December Events

Sooo much has been going on here in last few weeks. December is always crazy it seems. We finally saw the last of the beautiful fall colors and now everything is stark and barren. This reminds me how things looked when we came here almost 1 year ago!

My 2 monkeys are always, always on the go and always coming up with something. Here they are having a guitar and cello duet.

The first week of December we had the St. Andrews ball. This is a huge Scottish event and a great excuse to get all dressed up and generate some money for local causes. Zoe did my hair and make-up, (She knows a lost-cause when she sees one..) so I looked pretty glam!

Here's the 5 Disney Princess all cleaned up. I think this is the first official picture of the 5 of us in one place!

I was in charge of the Whisky tasking event. They had to taste 6 whiskys and there were 9 whisky descriptions given out: 6 real ones and 3 red herrings. They had to try to identify the 6 whiskys. A few folks got 3 out of 6 which I thought was pretty good!

Lots of glasses to fill...

My buddy Aurora. She's a Korean-American who is now an Expat back in Korea! Don't know what I would do without her. She speaks and reads Korean so I am always bugging her to help me find something/translate something/call for something...

We found this place in China called DH Gate. You pick a dress, send them your measurements, and they custom make it for you. A bunch of us went for it so here is the "DH Gate" crew!

After St. Andrews we tried to get into the Holiday Spirit, which is kinda hard in a country where Christmas really isn't a big deal. The Smiths went to Australia for the holiday so they let us put up their Christmas tree. That made the apartment feel a LOT more like Christmas!

Sasha wrote a letter to Santa to tell him that we would be in the Philippines for Christmas. She even wrote a section in for Teddy with him dictating and her doing the writing. What a great Big sis!

And then there was the NOV Christmas party. Sasha and I were basically told that we had been signed up to play our fiddles in front of 600 people. Great. We were less than psyched to begin with and then we got lost getting there and took 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to the event which it turns out was 20 minutes from our house. We barely had time to scarf down dinner and we were up!

My face in this picture pretty much says it all....

Sasha and I decided to just play for each other. Here I am drawing strength from her and trying NOT to look at 600 people!

Me and my girl:

She was amazing as always. Went white as a sheet about half way through, but carried on none the less!

At the end they gave us special gifts. Including bears for the kids that are as big as they are. Did I mention that we live in a tiny apartment?

In other news, I have a new camera!! My other one broke and I got a tiny one to run with in the Disney half marathon, but it takes lousy pictures so I got a real one. The pictures are AMAZING so from now on the blog is going pro-style yo!

Sasha of course HATES being my camera test-subject....

Teddy half way up the hill on his resting rock. We have to stop here every day.

.....and showing me his EPIC muscles.

Addition to the family Alert:  Jeff has been wanting a fish tank so the kids and I got him one for his birthday while he was away on a trip. We have had a blast watching the fish, naming the fish, and just looking, looking, looking....

We even have some "ghost shrimp" there are 3 males and one female. This male has scored a huge food flake.

The female ghost shrimp is upside-down under the filter and that dark mass on her abdomen is tons of eggs! We'll see what happens with that.

Of course no camera test is complete without shots of the furriest members of Team Stolasz....

Max is comin' in for a love...

Here's the whole fish tank set-up. We moved it to the kitchen table so we can watch the fish while we eat. Makes it feel kind of like a Chinese restaurant....

Santa meanwhile got the Christmas card, sent the kids videos which you can see HERE and HERE, and then told them that he was going to bring their stocking stuffers to the Philippines but bring their big present early so they could have it on the plane! So on Saturday the kids got to open their big present from Santa. He rules right? Sasha has been wanting a DS for about a year and was just on pins and needles wondering if Santa was going to come through for her.

It's a "Cars" game!

Playing some crazy cooking game that she wanted...

Teddy and Dad try to figure out this new technology.

Both of the kids also had their Christmas shows this last week so I will try to post pics and vid from that in my next post before we leave. I'd better get on that... only 3 more sleeps until we go to the Philippines!

Half Marathon Training

 The girls and I decided that we should plan a girl's weekend. But we didn't want it to be a weekend of sitting on our derriere's eating food ect so we wanted to come up with something that would be healthy and good and that maybe we could work toward. Then I went for a hike listening to my WDW today podcast and they were talking about the Disney Princess Half Marathon. The rest as they say is history. It's the perfect event. So since September we have been runners in training. First we did a couch to 10K thing and signed up for a 10k race here in Ulsan. Then we found a 16 week 10k to half marathon training schedule and what do you know? We had EXACTLY 16 weeks between the 10k and the Disney princess. The picture above is me the morning of the 10K run which was also the first day of our 10k to half marathon. I was so excited to get the ball rolling on our 16 week journey!
I'm doing this with my friends Ivana (Croatia), Zoe (Australia), Karen (Wales) and Kellee (Australia). They are all hysterical and so fun to run with. Their accents are awesome. I will do video interviews with them at some point so you can hear what I get to run with every day. Love it. We all did the 10K except Kellee as she was bouncing back from an injury. She was there to cheer us on though!

 Here's Karen, Jeff and I about to cross the finish line. We did it in 1 hour and 2 minutes! Makes me want to do another so I can beat the 1 hour mark!

Here's Zoe zipping across the finish line:

 Ahhh, the sweet taste of success!! Our first benchmark on our long journey to 13.1 miles!

 I couldn't wait to go home and log my run. Hey, if the sticker charts work for the kids then why not us right??

 So since then we've been keeping up with our training calendar and having fun. We all take turns having great days, injured days and whiny days, but someone is always there to pull you along, talk you out of it, or celebrate a goal with you. And if you're really lucky, Karen might wag her bum at you.

 L to R, Kellee, Karen, Zoe, and Abbi. Abbi is Kellee's daughter and our fav babysitter. She's been training right along with us and is smashing her personal records almost weekly. We try to do our weekly long runs down in central Ulsan by the river. There are endless running trails there and you can go for miles and it's flat. AAAANNND when you're done there are fabulous coffee shops and little stores where you can find all kinds of Princess accoutrements.

 Gotta love Korean hair accessories! Last wee I scored a tiara AND these little pony tail clips with stick up bejewled crowns. Now I will look regal coming AND going. Gotta have some bling for the people you pass right?

 We even have a t-shirt logo that we're going to hopefully get on our race shirts. What do you think?

The amazing thing is that we are already 1/4 done! 4 weeks down and only 12 to go!

Next week our long run is 9 miles. That's CRAZY!!!!

Holiday Burn-Out...

 The thing about living in an International Foreigners Community is that you get to celebrate each and every single last Holiday ever invented in the History of mankind.

Holiday 1: Canadian Thanksgiving. Canooks are thankful too right? I have no pics of this event. Sorry guys...

Holiday 2: Korean Cheosuk. Second largest Holiday in Korea. Kind of a homecoming/harvest celebration. No school, no work for like 5 days. This is when we went camping:

Holiday 3: Pirates Day. It got it's own blog entry... I'm sure you remember it.

Holiday 4: Halloween!

 Holiday 5: Australia's Melvin Cup (Melbourne Cup? Melvin Cup? Some kind of cup...) It's a big horse race and you have to wear a silly hat and then bet. I bet on some lame dark horse called Americain (cuz you NEVER underestimate an American Underdog am I right?) and won the whole thing. Oh yeah, won like 160,000 Won or something and got a SWEET pink running jacket at the Nike store. I call it my Melvin Cup Jacket.

 Holiday 6: Guy Fawkes Night. This is a cool holiday the Brits celebrate. Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the houses of parliment and kill the Queen. So every year since they drink, eat soup, and burn him in effigy. WE NEED a Holiday where we burn someone in Effigy. Maybe if we finally find Osama Bin Laden we can burn his likeness and have a toast yearly. Think about it and get back to me...

 Teddy at Guy Fawkes night. Lots of soda and sparklers too! The kids had a blast!

 Holiday 7: The Indian Festival of Diwali. This is a festival of light and it goes on for like 2 weeks. They had a big party/show/food fest at the clubhouse. Here's me with my Diwali greeting dot. It has rice stuck in it.

Teddy receives his Diwali greeting:

 Here's my friend Jayshree with her 2 kiddos. She is a Canadian of Indian descent but came here from Houston so she was able to tell me a lot about the holiday.

 Holiday 8: American Thanksgiving!! We celebrated one day early with the Smith Family since Jeff had to work late on Thursday night. We had smoked turkey legs and chicken, craisins, mashed potatoes and squash, and kind of a make-shift green bean casserole, but we got an AWESOME pumpkin pie from Costco. Can't believe they had it here!

So if you're doing the math, that's almost a special event per week since we've been home. Add on Hashes, Quiz Nights, PTA events, 10K races, Flik trips, half marathon training, and good-bye coffee mornings and you begin to get how crazy busy it is around here. My friend Hayley got Pneumonia and checked into the hospital just so she could have a week off! So we're looking forward to Christmas but also an end to this insane Holiday season. Hope all of you back home had a wonderful Thanksgiving with REAL cranberry sauce! Love to all!