First weekend of April

Friday was April Fools Day, so I made up a fake sabbatical announcement:

"After a long wait, we have finally gotten the contract for a sabbatical. We will be heading to Kigali, Rwanda (yes that is in Africa), where I have accepted a nine-month position at the University of Rwanda. Now I know when you think of Rwanda you think of the horrible things that happened there years ago – but that has mostly diminished. We have a lot of preparation work to do - do you know anybody that would like to rent our house next year? We are all nervous about the whole thing but our recent trip to China has whetted our appetite for international travel (we have a lot of our booster shots already). There will be adjustments to be sure - I will have to adjust to eating lots of banana dishes. Karen was initially not enthusiastic about traveling to some rural areas where the women are required to go topless, but now her attitude is “When in Rome…”. We have been taking a few language classes and Kris has been doing quite well – the teacher claims that tweens are just really good at making clicking noises with their tongues. Kris and Karen were also concerned about the inroads that Al Qaeda has been making in that country, but I told them that if I were to run into Al Qaeda members that that I would tell them just what I think of their horrible activities. Katie is largely oblivious to the whole thing – we think that that a school system that canes people for not being perfectly still might ultimately be good for her. The travel there will take many hours, but , if there are no big strikes or civil unrest, we anticipate arriving there on June 28 (the date of Karen’s Major Birthday). Anyway, we have been wanting to tell you all this , but wanted to wait until the contract was in hand on this April 1, 2011."

The response ranged from total belief to total disbelief.

Friday night and throughout the weekend, Kris and I worked on her science fair project, which involved finding the mass and volumes of bowling balls to find a pattern of which ones floated in water and which ones did not. Katie's soccer practice was 8:30 Saturday morning. It was about 40 F. The fairly-clueless kids are fun to watch. In the afternoon we had a visit from our college friends from Madison (the Kaeders). We hung around together and went swimming at a hotel. Today we had lunch on the east side of the Illinois river. Note the very defensive Canadian goose in one of the pictures - apparently there was a nest nearby. High in the 80s today (we had snow flurries last week). After the Kaeders left I tilled our garden and we planted some seeds. It is fun to see the flowers starting to come out. Tomorrow the high is supposed to be in the 50s.