…the more you slip-slide away. (there’s a song with those lyrics, but I can’t remember the details abut it) I feel this way about my den, for it seems the closer I get to finishing the re-imagining, the farther I get from actually being finished. And this feeling of sliding down a scree slope comes up with my novel (I need to do more revising than I have), with my re-inventorying of the school’s library, with taking Korean fencing 검도 (keomdo), and with staying in contact with all my various friends and family who are several time zones away. I don’t want to be distant and yet I seem to be sliding down the slope.

Perhaps if I managed to juggle my time better, I could get everything done in a reasonable manner, but… I’m distractable and there isn’t much outside incentive for most of these. The library project is closest to completion because it’s my job and I want to finish with what we currently have before all the new books arrive. I’ve come to realize that my self-motivation can only take me so far, especially when I have no definite timeline to work with.

So I’m left with started projects waiting for enough momentum to be applied to overcome the inertia of rest. For instance, the re-imagining of my den is a decent project and will take some time to get tweaked just right, but I should have been done with all of the major changes by now. I have the tools, yet it’s hard to work on something when you aren’t certain that anyone but spammers and bots actually visit. There are a lot of spam comments I have gotten and a lot more that most likely are spam, but could possibly be legit, and only a handful that I know are from actual people. Granted, I realize that I need to ramble regularly to maintain an audience, but the fact that I’m not actually rambling in person with you means that I won’t catch your “I’m growing bored” look or hear your “mhm” of affirmation.

Which is to say, if you want me to re-discover the drive to ramble weekly, you need to give me some input. I’ve adjusted the various areas of my den to prevent spam from piling up in them, though I should have an area for you to leave messages to me in addition to the spaces following my ramblings. I think I shall call it the cork board.

In other news, the snow of several weeks ago is now nearly melted, which is a little sad, but it makes walking up the hill to work that much safer. It was fun while it lasted!

My wife caught Typhoid Fever, most likely a remnant of our trip to Cambodia that took its sweet time incubating. She got to stay in a hospital while they ran tests and gave her antibiotics. It was quite the nice hospital. I tested negative for Typhoid Fever, so I had a lonely week of scrounging the cupboards for food (I didn’t know all that we had…), though around the same time that Annie broke out in a fever I got food poisoning again. x.x School was also closed for a week to preempt the government from shutting it down for a much longer time; the administration also had the building sanitized and sent out a notice to parents. The students were happy to get a week off, but they’re going to be making it up at the end of the school year. My wife has returned home and has just recently finished off her antibiotics, so she’s doing much better! So thank you to everyone who learned about this through another medium and shared their concern and/or prayed. You should know that she isn’t back at work yet because the doctor hasn’t given her the green light, but hopefully the test to determine if she is Typhoid-free will happen sometime in the coming week.

My creative writing class is doing alright, though I have the feeling that several students don’t actually want to be in the class, but don’t have another place to be due to the limited number of electives offered. So I’m doing my best to make the class fun and am not giving out much homework, but they still seem half-awake. At least I gave them free-range on what their short story would be about.

After a pleasantly brief exchange of messages between Steam’s support staff and myself, I was able to buy games through Steam while over here in Korea. My problem was that I didn’t have a Korean Visa or MasterCard tied with my Korean bank account and their IP-checking service flagged me when I tried to use my US Visa debit card from a Korean IP address (a good safety feature, but frustrating if you’re overseas for a long while). But the person I talked with was pleasant and helpful and promptly resolved my issue. This allowed me to test the demo of Total War: Shogun 2 on my netbook, discover it actually ran, and go ahead and buy the game that hadn’t worked on my desktop. O.o So I’ve played some of that and enjoyed trying to conquer feudal Japan. One of my good friends is planning on buying the game so that we can play together. I especially like how the units speak Japanese (I understood when one told me it couldn’t move somewhere ).

Speaking of Japanese, I might be working on constructing several languages in the near future. I’m still figuring some things out, but I would be doing it as volunteer work for a game in development if I chose to do it. I’ll keep you updated on this, but this is the sort of puzzle I enjoy doing. The group project in phonology to construct a language was one of the most enjoyable projects I had to do while at university. The lead developer is taking a few weeks to get to know me better before deciding if he wants me to volunteer and I’m using the time to decide if I have the time and/or willingness to put a couple projects on hold to do this sort of volunteer work. But I am very much interested in this game and very much in love with the idea of creating languages. It’s time for me to sleep, so I’ll say more later (including the name of the game ).