Ahhhhh Toast!

We woke up on day one and really didn’t know what we were going to do. All the girls wanted to go shopping. The guys wanted to play golf. Not being a big golfer myself, I decided to go for a hike. My good friend’s grandson asked if he could join me. We sat around trying to decide which trail that we wanted to hike and I finally found one that was not too challenging for an out of shape 34 year old and a 9 year full of energy. We choose to go to Laurel Falls which is about a 2.5 mile round trip hike. The trail was great but was crowded. The waterfall at the top was even more crowded.

My hiking partner.

The weather was great and we had a great hike.

On the second day all 13 of us woke up and went to Clingman’s Dome.  It was about a half mile walk to the observatory. At 6643 feet, Clingmans Dome is the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was really cloudy/hazy day and visibility was cut way short.  It had to have been at least 15 degrees cooler at the top.

John and KK walking up to the top of Clingman's Dome

Just a little cool at the top!~

John and Beth Walking to the Top!

Not much of a view.

We didn’t stay at the top long. Visibility was poor and we weren’t dressed for the cooler weather. We got back down to the parking lot and took a few more photos and then headed to Cherokee.

JJ and Mr. Ray

Would have been a cool photo if I would have picked a better BG

The next couple of days were filled with more adventures. I will post more once I have gone through all the photos.

Cupidity........

The most part of each day is spent brushing up on my vocabulary for the GRE which I am scheduled to take on May the 11th. I am going through a Master Word List in Barron’s GRE Prep book. After every couple pages of words there is a simple test. I have been averaging 12 out 15 on these tests. I am spending most of my time going back through and reviewing the words that I am not familiar with. This week I have also start studying for the Quantitative section. My math skills are ……lacking so this section is going to be my biggest headache.

I am thinking of letting So-Hee take the test for me. She seems to always want to study with JJ.

I have also been applying for numerous jobs but have had trouble finding exactly what I am looking for. I am trying to find a part-time job that will not eat up most of my time but still has a large number of hours per week. I have applied for a couple and waiting to hear back from them. I also have a couple of photography projects that are coming up in the next couple of weeks and even one that I will probably profit from~! I did have a few photos that were used for the new church website. Check it out here!

I also have been slowly recruiting teachers to teach in Korea. I am about 60% finished with my website and still need to fix some bugs and write a few more pages before it goes live!

JJ and I have been trying to cook more and have really stopped going out to eat. Can you tell which meals she cooked?

So-Hee has learned where her food bowl is and has gotten bigger in the last month.

I have a few more posts planned for this week. Expect to see them sometime toward the end of the week.
Project 55
GRE Study Plans
Back to the USA

Kimchi

Multi-cultural from Left to Right Tony Taylor-Ghana, JJ-Korea, Me-US, and Father Tommy Conway-Ireland

I will post more photos later in the weekend along with an update on what we have been doing since I last updated here.

As you can see, we had some luck with our deer cam. We put out a bunch of corn and they seemed to enjoy it. We actually have been having to feed them twice a day. There are a couple of does that have been eating all the corn during the day and then letting the bucks have the crumbs at night. I started putting out most of the corn right before dark. The camera is actually set up about 30 yards from the house. I still can’t believe that the bigger deer have gotten this close to the house! We have been experimenting with moving the camera around for the perfect shot. I am sure that we will continue to try to capture some more images. There is a 10 point around here that I really want to get a shot of.

Can you see the coon?

This one appears to be a singer!

These two have eaten all of corn.

The picture really does not have that much to do with studying Korean except this is the new background for my twitter page which has been my new way to study Korean. I found TWIPL which is a Korean application to post photos on Twitter. I commented on a couple of photos in Korean and exchanged a couple messages with Korean Twitter users. I also started posting a few photos on TWIPL myself. For the last few days a few of my posts have been commented on by Korean speakers and I have been trying to post as much as I can in Korean. I have been pretty proud of the amount of their replies that I understand but still am having to use my dictionary, Google translator and JJ way too much for answering messages in Korean. I have started back with my flash card system and already have about 100 new words to learn. I also am back using the Seogang Series of text books. I am following about 10 Koreans on Twitter and hopefully will begin to understand more and more of their messages without assistance.

Deer Cam
I put out a wildlife camera a few days ago. The first few nights the camera was set up away from the house in the middle of the woods. We had no luck so my grandfather and I bought some corn and moved the camera closer to the house. We had seen some deer tracks and hoped for the best. We did get some photos but are having some problems with the flash firing way too early or way too late. We had given thought to opening the machine and attempting to fix it but decided that it would be way too advanced for us to do it. I will post more over our results tomorrow! I will say that all of our corn was gone and today I had to feed them twice.

Deer Camera with corn as bait

You can see the quality is very low...Not even a megapixel

These two does ate all my corn.