The movers just left
Sunday 26 November 2006 @ 7:46 pm

Apparently I’d accumulated a lot more stuff over here than I realized. The movers just picked up all my things except for my clothes, baggage, and the laptop. They’re going to be coming by tomorrow to pick up the rest, leaving me with essentially one bag to camp out of for the next couple weeks. It was very difficult watching my friends the TV and XBOX get packed up for their second trip across the Pacific. Good luck guys!

It’s one of those drizzly, rainy days over here, just wet enough to keep me from wanting to go outside. Unfortunately I don’t really have a choice in the matter, I have a big pile of Christmas gifts that need to be mailed, not to mention some out processing stuff to take care of. It never ceases to amaze me how much paperwork the Air Force manages to generate when you leave an assignment. Our mortgage closing was more streamlined than this, and that thing had like forty pages to it. Oh well, it’s for a good cause.

Now I’ve just got to figure out how to get all this stuff down to the post office ..





Space Water
Wednesday 22 November 2006 @ 4:01 am

I thought this was kind of cool .. I guess this is what astronauts do when they are floating around in space with nothing more important going on.





Boo at the Zoo
Friday 10 November 2006 @ 12:38 am
Boo at the Zoo
 
 

I uploaded some pictures Riki took of the boys trip to “Boo at the Zoo” down in Little Rock just before Halloween. I’ve never actually been to this for one reason or another but it certainly does look like a lot of fun. I couldn’t help but laugh at some of these pictures .. my boys certainly do know how to ham it up.

It’s getting positively cold over here now, which is a good thing as it means it’s almost time to go. We’re going to be playing war games again over here soon. I guess Korea had to get in it’s last parting shot on me before I escape. I think I’m going to go Christmas shopping next weekend if I’m able. We’re supposed to be having a Thanksgiving dinner thing a couple weeks from now, which should be nice. I’ve also been having “going away” parties every weekend, which is really just another excuse to go languish away in the bars down town. But hey, I can do that. I’ve got to enjoy my little alternate reality I have here while I still can!





Something I noticed about Korea
Wednesday 1 November 2006 @ 9:43 pm

I was standing outside the other day, just looking around as I do sometimes, and something hit me that I had never noticed before. Nothing particularly unusual was going on at the time, it was just another typical Korean autumn day. Which is to say a hazy but clear sky, no wind, and fairly chilly. And that’s when I realized I haven’t seen a thunderstorm all year. Not one bolt of lightning, nothing. I started thinking about it some more and realized it’s very rarely even windy here. When it rains, which it does far less frequently than I thought it would, it’s usually big fat drops coming straight down from a grey sky, followed by a day or so of drizzle and fog. After that we’ll have another month of cloudless hazy days.

Being from the Midwest, I’m accustomed to big fat thunderstorms on a regular basis. I think we literally had one every other day most of the summer one year when I was living back at Whiteman. You also never see the ever present haze you have over here. I’m always startled by how close certain things on the horizon are when the sky clears up as it does form time to time. I’ll never forget how huge the sky was down in Texas, it felt like you could almost see past the horizon at times. Even the sunsets are different here. American sunsets have that classic defined look to them, a blaze of colors followed by a fade off to the deep purple of night. Korean sunsets are huge and soft and take over the entire sky, again I assume due to the haze. They invoke a different feeling.

It’s interesting, because you can draw a lot of parallels between the Korean people and the Korean weather when you actually start to look at it. I wonder how much of an effect the weather has on a culture? I’ll say this much, it certainly has an effect on me. I realized that these sorts of things are a major contributor to feeling like a visitor. It’s just foreign for lack of a better word. Odd stuff that you would never think of until you find yourself thinking of it.