Monday, Aug 18

Slept.

Tuesday, Aug 19

I Left the Building! I got up when the alarm went off at 7:30…and headed to the San Ferando Valley for the Suiho En Japanese Garden.

It seemed a little “new” to me. A little too pristime. I mean, it was fine. A 6-acre garden next to a water purification plant, so that supplied the water for the large pond and several little babbling brook/waterfall features. Maybe it was just cuz it was here in California…like there was a “dry garden,” for the SoCal desert climate…and I had a hard time differentiating the “dry” parts from the non dry parts. My favorite spots were that little tea house structure next to the pond…it was shady with a little breeze coming through…and a stone wall bench next to the bamboo garden…also shady with a breeze.

It didn’t help that it was Just So Hot. And it was like the first real walking I’d done in about a week.

The gardeners were working Very Hard under the hot conditions, keeping it neat and tidy.

Afterwards I zoomed home in the full-blast car AC, did some work, then took a nap.

It’s the first day since I left Korea that felt “normal.” Had an outing, did some work, felt like I was allowed to nap cuz I’d done those two things. Can I keep it up??

Wednesday, Aug 20

I was “about to get in the shower” for most of the day…but one thing after another distracted me, like ChatGPT telling me my 2026 travel itinerary was FLAWED and I spent HOURS trying to redo it…oh the heartache. Only at like 9pm did a lovely creator respond to my post about said heartache to say “Uhm, I don’t think that’s actually correct.” I looked it up and chastised ChatGPT severely for giving me a near heart attack.

I finally took my shower at about 9:30pm and am now trying to convince myself to get in bed.

Thursday, Aug 21

Stayed home. Slept. Napped. Etc.

Friday, Aug 22

I THOUGHT I was going to have an exciting new adventure to share but…

So, while I was still living in NY, cuz I was looking for new/more side hustles, I learned you could sell your plasma…and it was pretty good money! If you went 2x/week for all four weeks of the money, depending on the center and your weight, you could make like $6-750/month! I was in. Sadly, there were no centers on Long Island…so, I put that idea back in the folder for another day. But as soon as I decided to return to the US for a couple months, I looked it up, and I saw that I could donate in all three states. Cool! I thought I’d be able to pay off like $2,000 off the credit card, which made me very happy.

HOWEVER. After being at the center for three hours: signing in, waiting for an ipad, watching about 30-minutes of videos, waiting, speaking with Nurse #1, responding to 27,961 questions on another (very slow) ipad, waiting…chatting with my waiting area neighbor (who has been doing this twice a week for two years!), then getting called in to speak with Nurse #2 cuz some of my slow ipad questionnaire responses had flagged me.

Most of the questions were like: do you have HIV? Have you had unprotected sex in the past x days? Have you been pricked by a not sterile needele? Have you been in prison? I was like no no no no no. But to  both 1) have you ever had a serious illness and 2) have you stayed overnight at a hospital in the past four months, I had to answer yes. And when Nurse #2 questioned me on these two answers and I told him about cancer in 2017, declared cancer free in 2022…he was like, oh, I’m so sorry, but you need to be five years PAST the five year free mark 🙁 So come back in 2027! Ha.

Ugh. So that was an interesting but wasted morning.

It was quite a cross-section of humanity in there. When I first told my niece where the center was, she was like, can’t you go to one of the big hospitals, that is not a good area. But I never think much of “good area, bad area,” and admittedly, maybe safety is low on my radar after two years in Korea, cuz I NEVER felt unsafe, I didn’t even have to THINK about whether I felt safe or not.But anyway, I went and I had no problems.

The big donation area was like a plasma farm. You’ve seen daity milking stations, where the cows are all backed into stanchions and hooked up to milking machines…it looked sort of like that, except humans instead of cows, and plasma instead of milk. It was quite interesting.

Anyway. Maybe when I come back to the US in 2027 (which is my plan, I guess).

Then I came straight home and rested from my exhausting morning. Ha. Maybe I need to start taking iron or something.

Saturday, Aug 23

Guess what today is? Two years from the day I arrived in Seoul. What an experience that was – exciting but TERRIFYING. Thinking I was going to be arrested by the customs police, thinking I’d arrived with all my luggage at the wrong hotel, not being able to find a place, not being able to get cash, just eating convenience store food, my phone not working, get stranded during rush hour in Gangnam in the rain…it was a lot. My arrival and that first week was a LOT. And it’s still So Vivid. I can’t believe it was two years ago.

But…I survived. Go me.

Today I picked up my aunt for lunch and a visit. This is my mother’s younger sister – the only of the three sisters left. My mother was the eldest, then Bettie was the middle child – she’s who I was named after, she died shortly after giving birth to her first (and only) child…and my Aunt Dodie is the baby…and she’s now 95. She’s still relatiely active but somewaht fragile. She still drives, which concerns me, but she always goes out with a helper. Anyway, we had a nice lunch at Canter’s Deli, which is a classic Los Angeles fixture, a 24-hour diner style restaurant. I had a nice western breakfast (bacon in Korea was the worst) and we caught up.

Then we went back to her house, which is where I stayed all those summers growing up, so it’s very comforting to be there. This is the aunt who, when I was telling family that i was going to Korea, said “what if you die while you’re there? how will God find you?”

We have different priorities, she and I.

I stayed til it was about to start getting dark, and then, because I’m not comfortable driving in unfamiliar places in the dark anymore (vision), I headed home, exhausted. Ha. It’s pretty sad.

And I was gonna get in bed super early but remembered I had scheduled my first Japanese tutoring session for 10pm. It’s a little challenging scheduling with tutors in Japan because of the time difference.

Anyway, that went pretty well. I’m so used to Jun’s thoroughness, and Kohei was not…that. He was very kind and we went over a LOT of material in 50 minutes…but in several areas he was just like “read this yourself” (he had materials that were in both Japanese and English), and I don’t know if that’s cuz HE can’t read English really well or what, but it sort of left me like, huh?? Japanese does have similarities to Korean in many regards…so my Korean learning will help me a bit. But…most of the printed materials were romanized, not in Japanese. And that’s a thing in Korea, to NOT rely on romanization, but to learn the alphabet  FIRST, so you can read. You won’t UNDERSTAND everything, but you can read it, and over time you learn the vocabulary and can understand more of what you read. To start with romanization, at SOME point you’ll have to like take a step back and learn how to change from romanization to actual Japanese alphabet. So I guess I’ll have to teach that to myself somewhat…

By the time we finished the lesson and I saved and went over all the practice sheets he’d shared with me, it was almost midnight. I went to sleep witrh my alarm set for 7am to go to another Japanese garden in the morning before it got too hot.

Sunday, Aug 24

However…I was so tired I slept through the alarm and didn’t wake up til almost 11…and I didn’t want to get there at noon-thirty, it would have been so hot. So here I sit, inside, doing my remote work, catching up on the blog, practicing my Japanese lessons, and making TikTok videos. That is sort of dead in the water since I left Korea, sadface. I’m boring in the US, ha ha.

My niece, et al, return to “my” house late tonight and my peace and rest will be over, ha ha. I’m glad I had this bit of time to myself.

Okay, that’s a wrap. See ya later luv ya bye.

 

 

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