I has can speak Korean. Sorta.

So I've been studying Korean for about two years now, but you'd never know it. 

I work in a school district with lots of Koreans...and consequently lots of opportunities to practice my language skillz.

In one of my classes, there is a kid who pretty much just moved here from Korea, so his English isn't great and he is assisted by the ELL teacher in class.  "YAY," I think to myself "I wanna talk to this kid!"  So I spend time in class racking my brain for bits of Korean things to say to him...

This is how I imagine our conversation would go:

In Korean (in overly formal manner not appropriate for speaking with school children):


ME:    Hello!  Nice to meet you!
HIM:  Hi!
ME:    Who is that person over there?  I am an American person.
           Are you a Korean person?
HIM:  Um, what person?
ME:    That's great!  I like to eat Kimchi and Pizza!  The book is sitting on the table.  What is your
            phone number?
HIM:   Umm... 

Pretty much all I will achieve by initiating this conversation is scaring the child or leading him to believe I'm crazy.  Not good.  

The Death of Christmas

Yesterday I took down my Christmas tree.  The poor pitiful future pile of mulch, stripped of all its Christmas glory, dripping pine needles and leaving my hands covered in sap signified the end of one of the nicest Christmas vacations I have had since I was a kid.  It was quite sad.

(  It is amazing how bad a Christmas tree can look after you have taken all the lights and decorations off of it.  )

This vacation was different from ones in the past in that I actually got to celebrate it- and it was awesome!  I have been working in restaurants (and before that, retail - equally less generous with holiday off time) and had become used to bargaining for which holiday I wanted off the most, playing politics with managers to try and get enough time to travel home in time for Christmas dinner (or Thanksgiving's, if that was the holiday I was able to procure).

No more!

I'm a substitute teacher, so I get the same vacation time as a little child!  And it's wonderful!

I utterly packed my vacation time to the brim.

And now it is time to go back to work.  I picked up a job using our online scheduling system called Subfinder at about 1:00 A.M. this morning, and would have canceled it today if I hadn't woken up past the cancellation deadline this morning.  The perk about being a sub is that I really can work whenever I want, but need to find the discipline  on mornings like these, after a two week long joyous vacation with snow and great food and travel and buffalo hunts to get back in the car and make the long early morning drive to a middle school in my hometown.