Bonus episode #171 – March Madness

Hello everybody and welcome to bonus episode number 171 of the Cublips English podcast. How is it going? My name is Andrew. It's so great to be back here with you for another English study session. If you're new to our bonus episode series and you don't know what it's all about, let me quickly explain What I do here is I just hang out with you and I tell you some stories from my everyday life.

I'm a Canadian guy, but I live abroad in Seoul, South Korea, and I hope that by listening to these stories you will be able to improve your English fluency. We know that when you're learning English, You need to spend a lot of time with the language, you need to get it into your brain, and that's what I'm here to help you with, hopefully in a fun and entertaining way.

And to accompany every bonus episode, there's a 100% free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary that you can get just by following the link in the description for this episode. Plus, if you're a QLOOPS member, then you'll also get a comprehension quiz so you can check and see how much you are able to understand after you listen to my story.

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For an affordable price. And of course, a huge thank you to all of our members out there. Couldn't do Q Loops without you. So thank you so, so much.

Let's get started with the stories for this week and I just wanted to start by putting a bow on talking about my time that I spent in Japan in February. In the last bonus episode I told you about going to Fukuoka. And after visiting Fukuoka, I traveled to Tokyo where I saw a My Bloody Valentine concert, which was incredible. I met up with a bunch of awesome QLIPS listeners as well.

And then I got super sick. And I also talked about getting super sick in a recent bonus episode. If you haven't heard that story, I'll put the link to it in the description for this one so you can check out that story. The concert was mind-blowing. It was incredible. And something very interesting happened during the concert. And I'm actually gonna tell that story in the next Fluency Files episode, our member only series. So

QLOPS members, look forward to that one. I'm gonna record it soon and it should be out shortly. And I also briefly wanted to mention the CULIPS meetup that we had in Tokyo. It was amazing. I want to say a sincere thank you to everyone who came out and joined me there. It was so nice to meet all of you and to get to chat a little bit with you all. My only regret for the meetup was that the time was too short and I didn't get to talk with everyone for as long as I would have liked.

So I really apologize if you came to the meetup and then you were only able to talk with me for a few moments. I I guess I'll just have to come back again one day soon and we'll do it again. We'll do another meetup. But yeah, it was amazing. Thank you so much again to everyone who came out and a big extra special thank you to everyone who gave me a gift. I was totally surprised and and super grateful

for all of the little gifts that I received from different listeners in Tokyo. Cookies, chocolates, peanut butter, my favorite peanut butter, coffee, cards, little letters and handwritten notes, guys. It was very, very touching. and very kind. It made me feel so welcomed to Tokyo. So thank you so, so much. It was an awesome time at the meetup.

And I think for the next meetup we gotta do one in Seoul, where I live here in South Korea. We've got a lot of listeners in Korea and it's about time I think that we do a meetup here in Seoul. So If you're interested in that, uh maybe you could let me know on our Discord community. We'll start getting the discussion started, we'll start planning it, and hopefully we can announce an official meetup here in Seoul sometime in the spring, I hope. We'll see what we can do.

Alright, so guys, I have two things planned that I wanna tell you about, and I guess this episode is going to be a March retrospective. Retrospective means looking back on something. And so I'm recording this on March 29th, right at the very end of March. So yeah, let's do a retrospective look back on March and

It was a pretty busy month for me, but there are a couple of highlights and standout stories that I wanna talk to you about. The first one I'll just mention briefly. I don't wanna go into the weeds too much and talk about all of the details, but Uh just for my running people out there who enjoy hearing about running stories. I did do the Soul Marathon in the middle of March, March fifteenth, I believe was the day that I ran it, and I did it for the third straight year.

Three years in a row now I've run the Soul Marathon and it was a really fun run this year. Again, my running buddy Jimmy joined me and we ran it together. And I was a little bit worried going into the marathon because I had a pretty terrible winter of running because in November of twenty twenty five I ran another marathon here in Seoul called the JTBC Marathon. And uh I put too much effort. I think I went too hard during that marathon because after I finished.

I was sore, as you could imagine, but that soreness never went away and I had a lingering running injury in my hamstring and up into my glutes, which is like the muscle in your butt. I ha I had just really a lot of pain in my leg, my left leg, all through the winter. So that really restricted how much I was able to run. And then also I traveled to Canada and I traveled to Japan, which made running a little bit difficult, and I ended up getting super sick.

So I use this app called Strava when I go running to track my runs so I can have almost like a diary of all of the training that I've done. And it has this really cool stat where you can see how much you trained month by month by month. And if you look at my training throughout the winter,

It was like a zigzag, just up and down, up and down. So I would run a lot for one week, and then the next week was like nothing, maybe because I was injured or I was sick or traveling. And then the next week I'd run a lot. And when I say run a lot, maybe I was running 70 to 80 kilometers during these busy weeks. Which isn't as much as I would like. That's maybe five hours of running a week, five and a half hours of running a week.

Which when you're training for a marathon, to me, that's almost like the bare minimum. And I was only doing that every couple of weeks. So I really, really put in like the bare minimum effort to be able to even finish a full marathon of forty-two kilometers. So going into the soul marathon, I was worried and I had no big plans for trying to break a personal record or anything like that. I just wanted to finish. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to run with my friend for as long as I could.

and just enjoy the atmosphere. I have to tip my cap to the organizers of the Soul Marathon this year. It was better than ever. Uh there were so many people cheering us on as we were running and just the vibe and atmosphere around this marathon was really fun this year.

and i in fact one of the standout parts to me was n this happened twice, at two points during the marathon, there were Uh and to be honest, I didn't get a good look at the musicians because I was running and it was a little bit difficult, so I didn't see them too well. But I believe they were maybe younger musicians like middle school students or high school students.

and they were like orchestras and they were set up in these big yellow Adidas trucks. So there's like big semi truck that was kind of open and the there was like an orchestra and a band inside. And they were playing music, and that happened at two points in the race. And for whatever reason, that just really encouraged me. And I thought it was so great. And

This is a little bit embarrassing. I don't know if it's just because I'm getting older or because when I run a marathon it's just really difficult. So I think maybe I'm more sensitive than usual. But as I was running by one of these mini orchestras in the Adidas truck. They were playing the song Golden, which I'm I'm sure you've heard probably it's a worldwide hit, I think, from

the animated movie K-pop Demon Hunters, this worldwide hit. I believe the band or the singer is called Huntrex, right? Huntrex Golden. So the orchestra was playing this song and it almost made me cry. It was so so cute and just really encouraging and I almost shed a tear as I was going by this orchestra playing on the side of the road. So This is all just to say that the vibes were immaculate. The vibes were great during the race and

Uh it was just a great fun time. Although running a marathon is always difficult, it wasn't too difficult this time. I didn't want to push myself too hard. And I just tried to enjoy it. And I guess I was in better condition than I thought I was, because in the end, I finished in two hours. 57 minutes and 12 seconds, which was my second fastest marathon ever. So uh second place PR, which was totally unexpected, but I'll take it and I'm happy with it.

And I'm keeping the good energy of the soul marathon into my spring training. I'm gonna be running another marathon in early May, uh, if all goes well and I don't get injured or sick or anything. And Now that the spring is here in Seoul, it's it's a complete pleasure to go outside again. We've had some beautiful spring weather. The air quality hasn't been great in Seoul, unfortunately, so that's a bummer, but the weather's nice, the sun's been out.

and the blooms and flowers are out, you can hear the birds singing. Spring is definitely here. And so it's just, yeah, a very big pleasure to get outside and go running as much as possible these days. I've even been trying to wake up early and run in the morning. which is something that's usually very, very difficult for me to do. I'm more of a evening and night runner, which I think is rare. I think most runners who are pretty hardcore regular runners

Like to wake up early in the morning and go running. But for me, I just naturally seem to do better in the evening. I think I like to use the morning time for when my brain is most active and I can like study Korean or I can do some work when my brain is like awake and I can function well. However, I thought there must be some reason why everybody runs in the morning.

So before I preferred to use my brain power in the morning and then my physical power later in the evening and I would run, yeah, in the evening or sometimes even at night. But I figure there must be some reason why people run in the morning. And also all of the marathons that I run, all of the races are always in the morning. So it kind of makes sense to get into that groove, into that habit. of waking up early and running in the morning. So I've been trying that this spring.

I I can't say it's a set habit because I've only been doing it for about two weeks now. However, it's been great trying to sleep earlier, wake up earlier. run in the morning and then have that crossed off of my to-do list for the day, like the exercise is done and then I can just focus on my work or focus on the tasks that I need to do for the rest of the day.

It has been great and it kind of clicked. I'm like, ah, this is why people run in the morning. It makes sense to me now. And yeah, we'll see if I can keep it up because I have been enjoying it. So. That's the part of this week's story that I wanted to talk about regarding running.

And most people would probably think that a marathon is a grind and is difficult. However, uh the next story I'm gonna tell you about is something that I thought was more difficult than a marathon, to be honest with you, and that is that My wife and I have been doing some landscaping in our yard over the past couple of weeks.

And actually it's more like construction than landscaping. Landscaping is what we call essentially gardening, when you make a garden and plant some trees or flowers or maybe make a flower bed. or make a garden or rearrange how your yard looks, all of these things are called landscaping.

However, we did more like construction in our yard. And just to paint a a picture for you of our yard, we live in Seoul. It's a big urban area. We do have a small front yard in in front of our home. However, it's not like a front yard would look in my home country of Canada or what you would probably see on an American TV show or for our European listeners, like a European front yard for a home. It's doesn't look like that. It's essentially just

more like a parking lot. Think of more like a driveway with a wall around it. It's just a cement floor that's walled in in the front of our yard. And Uh originally when we moved into our home we thought, hey, could we turn this into a big garden or and plant some grass or put in some flower beds or something like this and use it uh in a more natural way than just having this concrete floor?

But in reality, it's not so easy to remove that concrete floor and there's like layers and layers and layers of concrete and we're like in this urban jungle. And we were advised not to dig up that. concrete floor that kind of has to stay there or else maybe we'll sink into a sinkhole or something. So we've had to be creative and try to make our yard look more natural in different ways. And my wife's been amazing over the last couple of years since we've lived in this home.

She's done a fantastic job at gardening in containers and we have several big trees and bushes and plants and it looks great. However, everything was just sitting on that concrete. floor, which was a little bit unsightly, and also it's not very even. It's like really bumpy and hilly, which made it hard to garden with bigger containers. Like we have a couple of trees. And we actually had to go to this like nature path near our home to look for some flat stones.

so that we could put them under the pots of our bigger trees, so that the pots would be even, because otherwise they wouldn't be level and they would just tip over, so we had to go

stone hunting to find some nice flat stones, and we'd prop them under the flower pots so that those trees could stay level. So that floor of our yard, that concrete surface of our yard, was very uneven, so My wife was thinking about some things that we could do to improve the aesthetic quality, the beauty, the visuals of the yard.

And she actually even took some pictures of the yard and put it into AI. I think she was using Gemini and went back and forth, like generating ideas and it's pretty crazy AI these days. You can do something like that and it will spit out uh a prototype for you like oh if you do this this this then this will be what the end result looks like

And so one of the ideas that I I'm not sure if it was AI that came up with it or if my wife came up with it on her own. However, she had this plan to take like an L-shaped strip of the yard and then make it a flat platform, not too high up, maybe about I don't know, ten centimeters.

fifteen centimeters or so, and make it like a level platform and we would build it out of cement and then put some tile on top and then we could use that as a platform to put all of our trees and plants and that would add a splash of color and it would also

Yeah, just look more organized and and nicer. And then also we wouldn't have to like use those stones to prop up the flower plants and to make everything level. So she had this idea, she ran it past me, and she's like, I want to do this. What do you think? And I said, Yeah, okay, let's do it. Sounds good and she volunteered to be the foreman. Foreman is a really important job in construction.

And it's usually like the the construction supervisor, the person who manages the crew, makes sure everything is safe and keeps projects on schedule. We call this person the foreman. So my wife was the foreman. And I did all of the grunt work. Do you know this expression? Grunt work. To grunt, this is an interesting verb in English, G-R-U-N-T grunt. It means to make one of those sounds that you make when you're working hard, kind of like oh.

If you're if you're working hard, you make those grunt sounds. Often you can hear tennis players grunt when they hit the ball, right? They're like, huh, as they hit the ball. That is a grunt. So grunt work just means hard physical labor, the kind of work that would make you want to grunt. So my wife was the foreman and I did the grunt work.

And the first thing that was really difficult was we had to buy the supplies. So We went to a local hardware shop in our neighborhood here, probably about a kilometer away, and we had to pick up cement and mortar. And okay, that was fine. It's actually very affordable. However, getting the cement and mortar back to our home.

was expensive. Uh there was a pretty high delivery fee just to drive it about a kilometer back to our home. Now we don't have a car or a vehicle. However, I'm kind of naturally cheap, so I don't like paying money for things if I can avoid it. And I thought I can avoid having to pay this high delivery fee just by taking the concrete back myself. Now these bags of concrete we had A couple of bags that I believe were 25 kilograms and one bag that was 40 kilograms.

Now carrying that would be pretty difficult. Of course I can lift a bag of that weight, but carrying it for a kilometer on a busy city sidewalk is pretty difficult. I actually did that before and almost died. with a huge bag of salt. You know, the salt that you put down in the winter to prevent ice from forming. Our local neighborhood government office was giving away free bags of this salt, and I think it was maybe twenty kilograms.

Again, a kilometer away from our home. And I just went and thought, yeah, I can carry this bag. And almost died. It was so difficult carrying this like 20 or 25 kilogram bag of salt. So I knew that I I couldn't carry these cement bags by myself, but we had this hand cart that I don't know my wife picked up at some points, maybe for shopping or something, and it just looks like one of those plastic milk crates.

But it's got a handle and it's on some little wheels and miraculously it fit a bag of concrete and I was able to load them into this little hand cart and then carry that hand cart back home. It was difficult, but I was able to do it. And it was kind of funny because

going from the hardware store to our home, we have to pass through this busy urban area with tons of people, and the sidewalk is not so great. It's like made out of bricks, so there are lots of bumps, right? And i in the city there are trees and those tree roots grow under the sidewalk so the sidewalk is not flat, it's like up and down and there's bumps and cracks and all of these things and at some points the sidewalk is a little bit narrow.

and there are many people. So my wife's job was to clear the way, so if there were people just standing, loitering on the sidewalk and I was coming through with all of this cement behind her,

She would kind of like, excuse me, excuse me, can you get out of the way and clear the way for me? And then I would follow behind her It's almost like sometimes in Canada you see uh a truck on the highway, which is carrying a really big piece of equipment or a really heavy load, and we call this an oversized load or an oversized truck.

and they take up more than one lane on the highway. And so legally they're required to have a smaller like pickup truck that will drive in front and behind them just to make sure that everything is safe and they can pass people. correctly. And that's what it reminded me of. My wife was like the safety vehicle in front, making sure that my way was clear and that I I wasn't gonna bump into anybody carrying these

yeah, fifty kilogram loads of cement in my little hand cart. So that was the first grunt work job that I had to do was just getting the cement back to our home and then I I had never done this in my life before, but cement mixing was also very difficult. So having to mix the cement with water and some gravel and some other kind of bonding agent that we would use to make sure that the cement actually stuck together and was sticky so that

it wouldn't just dry and crack later on. So mixing that all up with water and preparing the cement, oh, that was also Backbreaking. This is an adjective that we use to describe very, very hard labor. Backbreaking. It's not like my back actually broke, but it's just difficult and you're bent over and I really wish I had a cement truck i in that moment because yeah, mixing cement, who knew? Very, very difficult. So

I was the cement mixer and my wife took the lead in actually making the platform and she would do all of the cement work. So I would just essentially give her the wet cement and then she would form the platform. and then as she was doing that I would go back and mix more cement. And by the time I had finished mixing, she was usually ready for a another batch of this the wet cement. So

We kind of worked like that together and we made the platform and then we put all the tiles on and put the grout in. And the grout is what we call the material that you put between tiles. So, you know, you have this empty space between tiles, and in that empty space, we put a material there called grout. So we did the grout work. And yeah, it took us all day. We started last week. early in the morning, maybe nine thirty AM, and we went all the way till

after dark, maybe eight thirty PM, like all day, literally, and we finished and we're like, okay, great. Like, good job. That was really difficult. Way harder than I thought it was gonna be. And then we went out for dinner and just sort of relaxed. And the next day my wife actually continued there was a few little things that she had to do. And so she spent a lot of the time out there the next day as well. And that was last Sunday.

Sunday is my Clips day, so I had to do some Clips work and editing and episode making. That was a non-negotiable for me, so she decided that she would work on her own, just to do the little finishing touches. And I was working on QLIPS and after a few hours of her being outside, she came to me and said, Andrew, we messed up. We didn't measure very well.

and the platform is too small. We made it too small. Our biggest trees won't fit on the platform. So we're like, Oh, great. Now what? So We decided that we're just going to have to expand it and make it bigger. So that was last weekend and we decided, okay, we need to buy more tiles, we need to buy more cement, and we just need to make this platform bigger. And so that's what we spent all day working on yesterday.

Again I had to go to the hardware store and pick up yesterday it was a forty kilogram bag of cement and carry that back home in my cart. then do all the cement mixing and we extended the platform and put the tiles in and did the grouting and right now it's drying. Thankfully it's finally the correct size. So we shouldn't have to expand it anymore, but it was a lot of work. I have a huge respect. I've always had a huge respect for people.

who work in construction and who work outside and who do these kinds of difficult jobs for a living. uh I've always had a respect for these people, but it just underscored how difficult this kind of work is. So if you out there, if you are a construction worker or you do this kind of Labor, I uh hats off to you, I really respect you because it's not so easy And the final result, I'll put a picture on our socials, on our Discord and our Instagram. You guys can tell me. I think.

You know, my wife and I were joking around, like, we've never done this kind of work before. We don't really know what we're doing. We're probably making tons and tons and tons of errors. And yeah, the final result It looks cute. It's like Indie indie construction, not professional construction. I think it's gonna add some charm to our yard. It's going to make it look better for sure. It's nice that we won't have to deal with those slanted flower pots or like all the rocks.

cropping up the flower pots to be level. However, it's not completely level. I can't say that we completely fixed the problem. So maybe we'll still need to have a couple little stones under there, but Yeah, nice to get that job done with it took up twenty. Two weekends of March. So yeah, this weekend and last weekend were really centered around this construction project.

But now it's all done. We just have to wait. Uh we're gonna wait around a week for all of the cement to dry, and then we'll move our trees and our plants, uh everything on there and yeah I can't wait to see exactly what it will look like. All of our trees this week in the week between construction last week and this week, all of the blooms and the buds have started to come out.

And so yeah, spring is in the air here in our yard and can't wait to see everything in full bloom here in the next few weeks.

But guys, that's essentially what I got up to in March was running and constructing and building and breaking my back with this hard work. But I'm curious about you. How did your march go? Why don't you join us on our Discord community? You can leave a comment for me and for our entire Qlips listening community as well.

And it would be great to hear what you have to say about your march, what you got up to, some of the highlights, maybe even some of the lowlights. I'd love to hear what's going on in your life. So be active with your English. Come and join us. On our Discord, the link to do so for free is in the description for this episode.

And also I want to let you know that we have speaking classes each and every week for CubeLoops members. We have three classes. You're uh allowed to join as many of them as you would like. And each and every week we're having really fun classes. I host a class every Tuesday and yeah, it's great. We have some awesome Cube members who join us and we practice our English and

Yeah, it's just one of the highlights of my week. So if you would like to hang out in a really fun environment, very low pressure, with some great people to practice your English and to talk about what we hear on Qlips. then I'd highly encourage you to join us for our weekly speaking classes. You can do so if you're a Cube loops member and if you'd like to sign up and become a QLOOPs member, then just visit our website, qloops.com and you can do that.

Well, everyone, that's it for me for this week. Please take care, and I'll be back soon with another brand new QLIPS episode. But until then.