HOME!

My cat's chubby, my family is great, the Flames lost, but beer in Calgary is terrific. Oh how I love the fall in this country.

Three more sleeps. Three more sleeps, a move starting at 6 a.m. on Thursday, and a 12 hour flight complete with 2-hour stopover in Vancouver. Three more sleeps. Two more teaching days. That's 14 classes, 4 cookie parties, 36 report cards, and 12 acheivement certificates. Three sleeps.

It's more exciting than Christmas. Than my birthday. Three more sleeps.

Last week, last Thursday, I believe, the head teacher (Thomas) told me that we needed to move to a different apartment. He told me we had two choices for days. The first, October 31st, was impossible as we will be in Calgary and not remotely close to Seoul at all. The second, October 24th, is our departure date. While inconvenient, I told Thomas that we could move before 1:00 p.m. on the 24th, but that we needed to stop then, lest I suffer anxiety attacks all the way to the airport. So we spent the weekend preparing for a stressful Friday move, wishing the whole time it could have been sooner. Well, as luck would have it, Thomas told me today that we can move on Thursday morning instead. As my first class is at 11, we have plenty of time, so long as we start at 6 a.m.

It will be a joy to experience the intricacies of an apartment move in Seoul. We actually have a moving company helping us. Two trucks, 3 guys, and a crane. You see, Korea has what I see as a very unique moving system, at least compared to what I know of crews of young 20 somethings in blue uniforms in Canada. First, the movers pull up in a couple of rather small looking trucks. Then they set up a crane in front of your place, pop out the windows, load everything onto a skid, and haul it down out of the building, into the truck. No stair carries here. We're moving from a third floor apartment into a second floor one, so we still won't be experiencing the view from one of the massive complexes in Seoul. I swear they have apartment buildings here the size of Eaton's Centre.

Time to go for that first sleep. And tomorrow will be spent packing, and worrying about what to do with the cat.

Bought it. Officially purchased it, received confirmation, and will await it's arrival at my parents' house sometime in the next 10 days. It's really all very exciting.

I have a cold. I need to go home and rest. If the cat and the mosquitos let me.

It's currently 3:38 a.m. on Thursday morning here in Seoul. I'm sitting in a computer room, inhaling mass quantities of second hand smoke, and waiting for a friend to get back to MSN from his lunch break. Why, you ask? What could be so important to have me up at nearly 4 when I have to be up in 5 hours?

I'm trying to buy a computer. It's been on my list of "adult" purchases for a year and a half now, and I'm finally ready to get it. Mostly because I've finished paying off the first two post-university credit binges, partly because I can no longer stand the stench of cigarettes in the computer rooms here (how did all of you put up with me back in the day????). So I'm interested in the Dell Inspiron 8500. It's really quite pretty. However, I'm not entirely comfortable selecting all of my upgrades at this moment. For example, how is a moron like me to know whether it is better to upgrade to a better display or a better video card? Is one useless without the other? And do I need the Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 processor at 2.40GHz-M, or will I be allright with 2.20? These questions need answers. And they need them before 10:00 p.m. Eastern today if I'm going to take advantage of the limited time free upgrade to a CD/DVD burner. Why is it that I'm destined to make every major decision at the last possible minute? I suppose it's actually unlikely that I'll get the free upgrade even if my advisor arrives soon, as Dell didn't seem to believe that my SIN was valid. They said they'll email me within 48 hours in response to my application, but that will be long past 10 p.m. Eastern, even with that cunning little international dateline. Alas, how much extra can a CD/DVD burner actually cost?

For any of you who are actually in the know, here are the questions I need answered before I finalize my purchase details:

1. the bit about the processor.

2. XGA, Super XGA+ (add $77), or Ultra XGA (add $200)?

3. 32MB DDR ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 4x AGP 3D Video or
64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce 4 4200 Go AGP 4X Graphics (add $149)

4. 1300 WLAN (802.11b/g, 54Mbps) miniPCI Card (add $99) or
1400 DualBand WLAN (802.11a/b/g, 54Mbps) miniPCI Card (add $149)

It's really all beyond me.