Summer vacation

I finally have some good news. After months and months of asking for the same bonus pay and vacation time that my wife gets, and being repetidly being told yes and then a few days later no again, I finally got it. I am getting three weeks of vacation for summer, instead of two weeks and one week of so important desk warming. My co-teacher is ecstatic too, because that means she does not have to come to school and babysit me for that extra week.

I also got back pay for eight months deposited into my account, with that and my after school classes that I am once again the top bread winner for my household and as such I collected my ball sack back from my wife yesterday. I also get to be on top from now on, which is good for me because my back door will have a chance to heal.

Now comes the difficult part, figuring out where I am going to spend three glorious weeks this summer. Right now we have our eyes set on China and Borneo, but it all depends on our actual vacation times matching up, which did not happen last winter and we were unable to go anywhere.

Sick day

After six months of being exposed to no hand washing, open mouth coughing, disease spreading, Korean children who at least 30% of whom are "seek" at any given time, my immune system finally gave up. I guess I have not been eating enough kimchi...

Now it is my turn to say "I seek teacher! Need to sreep in crass." Except I aint going to class, I am using one of my 14 sick days to stay at home and get paid.

Back in the good ole US of A, if I was too sick to drag my sorry ass into work, that was 8 hours of money that I would not earn. As a carpenter, I made over $20.00 an hour, so a sick day meant at least $160.00 would be missing out of the next pay check, more if we were working overtime that day. And if I was so sick, that I needed to go to a doctor? That would have to come out of the next pay check.

There are a lot of things that suck of Korea, but at least I can take a day off every once in a while and not have to worry about how I am going to pay the bills.