No free lunch

I always forget that my brother always has something he is working on around his house. Last year, I was tearing siding off his house and doing footings for a new deck. This year, we painted his shed. I keep waiting for him to downsize and move into a townhouse or a condo.



I can't really complain. I get a nice room, good food, and laundry service.



Every time I come back to Canada I notice that ALL of my middle-aged friends are obsessed with retirement. It's a little depressing since I can't imagine retiring EVER (my feeling is that my students will one day find me slumped dead on my desk, dying with my boots on so to speak - I just hope it happens BEFORE I mark those 20 essays). What's even more depressing is that all of my friends say things like, "I only have $200,000 in this investment, $200,000 in RRSPs, $500,00 in my house, and 20 years of a pension. I don't know how I'm going to manage." Considering that ALL of my friends have 10 times more than I do, I'm a little concerned and a little disheartened. Everyone here lives so big. They all have big houses, big yards, big cars (often more than one). I think that they all expect their lives to be exactly the same after they retire as they are now. I am working on living in the moment, so I hope I can stop worrying about this.

I've been up at the TRU gym a couple of times this week. For the last few years, I've kind of been the king of the gym in Korea. A few guys have been stronger and fitter, but not many and NO women have been even close to my strength and fitness level. Here in Canada, I'm average, and quite a few woman have been stronger. It's a little intimidating when some woman takes a machine after I've used it and throws on a couple more plates. Yikes! If I stayed here, I'd really have to step up my workouts.

The gym shower culture here is also quite different. Today, I noticed how much quieter our showers are because we don't have people vigorously clearing their sinuses on the shower floor or hawking up a lung for 10 minutes and spitting big globs of phlegm on the shower floor. Mirrors here also get just a cursory look. Most guys just quickly run their fingers through their hair and then they're done. In Korea, the guys could easily spend ten minutes preening in front of the mirror before they go to workout and another 10 or 15 minutes when they finish.