As the World Turns

Current health
I'm okay. My system seems to have been adjusting to all the changes I've put it through. I can read normally again, and I don't feel like I'm about to have a stroke every time I go to sleep at night (part of that was probably stress and self-induced symptoms, I assume). Now, I feel good. Hopefully, I'm out of the troubled waters for now.

The job
It's actually better than when I started. There is massive turn-over here, which is stressful in its own way, but for the most part, things are generally stable. The students like me ("love me", according to reports from the parents), and the parents are constantly asking why I'm not teaching more of the classes because they'd rather have the "star" of the Academy teaching their students than random Korean teachers. That feels pretty good to hear, but at the same time I'm not sure I'd want the workload that would entail if they did add all those kids to my schedule.

I generally like the people I work with. There was one woman working here was kind of annoying, with one of those abrupt attitudes that really didn't seem appropraite most of the time. The kids used to complain to me about her (she was teaching science), and I knew she wasn't getting along well with her subject matter. They let her go yesterday, so she's no longer with us. Supposedly, someone else will replace her soon. That seems to happen a lot. Sometimes, it's justified. Other times, well, let's just say that I'm not qualified to make such judgments. But the other teachers and my supervisor are pretty cool. I like most of them, and even though we don't have long, drawn out conversations, I think we get along just great. We lost one teacher I really liked; she taught mainly the Toefl classes (English second language program). I got the impression she wasn't happy here, so I don't know if she left on her own or if it was a decision of management. Either way, she left a few days ago and asked if she could call me on my cell phone, so I gave her my number. I liked her. I hope she does well wherever she ends up going. She was somewhat in tears most of the other day, so it's sad to see someone cool have to go.

My computer
This situation was another one of those "can only happen to Duane" nightmares. It finally arrived a few weeks ago, but Customs had it and wouldn't release it. They wanted me to pay for it because it had insurance on it. A Korean teacher talked to them on the phone, and finally I had to fax (then scan and email) copies of my passport and other documents before they would finally release it.

So, I got it home and turned it on. Started up, and then gave me "Disk failure. Put in system disk." Nothing worked. Basically, it took me awhile to discover that the computer could not see my hard drive. So I rebuilt my computer. Twice. Finally, after a week, it could see the hard drive. It started up. But now it couldn't see my keyboard. You see, I installed this Zboard keyboard some months ago, and without it, my computer refused to recognize any other keyboard. No matter what I did, I couldn't fix it. So I bought a new XP disk and reinstalled Windows XP Home edition (over XP media edition, cause no Korean place had media edition). It came up and worked. But then I had no drivers. Duane wasn't smart enough to copy his drivers, so now I had no Internet connection and it had been so long, I couldn't remember how to get this configured. Finally, I realized that the ethernet card it was displaying wasn't actually an ethernet card but a protocol. So I used my laptop and found the drivers that fix the ethernet card. Then I had Internet access. Then, slowly I was able to reconnect everything else that needs to be working in my computer (cause now I could download them directly onto the computer). My life was pretty much saved by having a laptop and a flash drive. I now have to find tons of software that I no longer have because the new XP doesn't recognize any old files. I don't even have a word processor. Hopefully, Kat will find that software and send it to me. Or I'll end up having to pay a ton of money to buy it again, and as everyone is scared to death of allowing software downloads from Pirate Korea, I probably can't order anything directly from the US online. But I'm back up and running, so that's good. Plus, my computer starts up a lot faster when it doesn't have a ton of other software that refuses to stop loading first.

My writing
Not much to say. No success here. I received a copy of the book 2009 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market which I ordered from a British book company I buy a lot of books from these days. I've been pretty happy with them so far.

My degree
University of the Pacific still hasn't updated my transcripts to reflect I have a master's degree. But then I understand I'm not the only one who hasn't received an update from UOP, so I'm not panicking just yet. Kat is going in tomorrow to see what the status was on the printing of my thesis, which according to my understanding should not be a problem towards awarding my degree. But we'll see....

That's about it. Not much else going on. No social life whatsoever. Not even trying. But that's okay. I gave up on women a long time ago because they're all icky and have cooties. Calvin, Hobbes and I aren't letting any grrls in our club treehouse.

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