For the moment we are only preparing the place.
Last year was the painting of the rear part of the house. This year will be renewing the office and refreshing the main entrance walls and ceiling.
For that purpose we are selecting and tiding all the belongings that are in the office. I have already put away more than fifty outdated software manuals as well as probably some hundred original old programs still stored in floppies.
Sometimes it is difficult to throw away some documents, papers, objects that wear some sentimental aura. In the other hand, there are plenty of useless gadgets and objects that I can very easily put away.
I have not yet started checking inside the cupboards. I have some idea about what I am going to find there. Plenty of things, that are there, since we moved here, some seventeen years ago. Most of them I know will go directly to the bin, others will hopefully get another place somewhere in the house.
What takes most of the energy are de documents, and the books. I try to keep them in some logical structure.
First I must pack and put them in a temporary place (buffer) because they must come back to the office again when the renovation works are finished.
Selecting papers and documents from a very old cardboard box has let me to a wonderful finding.
I have found (I knew they were somewhere at home) some material from my childhood, and teenage era. A drawing book from 1968 I wasn't 11 years old yet and some other drawings done a few years later. Some of these draws, have been aready published in the artistic branch of this blog.
I have also found several letters from one of my pen-friends (1974-1980) My friend Cha Hee Soog, a Korean girl who gave me the desire to learn English.From 1974 to 1977 every letter I got from her, had to be read word by word with a dictionary. Then, making abstraction of any grammar and taking in account only the words I had to try to catch the meaning of her letter. That was the easiest part of the business. The most difficult was to write to her.
I must admit that for this second phase I basically required the service of someone having more knowledge than me of the English language.
We broke our pen relation when I got married. I do not really know why because even Evelyne, my wife, wrote her some letters in our early years of couple.
I would like to be able to get in touch again with her. I know my blog isn't so international that I could expect to find her but, who knows ?
Her name is/was CHA HEE SOOG, she used to live in :
590-9 5-ban 23-tong
Poong-Hyang-Dong, Kwang-joo
Jeon Nam 500
Today she must be 48 years old.
Some thirty years later, I miss her letters.
