thundersnow and other tales

from Wikimedia Commons

You deserve a full update, and you'll get it, but it's just past 7:30 a.m. and I'm still soaking wet from my shower and I have to be out the door by 8:00 or the subways become too crowded to deal with and I'll be late for class. So here you go, bullet time once again:

• We got the third snow of the year yesterday, a heavy, wet, sopping sort of snow that fell awkwardly out of the sky and went splat on the ground. The weird thing was that it rained first and then started snowing—accompanied by thunder. "Thundersnow" I thought to myself as I put on my old boots and traipsed out into that soggy mess to get my computer fixed. 
• Yes, that's the second thing: my computer. The hard drive went belly up last Sunday night. I was just clicking around, minding my own business, adding a few thousand more words to my 35,000-word NaNoWriMo project, when BAM—shutdown. Blue Screen of Death. Fatal error. Crash dump. Restart. Lockup. Force shutdown. No bootable disk. Sigh. I took it to the only Toshiba service center I could find on Google Maps, located in the Gangnam Finance Center building near Yeoksam Station. Once again I felt the unique and exquisitely painful sense of guilt I always get when I'm soliciting some service in Korea without being able to speak Korean. In pidgin (and heartbreakingly apologetic) English, the man behind the counter told me that my hard drive was bad, that he would salvage as much data as he could, replace my hard drive with a new one (albeit a Korean one with an English language pack) and put Humpty-Dumpty all back together again...for 121,000 won. I didn't mind. I was willing to pay any price, as a lot of my notes and pictures—and Novel #4—are completely unsaved and non-backed-up. I guess I got away cheap. I might have lost everything.
• HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Miss H and I are doing our usual thing: throwing a bunch of Thanksgiving-y ingredients into the Crock Pot and turning 'er on. We'll spend the evening nibbling on a delicious amalgam of Thanksgiving dinner, listening to music, sipping Russian champagne and plugging away at our newest jigsaw puzzle. 
• Good Lord, how did finals come so quickly? I was just coasting along, riding my way through a leisurely November with the students, doing various writing projects, quizzes, and fun activities. Now, suddenly, there's barely two weeks left until finals. Five class-days left, and one of them will be taken up by a standardized writing assessment and the other will need to be set aside for review. YIPE!!
• The day after Thanksgiving, the boys (Messrs. JA and BP) are coming over to brew up some more beer. This is the first time we've ever done it at my apartment. I have all the equipment freshly bought and laid by, and am rather excited now that this SNAFU with my computer has been resolved. I'm just going to be running around like a chicken with my head cut off on Friday afternoon after class, picking up my coat from the tailor's (frayed cuffs repaired), my laptop from Gangnam, and a few last-minute supplies from the E-Mart in Cheonho, across the river.
• On Saturday, Miss B, our army doctor friend stationed up in Dongducheon, is coming down for a visit. Oh, and that's also the day that Miss H and I are heading over to Incheon to have our other Thanksgiving dinner at the Fog City Diner. I hope we can fit Miss B in there somewhere. It's hard for her to get weekend passes. 
• And then the weekend after all this, Miss H and I are heading down south to Busan on the KTX (for the first time since spring) to see the gang and have an early Christmas party. Eek.
• And I still haven't resolved my V.D.Q., either. No reservations made yet and no concrete decisions in the offing. Argh!

How'd this happen? Everything was going so calmly for a while, and then BOOM. Chaos! Help! SOS! Mayday! Make it stop! I wanna get off!