VacaFiles

One of the best qualities about YB is her ability to open my eyes to new experiences.  Last year we spent a month together (with the kids of course) in Seoul.  Officially it was for Z's first birthday with YB's mom.  Unofficially, for me specifically, it was for a much needed vacation.

We spent a lot of time touring the city, drinking coffee, going to Paris Baguette and Cafe Bene, and taking the kids to the zoo and a couple water parks.  Many realizations were dawned in my mind but the one that sticks out the most to me now was, is, the Korean Sauna.

Now, let me tell you, the Korean Sauna is no joke.  YB, her sister and mom make sure they all go together every time we visit, kind of like a family outing.  YB took me last year and I didn't really know how to enjoy myself because I didn't bring anything to do and I didn't understand the concept.  I'm one of those weird people that can't enjoy something on the first try because I'm so busy trying to learn the thing.

Imagine, if you will, an early summer night.  It's not hot, not muggy, but a warmer than pleasant.  A pasty white guy lead by a hot Korean enters a sauna, down what I can only assume (because I've only been in two) the normal inviting hallway.  YB says something in Korean.  Probably something like, "Please take my husband to the locker-room and show him what to do.  He doesn't speak any Korean".  You'll see why this is hysterical shortly.  I am handed a numbered digital key which opens your personal locker (with the same number) in the locker room and with which all transactions are recorded.  Admission is paid when you get there, anything you buy goes on a tab tied to the key (used like a credit card inside) which you pay upon your exit.  My sandals go in a tiny locker in the entrance (again, with the number as the key).  I will not see them again until I exit and my tab is paid off.

YB disappears.  I am left with an older Korean guy who starts talking to me in hand motions.  "Great," I think to myself, "This is going to be awkward."  He takes me into the mens locker room which is way nicer than anything I've ever seen in the States (except maybe the member's locker room at the local YMCA my grandfather used to take me to).  Another guy hands me a set of clothes I will eventually change into.  The Korean guy walks me to my locker and motions me to, at least what I hope, to put on those clothes.  He walks away a safe distance.  I put them on and follow him.  He then stops me and, in very broken english, manages to say "shower".

This is where the backstory comes in.  YB had prepared me for this moment but I had hoped it would not come.  I had hoped Korean tradition would stop for one night at the very sauna I visited.  Before entering the coed part of the Korean Sauna it is necessary to shower.  The shower area of the Korean Sauna is wide open and generally contains Bade Pools with massaging waterfalls and different kinds of jet areas to work different parts of the body.  It's very therapeutic.  It's also very intimidating when you, for the first time, are in all your glory in front of whoever happens to be there as well as they being in all their glory in front of you.  Added to that, you do not put on the shirt and pair of shorts  the sauna gave you until you are clean and ready to go to the coed section.  So not only are you and the rest of male population nude in the shower/hot tub area where it can be rationalized as acceptable, you are nude in the non-acceptable as well.

So I shower and soak in a hot tub for a few minutes.  Goodbye stress.  More like "ThankGodI'mclothedIcanbreatheagain".  I dress and find the door to the coed section.  Down a flight of stairs I find YB.  She asks me what took so long.  Down two more flights of stairs is the common area.  It has a large, dimly lit (remember it is nighttime), sitting area with a couple of TVs with what I can only assume now were the latest Korean Dramas.  At the far right end of the room is a little cafe, directly across are doors to individual 15'x15' rooms with their own theme for bodily health.  One has oxygen pumped in.  Another has something "to help the mind" where a mom was keeping her kids while they were doing their homework.  One of the rooms is a super hot room to "sweat out the impurities and improve blood flow".  We didn't get any snacks.  We used all the rooms except the "Cold Room" which is kept somewhere just under 40 degrees to "lock out the impurities you sweat out".  I lasted maybe, at most, two hours.  A very short period of time.  On our way back up to the locker rooms YB showed me the "Salt Room".  This room consisted of salt and was heated to 160.  I couldn't stay in there.  We left.  The following day I was so drained I could barely move.  All I could do was eat and walk very slowly.  It was like I had been worked out but did not move one muscle at all.

Fast forward to present day.  YB found a Korean Sauna not far from our house.  It is set up the same way, doesn't have the oxygen room, but does contain the cafe and bade pool and hot rooms.  We have made use of it from time to time.  Last time I was there was a month ago.  After I was done I was no good at all.  Same side effects, I felt like I had been run over (in a good way).  But today I am feeling pretty good, functional, relaxed and enjoying it.  YB mentioned to her mom how I was feeling last time I went.  Her mom's response was that I needed to go more.  The holistic approach to health that is a part of the Asian culture includes making sure your body is free of impurities and that your blood flow is good.  The hot and cold rooms, the bade pool and hot tubs in Korean Saunas are designed to facilitate that.  And let me tell you, it works.  It really does.

And the Hot Stone Bip and Bop today was absolutely AWESOME.

Fixing Chronicles

There are certain things you give up on when going from owning your own house to a rental.  A powerful dishwasher is one of them.

And the dishwasher in that kitchen was   

Our rental has "one of those" dishwashers.  You know the kind, one of those lower end models that only has one spinning jet at the bottom.  Placing anything big on the bottom rack causes everything above it to go completely unwashed. YB and I weren't expecting the world of it when we moved in and at that time it washed as well as could be expected.  A couple of months ago YB and I noticed the washing quality started to go downhill.  The dishes started coming out cloudy and the top rack looked like it had hardly been hit with water.  

My first thought was the primary intake was clogged so I cleaned that out.  That fixed things for a few days.

Then I mistakenly used a dish gel so cheap it didn't work at all and, in fact, gummed up the secondary intake and part of the spinning jet.  

So I took those apart, cleaned those out, which, for a time, made the dishes "washed" but not "clean".  We lived with that for a few weeks, rinsing out the dishes before running them through the washer and even rinsing them again after coming out from the washer.

Yesterday I had enough.

I opened the dishwasher after a load had been done to find that a small piece of food which should have been easily rinsed off had not moved one bit.  It was after dinner and the kids needed a bath and be put to bed but I could not put it off any longer.  I rechecked the secondary intake nearest the door.  Clean.  I removed the spinning jet.  Clean.  I took apart the primary intake.  Seemed clean.

Cue the muttering under my breath.

Then I dug down deeper in the primary intake.  I found a grill area where the water is pumped through before being sent to the jet.  It felt like one of the soft plastic pieces was loose.  I pulled at it and looked at what broke off.  It turned out to be a piece of very old food or a piece of a label.

Hmm.

I spend the next 20 minutes pulling junk off of the grill area.  Bits of food, bits of labels, bones, a piece of wood from who knows what, small chunks of glass from broken whatevers.  How did the washer work at all with all this stuff down there?  I put everything back together, loaded it up and turned it on.  And oh joy!  There could be no better sound than that of water actually hitting and moving dishes on both racks.

I now know way more about our dishwasher than I care to but for some reason am proud of that because it is actually a relevant knowledge.  I suppose the signs of adulthood are such as these.

Milestones...

Praise be to the Lord, the God of hosts!  YB and I paid off our final student loan today!

Vacation Thoughts

Earlier this week YB and myself with the kids in tow returned home from a vacation to the Grandparents house.  Life is full of new experiences when married, and those experiences multiplied when married and traveling with kids.  So below are a few of my bullet point observations from our experience last week:

1. If your wife travels a few days ahead of you be prepared for the longest, quietest day at home you've ever experienced.  Also, be prepared for the phone call and text messages describing the awesome time she is having at her connecting airport in a coffee shop.
2. When the kids arrive at the grandparents house, expect to see videos of them doing things they have yet to experience, like dancing in the rain or watching grandpa eat something he's not supposed to.
3. Throw every piece of their normal daily schedule, like naps, out the window.  You'll probably make it about six days before they begin to fall apart or start randomly laying on the floor, drifting off to sleep.
4. In the same kind, throw every part of their normal diet out the window as grandma and grandpa, auntie and uncle sneak them goodies they otherwise do not ever have in massive amounts.  S'mores is a good example.  Then watch your son terrorize the yard for 30 minutes and then start inexplicably crying at nothing when the sugar crash comes.  See the last part of #3.
5. If they are too young, do not expect your kids to realize what "going home" means, especially if a six-hour car ride is what it takes to get there.  Do not expect you'll get a fight.  Do, however, fully expect there to be much tiredness, crankiness and sleeping for at least three or four days once you do get home.
6. Regarding your wife, should you have the resources to let the kids stay with the grandparents and you and she have the resources to stay at a hotel, expect her to live it up.  At midday use of the gym should be expected, as well as long uninterrupted naps, while you help the grandparents out with unexpected and well timed yard work during your stay.
7. Your drive back with the family in tow will be much longer than the drive up when it was just you.  Bathroom and meal breaks will be more frequent and the latter will be very random.  "Daddy I have to pee pee" will be heard as you are driving down a country road and the first gravel pull off you see will have a cop car in it with a police officer who is trying to concentrate on catching speeders.  He will have a back row seat to your son who has been holding it in all day.

I think trips to and relationships with the grandparents are absolutely necessary to the well-being of a child's life.  I have very fond memories of the experiences I had with my grandparents and want G and Z to have the same.  Of the things I want to give G and Z in life toward the shorter of the long term, a yard is one, but more importantly is time with the grandparents.  We pray.  We will see what God will do.

Tripping It

This week YB, G, Z and I are visiting my parents, a trip timed with a cousin's wedding which I was not able to attend as I was committed to a day of work.  To make things easier, I flew YB and the kids up.  One person driving six hours in a car with a one and three year old is not something I wanted YB subjected to.  It's not like flying is any easier.  Sure someone else is doing the transporting but the hardest thing to watch is a mom with a kid or multiple kids in an airport, especially a mom who hasn't packed correctly.  If you're a frequent flyer you know the kind of moms I'm talking about.  Generally speaking they have a packed suitcase that passes as a carryon for themselves and one for each kid.  The kid may or may not be carrying or pulling their own suitcase.  The mom also has has a stroller or car seat and diaper bag along with her purse and cell phone.  None of these bags are consolidated.  One mom, four bags, a stroller, a phone, and a kid.  No good comes from this.  It breaks my heart.  I used to see Navy wives do this all the time when we lived in Hampton Roads.  I don't know where they were going so frequently, but there they were.  Making a valiant attempt at something that needs a very logistical approach if you're going to have any kind of success in it.

When I fly by myself I have two bags.  One carryon that has my clothes for the trip, and my backpack containing my laptop and tech supplies.  When YB and the kids fly with me I always check one or two suitcases.  The thought of trying to save $50 at the cost of navigating an airport, even if it's one direct flight with two kids and a parent for each, is just not worth it.  Checking two bags still leaves us with three carryons, a diaper bag and stroller.

When YB and the kids fly on their own, like last Friday, I pack them as logically as possible.  They have one checked suitcase, one carryon, the diaper bag, the stroller, and a papoose for Z.  Somehow last week they managed to not need the carryon.  Everything consolidated into the diaper bag.  It was a miracle.

When all is said and done, the hardest part of putting YB and the kids on an airplane is not the packing, logistics or preparation that goes into it.  The hardest part about putting them on an airplane is when they go through security without me, when I watch my entire life go somewhere that I cannot go, into situations that I cannot help them through, making that long, painful walk back to the car without them, driving home to the empty, quiet, lonely house.  That's the hardest part.  Even though I know I'll see them in a few days it still feels like my heart is torn in two and true healing only happens when we are reunited again.

Life After Facebook

Life after Facebook?  Is there such a thing?

Oh yes, there is.  And let me tell you, what a wonderful thing it is.  What a wonderful thing it is to not check something that 80% to 90% of the time was people reposting memes, "Wish I were at Disney" postcards, ads to friend Mark Zuckerberg (give me a break), and 5% asking you to give up more and more of your personal data.

When I first got Facebook back in the day, '06 or '07, it was fun.  Yes it was a time waster, but it was a fun time waster with the ability to lock yourself down securely.  Seriously, whatever happened to the Flare Board?  But today it has turned into something that takes work to use it.  It's no longer something to kill a few minutes with.  It's something that takes time to maintain and navigate, and Facebook sure isn't paying me to do that.  My time is way too valuable.

So what is life like after Facebook?  Well, I have more time during the day.  I honestly wasn't spending much time on it anyway, but having 20-30 contiguous minutes of your life back per day is a noticeable addition.  My phone's battery life went through the roof.  Even the backend process on the iPhone (without the standalone app installed) had a noticeably negative affect on power consumption.  Install the standalone app and you wind up not being able to get through two days of careful usage. YB's old 4S is worse.  Heaven help you if you're traveling.  And then there's creativity.  I'm beginning to write again, not anything heavy or necessarily material for thinking, but YB and I haven't updated this blog for over a year and I think it's time to start again.  It's amazing the number of things that you think of doing when you're not thinking, "Oh I have to post this picture/thought/meme".  At some point in the future I will be starting a blog for the TD in me.  Posting that material here would probably make the two readers (YB and I LOL) pass out from sheer boredom and cause me to go back to Facebook.  I'm also thinking of adding a section for what I hope to be the experiences and growth of my *cough* golf game *cough*.