January 25, 2004

• Hello hello.

  
  

  So another couple of weeks go by the wayside and January will soon be drawing to a close. It's been just over 3 months since we arrived back in Canada from Korea. It's been a rough ride. But we're still kicking. Our current goals include becoming financially independant again, so that we can move into our own place. Though my wife's parents are great people, and the apartment is great, living with one's inlaws for a prolonged period of time has certain drawbacks. But at the moment, we're only making enough to cover the student loan payments and the minimum payment on the Mastercard bill, so there's still a way to go.

  
  

  Some of the interesting recent happenings have to do with food. I've made a couple of batches of hummus, one of the foods we couldn't get or make in Korea. Hummus and pita is a sublime snack. And on the flip side, we went yesterday evening to a couple of Korean grocery stores. It was an hour each way on the bus, which was a bit of a pain, but we now have kimchi, laver seaweed to go with rice, a Korean pear, and other delicacies. It was both nice and sad to be in the stores -- with all the products being familiar from Korea, it felt like being back there. I think that both of us would much rather be there now than here, so it was a bit painful. But at least we have our little 'fix' for the time being.

  
  

  My job continues to improve, though I'm still not getting enough hours. Thanks to demonstrating my skills I've sort of upgraded myself from person-who-chucks-garbage-into-dumpsters to general handyman. I get to do a lot of finishing work on the houses (plaster repair, some painting and caulking...) as well as some quality control and stuff. At the very least it makes what I'm doing more interesting.

  
  

  My jam session today started out a bit rocky, since there were some loud, dunken, obnoxious people who talked loudly and obnoxiously through the first hour or so. We finally got management to boot them out, except that they refused to leave and it took another 10 minutes to get them out of there. Nothing against them -- they were behaving as would be quite appropriate if we were playing a paid gig at the bar. But we're not playing publicly, we're doing a private jam session, and thereby everyone is supposed to be quiet and attentive. We do permit spectators sometimes, but it's with the understanding that they won't be disruptive to what we're trying to do. However, once they went away the proceedings went ahead pretty well. My three for the week were Jackson C. Frank's Blues Run The Game, my own recent Why Fly, and an acapella take on the traditional Tarry Trousers which all went very well.

  
  

  Another recent milestone was getting all of our photographs from Korea into albums. We had already filled 4 small albums, but this time around we had to deal with the remaining 340 pictures. Yoinks. We didn't have a record of what order the rolls went in, plus the photos within each roll were out of order. Argh. It took many hours of toiling, plus a few reprints to fill in gaps, but it's done. So now eventually I'll do another huge round of scanning and put up around 500 shots from Korea on the website. A big task, to be sure.

  
  

  Anyhow, I have more to say, but this is already longer than it should be. I'll stop for now. It's past time I was in bed anyway. Thanks for reading.

  
  

  Take care
  -Justin-

  • 9:01 pm
  • 6 Comments