Sack Family and COVID19

We are doing okay. Not great, not bad, but a solid okay.

There. That's the post. I can't go into more detail, because the details are all tangled up like a pile of coat hangers: if I pull one out to include, I just have to include a couple more to support it, and those sort of need more background to make sense of. Next thing I know, we're talking about the Japanese occupation of Korea, my job, which has changed a lot in the last year, and Busan Waldorf School, where my kids currently aren't going to school.

Nevermind. It's all in my head. I just don't want to go into it because my brain is getting used up on other stuff. I started writing this update a few days ago, and found that it was a page and a half about my job. So I retitled it, set it aside, and started this post. It's Sunday, April 5th as I start this, and I plan to publish this week. Preferably early this week, so I can use it to procrastinate for work that needs to be done by Thursday.

All right, enough culture talk. This is twice now that I have started a post about my family and dodged the issue. It's now it's April 11th, and there are two more posts in the queue and this one has been reduced to half a page.

Winter vacation is always an interesting time for us: Horyon usually has about two weeks of actual vacation, during which we try to go out of town for some kind of trip. The rest of her vacation is taken up by "vacation classes," which I could have sworn I had written about previously on the Roblog, but a brief search revealed nothing, and an intense search felt like more procrastination than I was ready to commit to. I am leaving this coat hanger in the closet. Even with vacation classes, Horyon has more time at home than usual. The kids have about 6 weeks off, and I have more than two months. By the end of vacation time we are all ready to go back to our normal lives. There is protesting on all fronts, but it is clear that everyone wants to be back in their respective schools.

This past vacation was no different. We drove to a big, famous amusement park called Everland south of Seoul. This was early February: the Coronavirus was starting to come into public view, so people were wearing masks and it was hard to buy hand sanitizer. There was no government directive to avoid crowded places, but people were starting to do that on their own. And the temperatures were wintery: below freezing at night, snow on the ground. Hat and gloves cold. There were not many people there, so we could go on most of the rides without waiting long. When Everland is running full steam you wait an hour or two for most rides, and they sell an add-on package that lets you go to the VIP line. Not necessary in February. Of course, the water-based rides were closed, and the wooden roller coaster was as well. I was very disappointed with that. But we had a

This year the kids had a week of school, then we went on COVID19 lockdown. At first the kids were happy, "Yay! More vacation!" That lasted about a week*, which was about a week longer than it lasted for Horyon and me. Then we started hearing, "I want to go back to school," and "I miss my friends," and "My soul is starving in this wretched isolation."

* This is a sort of average. Maxine figured out that this was bad news within a few days. Quinten took longer.

By now I'm pretty sure you all understand this reality. You are either under some sort of lockdown, or reading this in the future, trying to figure out how exactly our species was wiped out.* But we started in early March, so we've been doing it longer.

*I know, my optimism is amusing.

The country as a whole has done well, but we've had some minor scares along the way: Horyon has had low-grade fevers (under 100 degrees F), enough that her school nurse made her go to the hospital to get tested. Twice. Both came back negative, both within 12 hours from hospitals designated for testing. Early on she had a week or so of a bad cold or flu, with a real fever. She slept in a separate room for a couple of weeks, just to be safe.

Maxine was also sick for a while with the same flu Horyon had. So along with our family being isolated from everyone else, we were isolating ourselves from each other. Horyon and Maxine were pretty much worthless for about a week. Maxine's been doing dishes the past few months, so we really missed that, and when Mommy goes down for the count, everything slows way down.

So now it's April 19th. I am determined to publish this soon, but that has been the case for two weeks.

The kids are going back to school. Just once or twice a week, with classes divided so that only five students at a time are there. Our school is a Waldorf school, so they don't have kids doing computer literacy until 10th grade (next year for Maxine). Even then, they have a ground-up approach, starting with how computers are made and work, the basics of programing and communication, and touching on the Internet right at the end. Before that, they don't want students to get on the Internet at all.

I refuse to stick slavishly to these guidelines, but my kids do get a lot less screen time than most, and it's a win most of the time. I miss being able to discuss much pop culture with them, but they are still pretty fun to talk to. Which is all beside the point. The point being that my kids don't do online school time. They go to school a couple of times a week, with just four other kids from their class at a time. They get homework to do, but it's not normal by most standards. Quinten's includes things exercising (take the eight flights of stairs to our apartment eight times a day), growing bean plants from dried beans, and copying a huge amount of text into his notebook. Maxine is at a strange in-between stage, without a regular teacher, so she doesn't have homework per se. Her class is going to do self-directed projects, but they are still working on how that will look.

And now it is April 20th, more than two weeks since I started. I'm going to leave you with just one photo:

Maxine and I with 2000 pieces of Glorious Fun!

The Umbrella Charm

The weather forecast called for rain today, so I carried my umbrella and rode the subway to work.  Just as I got there it started sprinkling, so I think I could have made it by bike.  Twenty minutes later my coworker Ed stopped by my room on his way in.  He was soaked to the skin from riding his motorcycle to work.  He told me that when he left home the weather looked fine.  He took the tunnel (cuts a couple of k off the trip to work), and when he came out on the school side it was pouring rain.  So I felt somewhat better about not riding.

It was fairly clear when I left work as well.  It might have been a successful ride today, but then again I may have staved off the rain by simply carrying my umbrella.

If you had not guessed, I am attempting to publish the Roblog daily, even if the posts end up being somewhat insignificant.  I started this post before midnight my time, but it is now 20 after.  Even insignificant writing takes time, you know.

Before I go to bed, a quick update on the kids:

Quinten has taken to loudly announcing when a television show is finished.  To the uninitiated it probably sounds like "blah blah blah ih pinish!", but we can hear it as "Mickey Mouse is finished!"  He hollers whether one of us is in the room or not, and often yells three or four times even after verbal acknowledgement.

Maxine is psyched because her birthday is coming up, October 5th.  Don't tell her, but I think we are going to get her a turtle.

Good Kids

I had lunch at Burger King in Somyon yesterday, which is a rare treat for me. McDonalds has left it's huge footprints all over this country, but the King has not been so successful. People tell me it's because B.K. is too expensive, which leads me to believe that they can't tell the difference between a decent hamburger and a Big Mac. The menus at both places are pretty much the same as in America. You get the odd dessert thing with a combination of beans and ice cream (true!) or burgers with "Korean style" sauce.

But that's all beside the point. The point is that at the table next to me were four boys. (The rest of the restaurant had like two other tables with people, but they sat next to me. Welcome to Korea.) They were pretty well behaved, and they didn't point at me, make goofy comments in English (e.g. too many "OK!"s, "You are stone head!", etc.) or hit each other too much.

What they were doing was messing with their cell phones. I don't spend a lot of time around many kids, so I really had no idea how old these boys were, so I thought I'd ask. First I asked if they spoke English, and they all said yes. Good start. I might have been able to ask what I wanted in Korean, but I would have sounded like some kind of foreigner or something. They were very polite to me, and spoke English surprisingly well. This is what I found out:

They were all 13 years old. (I assume Korean age, so 11 or 12 by Western reckoning.)

The time they had had cell phones varied from four months to five years. Yeah, since he was like seven years old!

One of them didn't have his cell phone because his mother had taken it away. I'm afraid I didn't ask why.

One of their mothers had driven them to Somyon. They get to do something like this once a month or so.

They didn't all go to the same school, they just live in the same neighborhood.

One of them spent a year in Canada, though he spoke less than the other boys.

When I got home, I talked with Horyon about when Maxine will get her first cell phone. We're guessing even earlier than those boys. I think she's going to start asking pretty soon, because she's already fascinated by cell phones.

In biking news, today I got 2k up Kumryung Mountain. I decided that I am not masochistic enough to do this thing without stopping at all, so I took three or four breaks to drink water and pant like a dog. When I got up to 2k, I found the retreat center where our church had its outdoor service a couple of years ago. There was plenty of parking lot for me to ride around in without straining myself, but no alternate way down.

I've also decided that I don't like the Kumryung Mountain road. It is very steep and curvy, as well as being poorly surfaced for biking. Lots of washboard concrete, and a few patches of red stuff they put on the road to remind cars to slow down. all it does for bikes is make us feel like we have no traction. Going up is bad enough, but down is almost worse. I had to stop halfway down to take a rest and get the cramps out of my hands.

And so I'm limiting myself to one Kumryung Mountain attempt per week. Even after relaxing in the bath house, I still feel beat up. I'm too old to be doing this kind of thing every day.