OT Sly's house of random, 2021 edition

Reading ‘The Wonky Donkey’ with Tourette’s Syndrome.



You want to laugh for 8 minutes. Watch this video. She has such a great sense of humor about her tourette's.

 

They don't call it Fix Or Repair Daily for nothing.

 

I heard that joke on Wheeler Dealers, a car repair show, as they were working on a Fiat.

 

We had a mouse in our garage (after the bird seed) and had a pest control guy come out as we weren't sure at the time. He laid down a couple of sticky strips. Sure enough, a few days later, there was our dead mouse. My wife didn't know that's what they used, and when she found out, she was appalled that they would use such a cruel method. She would have highly preferred the quick and deadly mousetrap method, as opposed to the long, drawn out aspects of a strip. I told her, I mean, it was just a mouse. She wasn't havin' it. Ahh, well. Sorry, Mickey.

 

In retrospect, that would've been my better choice. I should have started with that for sure. We actually thought it might be a squirrel, hence the call to the pest guy.

 

I've had ants off and on for the last three years of the 5 1/2 years we've lived in this house. I just feel anxious about using ant poison in the area where we have the most problems, the kitchen. They always find something, crumbs in the toaster oven, food waste in the sink's drain, some crumbs not adequately cleaned up on the counter or kitchen table.
By the way, we've only used our dining room once, maybe twice, in the 5 1/2 years we've lived here and that was a large Thanksgiving dinner we hosted for our close and extended families. Seems like a waste.

 

Koreans make two great genre movies:
1. Science fictions;
2. Tragedies, aka tear jerkers.
We watch those.
My wife loves American and Korean soap operas. I can stand the Korean ones but not the American ones.
Korean movies win a lot of foreign awards and deservedly so.
Get ready to cry in every Korean genre. Koreans love to cry. They love to drink alcohol and they love to entertain you in their home. They are also very polite.

 

Yes, I can speak a little and can read it since it is largely phonetic. They have 25 characters and somewhere around 10 dipthongs. A dipthong in English is th, ng, ow, ou, sh, ch, oi and oy. That's eight dipthongs in English. There are probably more if I could just think of them. Once you learn the 25 characters and their sounds you can read Korean. There are a few exceptions such as the character making the hard 'g' sound when placed at the end of a syllable changes to an 'm' sound. English has more exceptions than Korean. You can see that with a little bit of effort you can pick up Korean without a lot of difficulty.
Korean, like German, has an honorific speech when you're talking to someone older or more important such as a teacher or government official, a doctor, etc.
Polite Koreans, which is most of them, place the right hand, turned up, just above the elbow when either shaking hands or accepting something such as food or drink. Of course they bow like all Asians. They also do not wear shoes in the house. You can either slip off your shoes and wear house slippers or just wear your socks which is what we do. And again like a lot of cultures and all Asians I can think of Koreans practice the Latin "mi casa es tu casa", my house is your house. My wife didn't know dirty words in English and even didn't know them in Korean. She learned some dirty words in English by hearing them repeatedly in her work place. She hated hearing them.
This is how my wife is: We had some workmen trimming some of our larger trees which had limbs dead and hanging after our ice storm. She gave them all cold soft drinks. When Lunch time came she fixed them sandwiches and side dishes. Our neighbors paid for the workmen, $700, she found out and went over to their house and gave them $700 which she thought was excessive but never uttered a word about it. Just like Koreans out neighbors refused the money until she forced it on them. She appreciated their gestures so much that she took them a gallon jar of hot kim chee that they like. We just love neighbors like that. We have a yard care service once a week and we sometimes have our yard service to some work on an older couple's yard who live next door, they are so very nice, offering to drive me anywhere I need to go, knowing I'm disabled. Yep, we love our neighborhood.
Geez, I can drift off on some really long winded subjects when trying to answer a brief question. Well, that's me.

 

In Korean they have a different word for boy's older aunt on his mom's side and a different one on his fathers side, and so it goes for his ordered list of aunts according to their rank by age. Then they have the list for their mother's side. Then they add the word boo for their aunt's and uncle's spouse. Then they have different words for your sister depending on whether it's a boy or girl and whether she's older than you or younger, same goes for a girl's sister or brother depending on their age rank. So, my nieces on my wife's side call me either Imo boo if their mother is my wife's sister and Gomo boo if on their father's side my wife is his sister. It all can get a little complicated. My wife's sisters all have told me they want to be called Noonah, which a younger brother would call his older sister because they were very very happy with my marriage to their younger sister and wanted to feel extra close. I've used it so often that I can't remember either their name for a younger brother-in-law or a younger brother (because they all call me Lanny, American custom). My wife is Imo to her sisters' children and her best friend's (Korean) children, they call me uncle even though they are both adopted children from Korea. That makes me Imo boo. On her brother's side, his children call me Gomo boo.
Even explaining it gets complicated
Yeah, receiving things in Korea can be done politely either with placing the right hand under the elbow or by using two hands. I usually use the right hand under my left elbow when either shaking hands for the first time but I think there are times when you should use both hands such as when you are handed a beverage, particularly a alcoholic beverage. My Korean teacher in Bellevue, Washington was a tea teetotaler but he said even he must receive an alcoholic beverage offered and must touch it to his lips but it's not a requirement to actually drink any of it. I think he taught us to receive beverages using two hands. Can't quite recall the detail because it's been about 35 years. Koreans will be extremely happy if you speak any Korean words at all or know any customs at all. They all tell me my Korean is perfect even though I know it to be badly botched. I always try very hard to pronounce foreign words correctly. I speak better German than Korean and always try to pronounce German correctly, ditto for Korean. I know a few words in several languages and try to pronounce them correctly also.
I've asked my wife if I speak Korean with an accent and she has assured me that despite my best efforts I do have an American accent which she finds cute. Oh well, she speaks English with thick Korean accent, so there. Yes, I find that very cute.

 

At one time that was the smallest park in the world. I wonder if that's still true.