Minor Interruption.

I promise you that post with some thoughts on food is coming soon. After last weekend's kidney-stone drama I've spent the majority of this week hunkered down at my desk at work fighting off waves of pain and nausea. You see, here in Korea, you go to work and suffer rather than stay home and recover. It seems to me that it's perfectly acceptable to go to work sick and have zero (and I mean zero) productivity, and I have accomplished about zero since returning to work Tuesday morning. I finally started feeling better yesterday, and feel pretty much normal today. Hooray! What this means though, is that the time I normally use for blogging, my off-periods, has been repurposed for planning the reviews my kids will do next week for their final exams.

Here's an interesting cultural note for today though. We use IM a lot in the office to communicate. In previous work lives I've always avoided emoticons on communications. Both Carolyn and I have discovered that if you don't use this one ^^ at the end of every message, your coworkers assume you're in a bad mood, tired, hung over, or in some way incapacitated. When they found out I was sick I got lots of replies like this ^^* to show me that they were sad for me. I think it's a quirky and somewhat cute bit of office culture here.

Now, back to work...that second grade 'b' class is coming up in about 10 minutes. FML.