Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Familial Crescendos- Part II

Heather brought the long-anticipated Bob to our post-Christmas family gathering to all of our delight. Of course we weren't evaluating him, but if we hypothetically would have been, he would have scored incredibly well ;)

Kiwi asked a question about proper teeth-brushing (since Bob is a dental student) and it turns out that we were all rather uneducated about the matter so we all ran to grab our toothbrushes and joined in the demonstration...

Bob's ornery side shown through the next morning as he showed us how to slice a banana with needle and thread so that it fell apart as soon as you peel it. Unfortunately Gyu woke up and opened the doctored banana before I could grab my camera, but suffice it to say he was rather shocked to find a pre-sliced banana in the peel!
With Kiwi, Gyu, Heather, Bob, Mom, Dad, Joo and me the house was full of laughter, discussion, games, and reminded me of my long-time dream of having an intentional community.
The lovely girls in our little intentional community attracted some Athens' version of cupids as we hit the town for Valentine's Day.

Throughout this quarter, Gyu and Kiwi have earned their keep in our community by alternating turns with the dishes while Joo has expanded her culinary proportions. I get the lucky position by just studying and throwing a bit of English advice in here and there for the boys. Our cuisine definitely took a step in the Koreanized direction as shown here with our cookie jar being replaced by a garlic jar...
Academically, this quarter has been much smoother as I've hurdled most of the math decay in my brain from eight years of less mathical endeavors. Add to that the bonus of having some extra guys in the house to hang out with (mostly being Chess or frisbee with Kiwi), and it's been a wonderful 10 weeks...
Joo's culinary prowess has reached new heights as she's finally applied for a local cooking school. Actually the following quarter, she'll just start off with a composition class to break her into the American school system, but after that she'll have lots of fun classes like breads, soups, stocks, salads, etc.

To be sure, having a fuller house means less alone time for Joo and me, but we've maintained our family conferences on a semi-regular basis and I think that's helped us to remain quite connected.
We were all happy to see the snow, depressed that we didn't have sleds, and then happy to realize with a sudden epiphany that a sled was simply any object that was relatively slick and could provide a barrier between us and the ground. Therefore, Gyu used platic bags, Joo used a duct-tape chair, Kiwi shaped some cut-up bottles, and I snowboarded down the hill on a leftover piece of laminate wood from when we did the floor.


The melting of the snow signalled the beginning of our sophomore year garden preparations. This time we constrained the budget a bit and decided to do everything from seed rather than seedlings (except the garlic cloves which we planted last fall). As I've been quite busy with school, the research on exactly how to do things fell into Joo's lap to which she indulged in her Youtube junkie habits- I wonder if, in the future, it would be possible to get a youtube degree after a certain amount of hours watching instructional videos- if so, Joo will get her Master's before I do :)
Kiwi and I (but mostly Kiwi) put the final touches on what could be considered our 7-month roof project since we had never actually set up the gutters to drain beyond the house over the summertime.
Weston and Jenny came down to visit us for the first time, a final hang out time before they head over to India... this time around, Wes is looking to self-publish his last 10 years of poetry (although it's much more elaborate than that- he's spent the last year or so working almost full-time to compile, arrange, and edit it into a masterpiece as this will be his first published work).
Towards the end of the quarter, an opportunity arose for me to travel out to Denver, Colorado for the national Engineers Without Borders conference on a research assignment. Never one to turn down a free plane ticket, I gladly accepted, although the four days away from Joo were the longest we've spent apart in two years so the reunion was as sweet as the conference itself.