Ajuma seems to be in a bad mood these days. I swear, she keeps moving the time of breakfast earlier and earlier. In my first week here, I came down at 7:30 (jet-lagged, you know) and she was all, hey, you're up earlier, breakfast will be a second. In the past few weeks I figured out that 7:50 was a good time to come down for breakfast - I could snooze a few times and still get to school in plenty of time.
This morning, though, the knock came at 7:30. "Come down for breakfast," Uchidashi said politely, being Ajuma's appointed messenger today. Her modus operandi is to complains to the diners present about whomever is not there, and shortly thereafter send someone up to bring the offending parties down. I myself have been the appointed messenger a few times, but never as early as this morning.
So, all that in prelude to saying - I'm kind of tired.
Must really find a way to exercise, as that has proven to be a good mood lifter. I've been wracking my brain for weeks as to how I could do this, given that I just don't have the energy to go to a 7 am taekwondo class for which I'd have to get up at 6:30 and then leave 15 minutes early in order to shower, eat breakfast and get to school on time. Even all that's not too bad, as long as I could get some decent sleep during the week, but with the class being as challenging as it is, I need to devote my evenings to studying, and I can't get to sleep at 10, I just can't.
Anyhoo (as Chuck would say), I've finally hit upon a solution, made possible by the fact that in the winter months (November through February), the KF workday ends at 5 pm instead of 6. So even if I linger half an hour, I'll be able to use the KF gym, which is tiny, but has a treadmill, which is all I need. Yay! Hopefully the exercise will blow that blankness away (see yesterday's entry).

Okay, so I have to talk to you about shoes for a second. Someone in one of my Korean classes in DC told me about the popularity of elf shoes, but I didn't believe it until I saw an example a few days ago. Of course, from that moment on, I saw them everywhere.
Yup, you read right - elf shoes. No, they're not green, and they don't have bells, and the wearer is not a diminutive sprite, but elf shoes is the right name for them: the toes extend anywhere from half an inch to (I swear) two inches beyond where your regular shoe toe stops. And they curve up.
The first one I saw was on a woman waiting to board the subway; she was wearing black ones that looked like a cross between a Debby-does-Dallas cowboy boot (sparkles) and a come-hither mule (two and a half inch heel). I thought that was kinda strange looking, but then I spotted my next one. And the next. And the next.
A really fun aspect of the trend (can't quite tell if it's on the up or on the down; Larry told me about it in the spring, so I suspect the latter) is that there are varying degrees of elf-i-ness - which, by the way, is exhibited by both men and women. You'll have your men's basic black leather lace-up dress shoe that looks perfectly normal except that it has a leetle beet more, uh... shoe, than you'd expect. Then you have your 3 inch heel with 2 extra inches of, um, toe -- turned-up, mind you! -- in the front.
I wonder when it'll hit the States. ;)