean support, a Korean browser, and I have nothing to worry about. Even if she gets a virus or something, I can simply wipe the installation back to it was before the virtual OS was ever used. It’s not a “real” install. It’s contained in a file that is easy to revert and control. It’s basically the perfect for what we need, and runs really fast. You can’t break it, and it works as advertised. It’s Windows XP in a box.

The only thing it can’t do at the moment, is give me full USB support. I just can’t get my USB devices working with it, though people claim this is possible. Some digging will be needed to get it working properly. If I can get the USB to work like I need, I’ll be completely rid of any reason to reboot into Windows XP proper. I’ll just install the applications I need in the virtual OS and work with them from there. That’d be pretty damn cool. I can’t believe that it’s so simple to get the Windows XP to run inside of Linux.

Other than the fresh reinstall, I’m very impressed with Feisty Fawn. I played around with Beryl and found it superior to Compiz.  Compiz crashed my windows system, Beryl was cool, but not all that useful for how I work with my computer at the moment. Now that they’ll re-merge, I’ll keep my eye on them.

I’ll stick with good old 2-D Gnome for a while till they get some more features. I’d have been ALL over these a few years ago, but “shiny” OSes don’t really excite me that much any more. Just give me something useful to write and surf with. I’m not that picky.

Anyway, I’m still trying my luck at Linux despite the snag, and I’ll keep at it and hope I don’t run into another similar problem. I’m getting more comfortable with everything, and there are so many unique and useful features I’ve learned to use in Linux that’d it’d be a pain to go back to vanilla Windows after all of this.

I have two hobbies which I deeply enjoy. I love to read, and I love to write. 99% of the time, I’m writing something on this website if I am writing something at all. I get into a mode where I sit down to write, and things simply “happen” to make this website get updated no matter the time it takes. It can be a short trip, or a long haul. Very little of my writing is done away from the computer, simply because writing things twice (once on a piece of paper, once again for the web) doesn’t make them available for others to read, and ultimately writing is meant to be shared, or it’s wasted.

What can happen on occasion is that I’ll be struck with an absolutely wonderful idea, and have no where to take note of it. This is always a regretful crime. I spend a lot of time trying to think of something to write on a daily basis. Whenever inspiration strikes me, I’d like to have a method to capture my idea so I can best put it to use later. It’s better to write down ten bad ideas and one good one than let that good idea slip away forever.

This means carrying a notepad and pen around with me whenever I go out of the house for extended periods of time. I’m not in the practice of doing this, but I think it could help my writing. Today I went shopping for a notepad so I could have something to jot down quick notes, or longer essays if the mood ever strikes me.

I have a terrible habit of looking at very nicely designed notebooks, picking one out, purchasing it, and then never writing it it. For some reason the first few pages of a notebook are the hardest for me to write on. They somehow “set the tone ” for the rest of the pages that follow.  If I use a notebook for mindless scribbles while I talk to chatty adult students, I can’t use it for my personal notes. If I use it for reflective purposes, I can’t draw something humorous or pencil in a phone number. Everything has to be “in it’s right place” for some reason.

Perhaps this mirrors my usage of my website. You can see the nicely divided columns and categories my writing falls into when I write on the web. I can expand the scope of my website from time to time by writing about something new that becomes a common in later posts, but usually I stick to the same few topics for posts on the main page.

The forums I frequent, or the posts I make via personal message are completely different in tone at times. I don’t post those sorts of messages on the main page because I don’t find them conducive to the environment I want to foster here. I’m free to express myself how I want, it’s just that where I choose to express myself isn’t the same

Just like in my notebook, certain things don’t “go” there. I know what it is for, but still, just breaking down and writing on those first few pages are still tough for me. Today I went to the store and found a nice notebook for my new bag. It fits perfectly in the pocket, as if it was made for my bag. I’ve also got a pen ready. Walking home from the store, I immediately opened up the notebook as I waited for the subway to arrive and wrote:

This notebook is for sudden inspiration. Inspiration can strike anywhere. The last thing you want is to be hit by a great idea without a pen or a piece of paper.

Just WRITE!

 I think that set the tone for the rest of the pages rather nicely.

Yoshi, our dog, has recently gotten his food switched. He was on a veterinary recommended diet of the most expensive (shock!) food available. This was for a skin allergy that he used to have from excess protein in some of his old food. We moved him to a protein free special formula that helped clear up his skin.

He was, however, developing an ear allergy. We don’t know what that is from, so we talked to a vet at a local pet store. His recommendation was to cut off the non-protein snacks for a while and give him a different food. This has duck and potatoes, but is still supposed to be good for his allergy as well. It’s slightly cheaper too.

When we switched food, I didn’t adjust the food amounts properly. His old food was a large round ball, which looked like a cheese puff. This new food is a flattened disc like shape, more like a nilla wafer. (Why do I describe dog food like processed food I ate as a child? That’s disturbing.) I was supposed to give “one to one and a half” cups of one of this new food. I kept over feeding Yoshi for the first week.

As a result, Yoshi’s been dropping poo bombs that are just incredibly huge and stinky all the time. He was like clockwork on his last diet, once a day, every day during our walk in the late morning. Now he’s squeezing them off twice or three times a day. Worse yet, he’s trying to eat them if we don’t watch and clean it up. Ew.

We finally sorted out that his problem was his over feeding. We significantly reduced his meal today, and he’s back to a more normal behavior. Now, unfortunately, he’s developed gas. He used to occasionally silently gas the room while he was on my lap. Now he’s actually developed a sound to accompany it. He’ll drop his ears and look up with a grin as he leaves the room after doing his damage. Both my wife on the couch and I have been gassed in this manner this evening. You don’t realize what’s happened until it’s far too late.

I was the undisputed champion in the household until Yoshi’s little uprising today. At least I gave a warning that let all women and children run to safety. Think of it like an air siren. Now I mark the arrival of him into a room like a challenger to my olfactory supremacy.

Whoever wins, my wife’s nose loses.

One of the worst things about going out shopping downtown in Korea is the whole feeling of being entirely too old for that scene. My wife and I went shopping for clothes for me today. We went because even I was tired of wearing the same thing every day.

Because I am not a diminutive Asian man, finding pants in my size in the city is something of a pain. We went downtown because that’s where it’s easiest to get nice, cheap pants that fit me. I’m lucky. I only fall slightly beyond the bell curve to the “large” Asian size. I’m about 5 cm too big in any direction you measure me for Asian clothes. Since sizes vary wildly even in the same measurements, I sometimes get lucky and find stuff that “fits”.  Eventually you get used to the snug fit. When I shop for clothes, jeans are only “just” to tight, and sleeves are only “just” so short.

We found some American brand clothes. Actual American stuff brought over from the States fits me fine just as it would if I shopped there. It’s just that it’s incredibly expensive. People pay a premium for wearing the same fashions as Americans. My wife happened upon a second hand shop that had some clothes the we decided to check out as a last ditch chance to save some money before we committed to an imported outfit in my size.

This was the first time I’ve ever been in a guchae (second hand) fashion store in Korea. I didn’t even know they existed. Everything led me to believe that people just tossed clothes outside in the apartment clothes bin when things became unfashionable.

These aren’t “Goodwill” style stores, despite everything being previously owned. This is more for upscale brands that might be a few seasons out of fashion that people don’t wear anymore. There was a lot of stuff that was still wearable for me, if it had been in my size.

We ended up getting pants, two shirts, and a nice, worn in leather bag me me (my wife calls it a purse) for the price of one pair of American imported jeans. It was actually me demanding the bag, despite the fact it cost as much as the rest of the clothes. She had spent four times the amount for a similar bag as a gift for her bother, and this wasn’t pre-worn and perfectly beat up. I love my man-purse. That’s me diving off the last vestige of American fashion and actually adopting Korean style. I’ll be wearing pink in no time.

What I won’t do, no matter what, is adopt the “Couple Fashion” we saw to a disturbing degree today. My wife and I were looking for a place to eat. We stopped outside a restaurant and looked in the window. As I was busy peering, my wife started to turn in a circle. She sort of elbowed me and said, “What’s going on? Why is everyone dressed like that?”

I stopped drooling in the window to realize she was right. Every single couple in a 20 meter radius was wearing matching clothing. Six or seven couples, all together with their “pair”, walking around hand in hand. Matching shirts, similar pants or bottoms. It’s like all the matching couples had come downtown together and were saying, “We’re the closest couple! Look at us! We even dress alike!” Way creepy.

Nothing screams, “We’re pathetic!” to me more than matching outfits. One couple set could have used a proof reader too. They had matching shirts varied by gender that said, “He (She) loves the Cock”. If only I had a picture! What a terrible outfit, particularly for the man, “loving Cock”.

Anyway, after a whole seven hours of shopping (!) we returned home via the subway. It was a very tiring day, but my wife said she was proud of me. She said this is the first time she ever remembers going shopping with me all day where I never complained and tried everything on. Even I get sick of my clothes eventually.

My wife got invited to one of the last weddings in her old circle of college friends. The woman in question happened to have caught dropped to bouquet at our wedding. The statue of limitations on Korean bouquets is supposed to be a six month turn around from catching the flowers to getting married yourself, otherwise you are doomed to years of spinsterhood. This woman proved that old superstition wrong and got married.

Since I didn’t know her, I was technically permitted to skip this wedding. It was in Seoul, and at the unreasonably early hour of 11am. Who gets married at 11am? (I’ve been alerted I have a college friend that got married at 9am! That’s crazy!) That meant we needed to get up and catch the bus they provided at 8am! Still, they provided the bus and even gave us easy to eat snacks for the ride.

My wife and I both were very tired on the ride to the wedding. The bus got us to the wedding hall an hour early due to light traffic. We got our pictures taken, then went upstairs to the hall for the ceremony.

Usual Korean weddings are short and tacky. This one took itself seriously and wasn’t that fun. They had a bubble machine, but it was turned off for most of the ceremony. The pastor talked for 30 minutes about love and duty. The couple exchanged vows. People sang, we had to “pray”. It was entirely too much like a real wedding. It might have been my stomach talking though.We eventually met up with one of my wife’s other college friends. They posed for pictures, then we ate at the wedding hall together.

Just to get competitive about it, The food wasn’t as good as ours, but the hall was better decorated. They lacked the gaudy “Neon Pink and Green heart” color scheme of our wedding hall and went for the “understated white with real flowers and candles” look. We had a professional Opera singer at our wedding, so their amateur singers still couldn’t compare. Our food was also a buffet, and much more delicious. Our catering room was bigger too.

After the meal, my wife and her friend chatted about English education for her daughter. Then we passed out again due to the heat on the bus on the ride home back to the apartment. We got back to the apartment in mid-afternoon, which was better since we left early, but we simply passed out again and slept the rest of the day. I’m glad we “got it done” and got back as soon as possible. Had the wedding been later, I’d probably been grouchy about giving up my Saturday to go to a wedding of someone I didn’t know.

This might be the last wedding I’ll have to go to for a while. All my wife’s friends are married now, and none of our relatives will be getting married either. We have one friend in queue, and then we are done. We expect one more person that attended our wedding to get married this year. Looks like our wedding debts have finally been paid off.