Christmas Tree Decorating Party

It's 4:22 a.m. now, and I've been blogging for almost two hours, finallly, at about 2:30 giving up on tossing and turning in bed and coming over to my faithful night companion, Toshiba. If I can't sleep, I can certainly blog.


Last night was Angelique's exhibition. After the opening ceremony, we proceeded to her friend's Vincent's studio for the 'after party.' It was interesting, a whole new world that deserves a blog entry of their own, but tomorrow , perhaps.

I got home at 1:00 a.m. and got up at 12:00 today. After coffee and a few slices of cheese and pineapple for breakfast, I decided that it was high time for me to rearrange my bedroom furniture. My bed was directly under the window, so each morning I'd wake up stiff and half-frozen thanks to the typhoonic draft, the direct result of the infamous Korean heat insulation, or the lack of it. I was in the midst of admiring a cute zoo of dust bunnies that established itself under the furniture, when Gwen messaged suggesting an early dinner. Great idea! Cheese and pineapple seemed to have canceled each other out quickly.

We met at 4:00 p.m. and had a very nice warm dinner at the Thai Orchid. Say what you will, but in my eyes, both the food and the atmosphere beat that other trendier 'cooler' Thai restaurant. After dinner, I declined G's invitation to move over to the RMT to meet some of her friends, since I had papers to grade. Instead of the Rocky (aka Smoky, as Gwen quipped) mountain I climbed two flight of stairs at Starbucks and flopped down to business. How silly of me to have ordered and consumed that enormous bucket of coffee, elegantly renamed to "Grande." Its 58 milion mg of the Best Seattle Caffeine certainly gave me an extra grande case of sleeplessnes in Seoul.

I was so absorbed in the book (American Fuji, by Sarah Backer) that Clare lent me to read that I couldn't put it down, ending up with a total of five graded papers. Plan A had been to have them all graded. I had to resort to plan B: wake up early tomorrow and finish the additional 18 papers for the day class and work on the ones from my night class later in the day. Not! Since I 'm not sleeping now, my planned wake up time will surely be my bed time. Now, I have to come up with plan C. How about telling students to come and pick up their papers from my office on Wednesday. Sounds like a plan to me.
On the upside, I'm really on top of my blogging, -over the top, actually.
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But, now off to my description of the X-mas decorating party this past Friday.

Two years ago it was Jiwon and me. We had fun. Last year it was a bunch people, and again good times were rolling. Wanting to recreate that feeling with my family of the heart, since my family of the blood is, sadly, rarelly with me at Christmas, I threw another X-mas decorating party this past Friday, December 8th.

Friends came over around 8 pm. We ate, drank, laughed, decorated, relaxed on the floor, reclined in chairs, danced a little and even waited for our 'salary man' friend Jungshik who came after work at 1:00 a.m.

The decorating elves did a great job, and only a bit of alteration was needed on the following morning, - as was to be expected from a bossy hostess who likes to direct people. Hehehehe! So, sew me!

Shown here in the picture with Clare is the tree before, and then w/o Clare, the tree after. I didn't change a whole lot - just removed the sugar canes and Santa's boot, moved this or that and added some tinsel.