Archive for the 'Home Life' Category

Jul

Report cards and random thoughts

Report cards. They have been taking up a lot of time time lately. I have almost 120 students that I need to do portfolios and report cards for. It’s hard because I still don’t know all of my students that well. I seem to know the bad ones and the good ones. But the average ones… well… I’m still learning about them. That makes writing good comments a huge challenge.

I’ve done some fun things with my kids the last few weeks. I’ll write about those soon. I also went out to dinner last Friday with the other teachers and I’ll write about that soon as it was delicious.

I spent a good portion of the last two weekends becoming frustrated with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. It’s a program that allows you to take raw computer code and make it into a working program (among other things). I never did succeed in getting BOINC to build and have given up (temporarily?) out of sheer frustration. Not being happy with that, last night I switched over to my install of Ubuntu and tried getting a music player to build. I think that the compiling gods who decide who will succeed and who will not are picking on me. Because something is “wrong”. What exactly that means is somewhat beyond me. I just sent an email to the person who is guiding me through this adventure.

So look for updates in the near future.

posted by Kathryn in Home Life,Off time,Teaching and have No Comments

Jun

Kim Chi Chun

I know how to cook exactly one Korean dish. And as I had it for dinner tonight, I decided to take some pictures along the way and teach the rest of you how to make Kim Chi Chun.

Kim Chi Chun is like a savory pancake. It’s extremely easy to make. Heck, even I can do it. Sorry about the fuzzy measurements below. I do this by eye as I have no measuring cups or spoons. And it’s not like baking where all the amounts need to be precise. As long as your batter is about the same consistency as pancake batter, you’ll be fine.

Start by assembling your ingredients. You’ll need flour (just plain old white flour will do), water, Kim chi, oil and salt (optional).

Then get all of your tools together. You’ll need a frying pan, a spatula, a cutting board, scissors, a spoon and a bowl.

Dump some flour into the bowl (I think I used about a cup) and pour some water over it (a 1/3 of a cup maybe) and mix. The consistency should be the same as pancake batter.

Open the bag of kim chi and pour the liquid into the bowl. Then take your scissors and shred the kim chi.

Dump the Kim chi into the batter and mix well.

Now put a couple of tablespoons of oil in your skillet and heat it up. Once it’s hot, pour some of the batter into the skillet. They should be the size of small pancakes.

When they have cooked a minute or so, flip them. This is the same as if you were making breakfast pancakes.

Cook until no more batter oozes out when you press on them with a spatula. Put them on a plate and sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt. This, of course, is optional if you’re watching your sodium intake.

Serve with soy sauce for dipping. Again, this is optional if you don’t like soy sauce or you’re watching your sodium intake.

Personally, I prefer them without the soy sauce, but I was having some serious salt cravings this evening, so I decided to go for the dipping.

And there you have it. Your first Korean dish in nine easy steps. Enjoy!

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Home Life,Korea,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

Jun

My weekend

Thank goodness it was a rainy weekend. I don’t feel so bad for sitting in front of the computer all day for two days.

I have been planning on triple booting (Vista Home Premium/XP Professional/Ubuntu Feisty Fawn) my laptop for quite a while. I started the process about 6 weeks ago. I managed to get the hard drive partitioned before I left for Korea. That process only took about 2 hours or so. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but it was probably something stupid. By the time I reinstalled Vista, I was so frustrated that I knew Ubuntu was going to have to wait for another day. And XP is going to have to wait just a bit longer as well. I’m waiting on my brother to slipstream me a new install CD as the one I had doesn’t have the drivers for my SATA controller.

So yesterday was the day to install Ubuntu. I pulled out the tutorial I found online and popped in the installer CD I burned. The install was truly one of the quickest and least painful ones I’ve ever done. The only problem I had to solve was a silly one. All I needed to do was right click the ext3 partition to specify it as the mount point (errr… at least I think that’s what it was called).

One reboot at the end of the install and I was up and running. First thing I did was install all of the updates and then started trying to break it. My first project was to get BOINC installed. I was following a forum thread that another cruncher wrote and managed to screw it up at least twice. I did learn that Google and “man” are indeed your friends. But in the end I did get it up and running.

I got Firefox and OpenOffice up and running and set-up just the way I like them. I installed Flash and Java so I can see all the nifty things on the web. I half figured out the problem I was having with RhythmBox. What I did should have solved the entire problem, but hasn’t. So I’ve Googled and also posted on a message board for help from a Linux guru as my Google skills seem to be failing me.

So all in all, I think I did fairly well for a weekend’s worth of work. I have a shiny new OS to play with. I learned some new things. And I got myself out of jams all by myself (even if the terminal still scares me).

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Home Life,Linux Adventures,Off time and have No Comments

Jun

Mogies

Your Korean Word of the Day is…

Mogie

In English…

Mosquito

I’m getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes here. I have a dozen bites on my right arm, six on my left, three on my forehead and god only knows how many on my legs. I have no idea how they’re getting in my apartment as I sleep with the windows shut and the air conditioner on low. Although I have the windows open during the day, they do have screens. And I didn’t have nearly as many bites when I went to bed as when I woke up this morning.

Thankfully I have some hydrocortisone cream courtesy of my mother’s friend, Mrs. Peters. So I’ve been putting that on the bites. And I’m trying my best not to scratch, but it seems Korean mosquito bites itch even more than American mosquito bites.

Some of my students were talking about how bites they have. Most have one or two. They then remarked how many I have. I just told them that I’m extremely sweet. And that’s why the mosquitoes like to bite me.

posted by Kathryn in Home Life,Korea,Korean Vocabulary and have No Comments