Bloggus Interruptus

In the spirit of fessing up and chopping down the cherry tree and all that, we are just plain old bad bloggers. Yesterday morning was a delight - up early to run on a gorgeous spring day, back early to turn on the coffee pot for a few steaming mugs of Sumatran extra bold, noses buried deeply in good books, and the knowledge that we had only eight hours of ABCs before a weekend with no plans besides more of the same. Not once did it occur to us to blog. I blame Jack Burns, the extraordinary protagonist of John Irving's latest doorstop, who has me madly turning pages in a novel full of tattoo addicts and classic Bob Dylan lyrics. Deanna holds "Everything is Illuminated" responsible, finding herself as rapt in the epistolic narrative as in the story itself.

Yesterday served as an unavoidable preview to OOFALWO's summer hiatus. The teacher who left us his laptop to go travelling in southeast Asia is returning to Seoul next week, and will want his Powerbook back. His return sends us to the noise and crowds of internet cafes until we can procure a laptop of our own. We're planning on going a month or two without, meaning very sporadic updates to the blog. Once we are settled in our new apartment (our fourth move in a year) with some new technology, we hope to return to regularly scheduled programming.

As a token of reconciliation and in a desperate attempt to keep our readers from abandoning us before we abandon them, we offer two photos today: first, a lion at Jogyesa temple meant to, yep, you guessed it, keep the bad spirits away; and second, a "Free Hugs" guy in Insadong meant to keep the bad moods away. The Free Hugger folks are always there, and appear to be affiliated with no religious group or have no ulterior motives (I had originally thought them to be a roving band of highly dextrous pickpockets with a penchant for personal space invasion) besides making people smile.