The one where I mention Skype

The ROTC boys took me out to dinner our last day of the course.  Naturally, I chose dalkgalbi.  Everyone loves dalkgalbi, especially me!  Afterwards, we had a drink at some underground bar near the restaurant, but I was tired and went home after an hour.  However, it was great to be surrounded by young people!

Christmas was rather lonely; I stayed home and watched a couple movies.  The planned buffet event fell apart with only one other co-worker showing up at the Hilton Hotel's Christmas buffet.  It was a pretty bad dinner.  Nothing tasted good, plus it cost me $40.  Merry Christmas, eh? LOL  I did get to Skype two of my sisters.  It was late Christmas night for me, but their Christmas morning was just warming up.  With Skype I can imagine that I'm actually in their houses.  It feels comforting.

The winter re-sit class is going well.  I have a fantastic class of eager beavers and most of them are quite willing to participate in activities without any coaxing.

The one where I spent 40 bucks for a bad dinner

Ah, the goosey-goon, or "Salvation Army" as they say in English.  Some will be surprised to learn that in 1979 from Thanksgiving to December 23, I was a Salvation Army bell ringer in Brooklyn and Manhattan.  I lived in Queens, and every day the Captain took me, Wes Hughes, and Robert Propert to our various bell ringing sites.  My favorite was... well, I hated New York, so there was no fave, but when we were at the Brooklyn courthouse, there was a restroom handy, so I liked being there the most, I suppose.  Some stories to tell about that little "holiday".

Christmas has come and pretty much gone.  I didn't do all that much today.  I had planned to go to the Christmas buffet at the Hilton.  So I did, mainly because I felt obliged, but I was also feeling lonely; however, after I got there, I learned that hardly anyone was coming!  Drinking parties all over town, it seems, were keeping folks away.  I can't drink much anymore, really, despite the big talk LOL, so that doesn't appeal to me.   Drinking makes me ill, really uncomfortably ill.  I hate felling sick.  Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yeah, I had dinner with Doug and his girlfriend at the buffet.  I'm not going to recommend the Hilton Hotel buffet, and I'm not ever going to go back, but I'm not going to come right out and say it was a god awful waste of $40.  Well, yes, I am.  It was exactly that. Let's be honest! They had turkey, and lots of other stuff, so I certainly got full.  It just wasn't very good considering how much it cost.  Maybe they should learn how to make any kind of pie, though.  That would help a little.  Anything besides those horrible sugar cakes they like so much. Yuck.

That's my tree in the picture.  It looks pretty in real life, but in this photo it looks like crap!  No presents, though.  :(

Merry Christmas anyway to one and all.  I hope you have a great day and live to see the new year! LOL

The one where I show off my mouse

Can you guess which one is the new mouse?  The nice thing about the new mouse is that it has no wheel.  You do all the scrolling and page turning by running your fingers along the surface.   Apple made something that was not only useful but is truly intuitive... for once!

Yesterday morning at 8 AM we had a foreigner faculty meeting to discuss new books and how the courses might be set up for next semester.  Though there were some important matters, some stuff could not be addressed since the department hasn't created the master schedule for next semester yet, and we don't know how many of the 20 new teachers are actually going to show up in February.

I am interviewing the last of my students today, then a makeup listening test, and then I will have everything I need to finish the raw grading.  I downloaded a PDF from the internet that explains how to do Excel spreadsheets.  I asked for help at the uni, but nobody understood what I wanted, so I'll persevere and do it myself.  We all have exactly the same 5 categories to include in our grading.  I have all the raw scores notated for each of the 5 categories and just need to insert equations for the weight of each category so Excel can pop out the magic number at the end.  Should be simple, but a template would have been nice to speed things up.  My office computer has Vista Home Basic, and I don't have Excel on it$  The university system is in Korean, and Home Basic doesn't do multiple languages (and can't be forced to), so uploading the uni system spreadsheet to my office computer is impossible. I will have to use the head office computers.  I have been a nervous wreck this week worrying about missing deadlines, forgetting to do things (which I have done already), figuring out how to organize the portfolio they started making us do, recording grades correctly, entering them into the system, and finishing up interview testing.  I have had a continual headache and stomachache for over five days now.  Some of the stuff is absolutely stupid, though, considering we teach conversation courses.  These should be pass/fail, since there is no valid way to test whether a student has actually learned to converse better having attended class for 1,300 minutes (I'm being generous here!).  We basically grade learners on how well they speak in general, not on whether they have improved over the semester.  Indeed, how can we know whether they have improved since it takes a while to figure out their level of competence in the first place?  Some students tank the placement test to ensure a high grade.  Pass/Fail is the only fair way to construct these conversation courses.  Some teachers give their learners even LESS instruction time since they have two weeks of midterms and two weeks (or more) of finals!  So the learners sit in a class of 25 for 1,100 -1,300 minutes over the course of 16 weeks, which means IF each student gets an equal amount of attention, 4 minutes each class, he gets 50 minutes or so of the teacher's instructive attention over the course of 16 weeks.  And then we have to assign a letter grade to him.  Beyond the pale, if you ask me.  If someone can rationally defend the current grading scheme, I'd love to hear it.  I think it is so unfair considering the subject we teach as to be borderline unethical.

The one where I'm not cooking with gas

The other day my landlady came by to see what I was whinging about regarding the city gas service to my apartment.  I told her the gas wasn't flowing regularly, smoothly, through the line.  She called the Rinnai A/S (service department) who promptly concluded that the gas range was too old and needed replacement at her expense.  She seemed to think that was reasonable and ordered a new range (top).  I thought that since she was being so gullible, I might try to convince her that foreigners like ovens and maybe she should buy a new oven for me instead.  No go.  But it was worth a try.  So the service guy shows up with the new range top, and I show him how the gas is behaving, so he gets on the phone to tell his office that it's not a problem with the range.

This is the guy in my kitchen calling his office.
(Yes, I take photos of all service people who come to my house.  I don't know why exactly, but there it is! -- Who are you calling insane? LOL)

So he told me that it's the gas meter that is obviously malfunctioning, and he'll have the landlady call for an appointment with the city gas company.  Voila!  I now have to be home supposedly at 3 PM Monday, but I know that as soon as I make a quick 9 AM trip to the university, I'll get a phone call from the gas guys asking where I am.  If I stay home all day, they won't show up until 5 PM.  It's a subsection of Murphy's Law called the Korean Clause.

I've done some cooking!  Take a look:

This is a batch of corn bread cooked in a caste iron pot in my toaster oven (hence the uneven browning).  I like to put hot milk in it and eat it like a cereal for breakfast.  It's a good batch.

This is a meat pie I made with chicken, potatoes, and fried onion inside.  The pastry turned out really nice, but I had to camp in front of the toaster oven most of the time to make sure it didn't burn!  *sigh*  I wish the landlady would've agreed to a real oven.  She'll let me buy one and install it at my own expense, but that would be a huge hassle come time to move next time.  However, if I don't plan on moving, what's the big deal, Michael?  Just do it!  Do it! Do it now!  Yeah, that's what I thought, you wuss.
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Hey Grandpa!  What's fer supper?

(I know this gets re-posted automatically over on Facebook, but it doesn't format very nicely... sorry for that, but nothing I can do about it.)