Biggish Day?

Today I head up with the BKF to Bigger City to meet with Yun-Hyang Lee of Ewha University and Vania Haam of the ATA Korean wing. I think this is something like a job interview at best and another character check at worst.

So I spent last night resurrecting a thing from the past, the "Briefcase full of BS." In this case it is a lovely brown-leather traveling case with my updated CV, two copies of my review of Cho Sehui's The Dwarf (for Ed, you know! It would be a coincidence if a copy happened to appear in front of the Women of Ewha. Coincidence I say), my new cards and several articles about Korean history and literature. Also, of course, a dog-eared and annotated copy of The Dwarf. Let's hope no one of the crew I'm meeting are of the "pristine book" religion.

In any case, as the plan was to pick me up at 9, the BKF will be here around 10 and then it will be off to whatever it is.

On the other side of this coin, the planning process at work seems to be going well, although I frequently find myself arguing on the side of the consultant and not my president, who occasionally goes OCD over some PowerPoint slide or arcane piece of data that is generally unimportant while we are still discussing meta issues. I also wish the consultant would learn to recognize when the president has dropped one of his little jewels (normally a metaphor he is proud of, a joke, or some story) so that the president would not have to continue repeating these until they are acknowledged. It really slows things down. Not so much as the Pres being in charge of the Powerpoint (it hurts to watch someone struggle to do something relatively simple. But you grab the mouse out of the President's manly and noble hand only at the risk of your continued employment).

Ah well... it's a lovely day in Big City and I have 30 minutes or so to enjoy before the Embassy arrives. And the landlady is gone all next week, so I shall have privacy.

For what, God knows, but it is good to know it is there.

Finally, my favorite self-absorbed blogger continues to struggle under the massive weight of the beauty and solemnity that she so gracefully carries...

My inner introvert lets out a sigh and bemoans the fact that I am already popular

Alas.. struggle on Namaste, struggle on!

Bee-Movie Scenery

The Korean Embassy is normally a calm place (as that apparently placid picture to the left demonstrates). The BKF and JAE attend to common household chores whilst also making a meagre living selling jujubes and crude handmade crafts to soldiers. The Great Unifier is still far to young to marshal his powers and make us all his pawns in his single-minded drive to reunify Korea. At this point he can’t even control his bodily functions, so all is pacific. I might also note that he is, so far, not a complainer of any sort and that’s just the kind of kid I want for my Godson.

Mission Accomplished.

So I drive down on a Friday. My relentless drive for success at work (for I am steely-eyed, slightly graying at the temples, rugged-chinned and intense) means that I have maxed out my vacation time. So I was able to take Friday as a vacation day and drive down to the embassy.

There is something very nice about bailing on work and taking a day off to drive somewhere. I was even unfazed by the fact that the splendid array of rock-songs-from-wayback-then that I heard on the way down, included the back-to-back combo (on different stations to boot) of “Time” by Pink Floyd and “Running On Empty” by Jacksone Browne. This is a terrifying combination of songs about age and lack of meaning for a man of 32 years old, much less for 41 year old (muscular and attractive though I am), but ruggedly handsome survivor such as myself.

Still, I made it down and much of the day was quotidian, even by cross cultural standards. The rice and beer of arrival, the telly-vision. and the attack of the killer bees.

The BKF is uncholeric by nature, and when he wandered back (from a bathroom break) to Mission Impossible playing in the living room he was preternaturally composed when he said… ‘AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEE3EGHGHHH! THE BEES HAVE COME FOR MY CHILD!!!!”

Well, or asked “how do you tell if bees are trying to start a hive?”

As it turns out, I have some knowledge of this. When I was but a young sprout, a cluster of bees looking for a new place to chill came swinging through my elementary school playgound. This was at lunch so all the kiddies, young (me) and secretly homicidal (my sister) were watching. The hive was relatively spread out and I, and some other kids, took too running through it. We got through so fast no bee had a chance to sting us.

Except I was a stinking hippie. With long, flowing, honeyed locks. Filthy and down to my ass. My little statement of rebellion against the man managed to catch a bee.

Like the cheese-eating surrenduuurrrr(!) monkey I was, I ran whimpering out of the swarm. Towards my sister, hollering, “get it out of my head!”

To this day I’m not certain if my BS was trying to kill the bee, or the voices she surely believed I was in thrall to (Zepplin, man!).

But, responding to either call, she took the plastic pony she had at hand, and beat my head (not using the body of the horse, rather using the spiv-sharp front hoof of the thing) until no bees could possibly still be alive, and the buzzing in my head could not possibly recede.

Really, it IS all about family.

Once I was out of the hospital I went to my 5th grade teacher who explained that bees, sometimes, would move nests and it would be in a big old fly-by.

Which, after that long and completely supernumerary digression, is what these bees were doing.

BKF is un-Korean in some ways. He is the guy who introduced me to the “Why The Fuck” theory of Korean response to a problem. This is the reverse of the Mexican versions which means, ‘Why the fuck fix it?” To Koreans the question is “Why the fuck not fix it?” And like Mexico, Korea has plenty of workers. Unlike Mexico, their workers. Er…. Work…

But BKF was unimpressed, or nonplussed by the attack… he tried to figure out who you might call to respond to such and insect attack.

But JAE’s old man was entirely bored.

So that little bee problem you see above (First pic is long shot; second is where something with a bolt was pulled off the wall creating the hole; third a picture is of the hole crawling with the evil, stinking (Japanese or American, depending upon you Korean orientation) bugs that was gonna have to be fixed!

Brah!

Take it as a parody, or take is as proof of the efficacy of the Korean “WTF” theory, but the pictures you see here document the short but deadly war on the bees.

The old man first had to gird his loins. In this case he donned a heavy coat, a mesh bag for holding vegetables, a plastic bag, and some dishwashing gloves which were pulled on outside of the arms of the coat. This process took about 20 minutes and the entire nuclear family was involved in it. It was something very Korean, and something I can’t quite categorize other than to say it was amusing to watch but something deadly serious for the old man..

Then came the machines of war. The old man marched off to battle with two cans of bug spray, stick, a tube of joint-compound, and an old table. The boys brought the table round and it was on.

The attack was frontal. Two handed spraying of the hole with the contents of the two spray cans (which certainly hadn’t been full to begin with, but the bug spray cascaded down the side of the house like a waterfall. When the cans began to run out of propellant, the first work was done and you could watch bees fly away from the wall in uncertain spirals, and then at a certain point fall out of the air. So much spray had been applied that I’m certain several of the bees died of drowning long before their central nervous systems began to fire uncontrollably. One of those pictures over there is of Jong Qu nervously watching this part of the spectacle.

Finally, came the salting of the earth. The joint compound and a stick turned the hole in the wall into an Apiary Cask of Amontillado. There were only two kinds of bees, the ones trapped inside the wall, and the ones trapped outside the wall.

After a short interregnum in which scairt and lost bees beat about the sealed wall, all was calm.

Until the ghosts of the bees trapped within the walls rise from their mortal graves, enter the home through the power outlets, heating vents, cooling system, and around the light fixtures.

Then they will kill and kill AGAIN!

And just because, a relatively high-res picture of the lovely infant himself..

Back To the Future.. Korean Embassy Floor

Just finishing the pictures of the rebuilding of the BKF's house, since he has some folks overseas who want to see it. This post should have been sometime back in July.

That evening we made a start at the floor, but it was pretty desultory. That first photo is just to remind what the floor looked like when it was all linoleum. When I arrived back from the hotel the next day BKF was sitting on the floor sort of swatting at the composite pieces. We quickly learned it was much better as a two person job.

Somehow we got through the previous day drinking only one beer each. This was just the wrong approach and so, although it was early on a Sunday morning, I stopped by the liquor store to pick up a six-pack of Bud Light. When I got to BKF's new house he had already had some kind of semi-Mexican breakfast the remnants of which were already congealed to their yellow fast-food wrapper. So I scrounged around and found some kind of Cheesy-Poofs and had the following breakfast of champions.

The BKF and I soon learned that in the big, spacious areas it made sense to lay the composite flooring down three pieces at a time. So we raced over these kinds of areas. The tricky bits were in the kitchen where there were all kinds of tricky angles, a refrigerator, and an unfortunate two-inch difference between the width of three pieces of composite and the floor space. I worked on the big areas while BKF called me when there was need to trim something, move something or force something into a small space.

By the time I had to leave we had most of the kitchen done and the refrigerator back in. It looked like the house might actually make it.

Ed, of course, had a celebratory beverage, and for once it wasn's mechju!

The Great Unifier, Introduced

JAE Likes the Drugs!


The "Great Unifier" Ponders his First Significant Separation!

Smoke Em if you Got Em

As of 9:57 this morning there is one more little Korean-American floating around in Salinas (bringing the total to, three, in all).

JAE went to the hospital at around 6:30 last night and was delivered in just over 12 hours. "About 47 minutes of hard pushing" says BKF.

As usual, JAE was quick, efficient and without drama. Why, after all, have a three day labor? ;-)

There was an amusing moment yesterday as the BKF asked JAE's parents if I was allowed to visit in the week after the birth (there is a rule that only nuke-famblys can come in the house) and I will be allowed to "pass the rope" that keeps strangers (and disease) out.

There goes THAT plan to get out of the translation business!

Anyway, congrats and smoke em if you got em.

Pictures soon...

Korean Embassy Redux

Perhaps the biggest nightmare in the BKFs house was the wall of horror and its transition into the horrible wall of blood. The old woman who had lived in the house was in the habit of slapping up new wallpaper when the old wallpaper no longer suited her. Because of this you could tell which room had been the children's room. In that room, as you unveiled each layer of wallpaper you revealed a different developmental state. At the bottom the wallpaper was bright colorful figures of bells and things (suitable for an infant), above it was patriot/historical events wallpaper (suitable for a school-child), above that was a wallpaper with abstract figures (suitable for a teen) and on top was the wallpaper (stupid geometric patterns) that the old lady slapped on to re-establish her control of the room. Each room (including bathrooms, which were otherwise decked out like they belonged in bordellos) had one "accent" wall covered in wallpaper. In most of the rooms this wallpaper came off fairly easily - you scored the wallpaper and slapped on an "enzyme-based" wallpaper remover which was just about as effective as prayer would have been. The only difference is that once we were done we didn't feel any closer to God.

As a youth, I was privileged to have a slumlord as a father and we owned some ratty apartment buildings in Redwood City. We had to remove the wallpaper there, but in those good old days you could use a remarkably caustic remover which was based on some kind of highly poisonous poly-styrene-toluene-killuall type of chemical that is no longer available to the average consumer.

So when we got to the wall of horror, stinking enviro-nazi hippies had left us without the tools we needed. The old lady had slapped three or four layers of wallpaper on this thing. The first layer came off with deceptive ease... Jae could strip entire columns of the stuff from the wall. It fell off like soccer players pretending to be fouled. But below that, the thing might as well have been concrete. BKF and I scraped until our arms nearly fell off, but we achieved little. You can see the picture of transcontinental pain that we finally achieved.

As we scraped away on the wallpaper the hombres BKF had hired worked on pulling up the linoleum. They pretty much got the entire job done in one day, but there was an amusing side-note. I drove down on a Thursday afternoon and when I got there BKF hissed to me, "I told them that you were the owner." I was a bit bemused by that. BFK did say that the hombres stopped talking as much once I got there. Later, BFK noted what my arrival must have looked like to the hombres. BFK had been working on his computer all morning, and once I landed he joined me in scraping the wall. To the hombres it must have looked like BFK had been loafing until I arrived, and then snapped to attention.

In any case, the hombres stopped talking and laughing and began taking their breaks outside.

I'm the man!

During our ample beer breaks (the hombres got agua) I took the camera around and just looked at the place. One thing that popped out was how.. well... eclectic the previous owner had been. The backyard looked like some kind of Zen OK Corral. But the inside was worse. I noticed that the electrical fittings looked as though they had been picked up at garage sales and at some point it hit me that there were no two fittings even remotely alike. If you click on that photo to see the larger version you will also note that each one was covered in grime.

Several days later, as BFK and I spoke to the next door neighbor, he told us that the old owner had been the bric-a-brac queen (we took down about three linear miles of bizarre little shelves) and that once she retired she spent her entire life haunting garage sales and antique stores. And if something was truly tasteless and gaudy she snapped it up.

The same was largely true of her approach to lighting. No two lights were the same and none seemed to match in any way.

In any case, on the next day BKF set the hombres to working on the wallpaper problem and by noon that day it had been rendered semi-gone. After that all three turned to getting the walls ready for painting and by the end of the day that was also done.

Painting was boring and predictable, but as noted above, it turned the wall of horror into the wall of blood, which you see over there on the left. BKF says that the first night he slept in the house, with only external lighting and his mighty Korean Hunting Dog to scared to enter the house, it looked like he was in some kind of horrorshow. The wall looks a bit saturated and heavy, but it looks good from the living room and once things are placed upon it I think it will look fine.

We just have to remove that fat waygookun from in front of it and everything should be just fine!

The next weekend I also came down and it was mainly about moving from the old apartment to the new house. The BKFs had an innovative system for moving which featured four evenly balanced tiers:

1. Complete lack of planning
2. Glad Bags
3. More hombres
4. U-Haul truck

While Jae struggled manfully to put breakable things into boxes, the remainder of the move was accomplished by putting big pieces of furniture into the truck and 'packing' them in with boxes full of junk. Since the "junk" that was supposed to be moved and the "junk" that was just "junk" was more or less indistinguishable, both the hombres and I packed plenty of stuff that was supposed to end up in a dumpster.

In due time this was moved to the new house and hastily stuffed into the garage, which quickly became impassable. This was inconvenient as it was the only way into the house and also contained the composite flooring and padding which we were going to install the very next day.

Intrepidly (is that a word) we hacked a path through the mess and kept it open from then on.

The BKF and I began on the flooring, but only had about 9 strips down before the BAG came into town, we all had dinner, and then went separate ways. The BAG and I headed to a motel (practically via King City, since as soon as my gas warning light came on I found a miles long frontage road with no access to the highway - we just kept tooling along as I watched my gas level dwindle) where we had some lovely Hotel Medicine, BKF slept in the new house, and his lovely wife (and mother of his child!) went to stay at a friend's house.

On the morrow? The floor, oh!

Korean Embassy!

There is that special moment when the coffee is just beginning to seep into your bloodstream as you head onto the freeway. Saturday morning early, so no one is really on the road. After a lovely bagel and beverages with the BAG (at the Korean Bagelry, no less) it was off to the road. I had been planning to listen to my Korean language tapes on the way down, but what the fuck, I was gonna be spending the entire weekend with a real live Korean, and why get started early when the iPod could blast the tunes?

The BKF was still out at some local lumber emporium when I landed... Farm-Town was cold and foggy, though the sun was trying to come out. I checked out the latest Korean outpost. I wandered around the front of the place (It kind of reminds me of the house MAF lives in out there in Caucasia - the same kind of semi-recessed by a porch and plants, "get the fuck out of here" vibe. This is reinforced by the tarnished brass plaque on the door which warns away "peddlers or agents." "Welcome to the Korean Embassy in Farm-Town. Now please back away slowly."

The fence was in, well, not so great shape as this photo of the "latch" demonstrates. Still, even a look at the outside showed that there was promise here. Anyway, I undid the funky latch and wandered into the back yard. It's pretty big and with a bit of work would be something quite nice. It is larded with little concrete decorative touches and fencing that might, if you squinted real hard and conjured up the smell of Kimchee and Soju, be seen as Korean, maybe, asian, possibly. There is something like a low corral in one corner and a dry fountain of some sort in the other corner. There are several unidentifiable (to me, that is) fruit trees as well as an orange-tree that I could recognize. This should make the BKF's new married relatives very happy when they come to visit. When I lived in South-Central Big City I had a house with about three fruit trees in the back. When the Korean relatives came to visit me, the father was so boggled by these riches that, drawn to them as if hypnotized, he bashed his way through the screen on the glass sliding doors leading to the backyard. In retrospect I am extremely glad that I had the foresight (?) to open the glass doors before the Koreans got to my house.


The neighborhood seems nice also, although only a month's residence will allow sufficient evidence as to that. I was completely unmolested as I wandered in and about the house and I suppose this could be either good or bad. While I type this the sun has come out (though it is still windy and cold) and the pigeons have started cooing. I hate pigeons - noisy messy pieces of shite.

Anyway, the BKF has to land soon and I promised the BAG pictures. There is a lovely unsecured Linksys network here, so I will see how it handles ftp.

Which it seems to do quite admirably, so this is off to the web for the BAG's delectation.

More soon, as the horrrific work pace allows.

Right... but that I mean the Soju consumption.