I opened one of the students’ portfolio packets tonight and laughed and laughed. She’d submitted her personal notebook, as I’d specified students do—I don’t know why, I guess I was planning on quickly perusing their note-taking and whatever in-class exercise work was done outside of the journals when marking them on class participation. Anyway, in this notebook was scrawled, on the first page, in neon pink, the following phrase: MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!~ This was an admonishment I made to the class on the first day. I was warning them that a writing class …

Other than the somewhat disappointing experience of finding blatant plagiarism in one of the essays submitted in my writing class, I’ve had a pretty good day: I got a little writing done on my ghost story in the morning, and I’m now at over 120 pages of material. My ghosts are verging on arriving in Pyongyang, which means I’m probably about halfway to finishing the story, or maybe a little less. I watched the first episode of the old TV show Battlestar Galactica and I am not really interested in watching the rest, but I kind of vaguely got why …

Alley Cat! You’re a wheelin’ & dealin’ kind of catwho not only has the unique ability to takethings in stride, but let it be known you’resmarter than you look. What kind of cat are you? brought to you by Quizilla What? More silly quizzes in the extended Entry, click the link below to see them all.

Here’s a pic Lime gave me clearance to post, from our Autumn wanderings. Awww, ain’t it sweet? Yeah, yeah, I know, shut up, Gord. Anyway, click on it to see a little more detail. Oh, by the way, this is also a reminder to myself to get cracking and post some of the many, many photos I have sitting around on my hard drive. I am hoping to get that done in the next couple of weeks, but final exams take precedent to everything else till my grades are handed in.

Just a reminder: even if it’s blocked on your school server, as it is on mine, the roundup over at Simon World is always worth checking out. Simon linked to one of my posts on this one, and he’s got a more recent one out here. Via Simon World I was led to Jodi’s page and a very interesting post about the Asian practice of “saving face”.

So in my searches for information about saxes in Korea, I’ve come across a couple of facts that are pretty interesting. Selmer saxes are WAY overpriced here. A Selmer bari sax runs about W10,000,000, which, yes, is about $10,000 American, and something like $11,000 Canadian. A used one in really poor shape runs about $9,000 Canadian. Several shops have quoted me figures like that. The well-reputed Yanagisawa saxes are more affordable—perhaps shipping from Japan is just cheaper? Or maybe it’s the fact that Yamaha has a bad rep here, and Selmer is the horn everyone thinks is the best (and …

That’s exactly what was called for today, and the only real interruption was a trip to school to participate in a preparatory meeting for the winter camp I’m working at in January. Lime’s been sick and just kind of sleeping all day, and while sometimes it’s nice to curl up with her, I can’t pass a whole day sleeping, especially when I’m not really feeling too sick anymore. So what have I done? I’ve found something on which to spend my over-overtime made teaching at a high school last semester. It was a killer-bad knot in my schedule and I …

It’s a perfect day because it’s the last day of classes for all but my writing class. The writing class’s worst work is finished as well, and we’re just going to meet next week for a few free-writing sessions. They’ll hand in their essays today, their course portfolios next Friday, and they have two more classes. But my conversation classes are meeting for the last time today. From Monday on, it’s just exams that are left to be done. Not to give the impression I hate my work, but having been so sick all semester has been a drain, and …

Yes, Sax Life, as in, my saxophones. Finished teaching at the high school today, and had a dinner with some of the teachers. It was a good class in the way some of the classes we had were really good, and a bad class in the way other classes had been before. What was weird was how the girls responded to it being the last class. They were suddenly all about taking pictures with their camera-equipped cell phones. They were declaring their undying appreciation of my teaching. A couple of them ran out and got chocolates to give to me …

I hate comment spammers. I really do think they all need to be taken off onto some desert island, if not dropped into the ocean. They’re basically taking the best positive invention of the 20th century, and coating it in feces. Okay, it’s a little personal at this point. There was so much comment spam being directed at my site last night that I lost all access to my installation of MT. I knew there was a spam problem, but I didn’t quite know how to fix it, and I was too busy to do any real research into it. …