Catching up

Goodness, it's been a while since I last posted. I see that my last post was about the hot rainy season, and now Korea has tilted a little bit further from the sun, the leaves have turned fiery shades of red and yellow, and the scarves and winter coats are coming out... I should at least make 1 post per season, right?

Actually I only meant to take a *very brief* hiatus from posting. I told myself I would NOT ALLOW myself to make any blog or Flickr posts until I got off my lazy butt and updated my online portfolio, which I hadn't touched in 2 years. Then the updating turned into a full-scale redesign, with me trying to hack through a Wordpress theme and teach myself CSS at the same time. The website is done (sorta) but I've concluded that I'm no longer a fan of Wordpress and I've been toying with the idea of doing it all over again with Expression Engine. Yet I haven't been able to bring myself to look at any code for a month. There's a reason why I'm not a programmer, it's cuz lines of code makes me fall asleep.

Getting myself to do things that I know I should do but don't want to do is a fine art. Lately I've tricked myself into exercising thusly: No playing with the Nintendo DS unless I'm doing situps at the same time. It's actually kind of worked as intended: I'm playing the DS less, certainly.

Recently I had the ghastly thought that what if, one day, I look back on my time in Korea and it's just some kind of hazy memory, kind of like college is for me now? So now, for my own sake if no one else's, a brief recap of what happened over the past few months:

> We went to New York to see family. Twice. There were some family issues to deal with.
> We also went up to Maine to see Gavin's family. Twice. I walked through my first corn maze.
> I smuggled some yummy cheese back to Seoul. And sausages (shhh).
> We had two wine and cheese parties. Almost done with the cheese now.
> We went to Jeju Island and got stuck in a typhoon.
> We bought folding bikes. Gavin has a black Strada, I have a red MacKinley.
> In freelancing news, I finished a website, started another one, and bid on a few more jobs and didn't get 'em... In between, there were some postcards, web banners, and other little jobs of varying levels of interestingness.
> My logo got shortlisted for Tokyo Design Week's Love Your Earth competition. ^^
> A dear friend moved to Singapore. (*sigh, expat life... always saying goodbye...)
> I joined Facebook. I suck at Scrabulous. I realized I don't have that many friends compared to some folks. But I have good ones :-)
> Seeing as how degrees are a big deal in Korea, I contemplated actually getting my Master's by finally finishing my thesis, only to discover that Pratt won't let me do my thesis off-site. Unlike other normal Masters programs. Phooey on them.
> We stayed out too late eating barbeque a few times too many. I completely screwed up my sleep schedule and digestive system for a few weeks. It is possible to jetlag yourself without leaving your own time zone.
> went through a mood swing or two, but I cured them with pastries. This time, I didn't break my phone.
> I baked some bread. I baked some pies.
> I sewed and sold a few more iPod cozies, and I am studiously procrastinating on developing cozies for the iPhone or the new fat iPod video nano.
> I've been dreaming up more things to sell on Etsy for the holidays.
> I designed some stickers for the iPod shuffle. You can buy them here.
> We went through an inexplicable spurt of listening to sappy country tunes and cracking up at the lyrics. Right now Conway Twitty's "Lying here with Linda on my Mind" is on my iTunes.
> I bought a sewing machine. I am sitting here looking at it, and it is looking at me.

Freelance projects have died down slightly (Temporarily, I hope. Anyone need a website or a brochure?), there are no immediate trips on the horizon (at least not til December), and I have a backlog of photos that have not made it to Flickr yet, so I hope I'll be better at blog-posting in the coming weeks...



If you have a good vocabulary, you can help feed people.

Sometimes, I am left brained; most of the time I am right-brained. What are you?