I just can't believe it...

Well, here another week has gone by and guess what? (have you guessed yet?...)... I'm still waiting... Okay - I'll tell you: Michael was sick again! Yes, again! I can't believe it. I wash my hands with soap and water, I use Purell, I disinfect the tables, keyboards, mice (uh, computer mice - the others are too hard to catch...), doorhandles and I still had a 100°+F temperature for two days. I can't remember the last time I had a fever for that long. It must be my weakened immune system from the last cold. Cousin Donna sent an encouraging comment that it will only take a couple of years to get our immune systems use to teaching. Did she say a COUPLE OF YEARS? I don't know if I can survive... Actually, it has been a particularly tough winter for our school. We have had 25-30% of the students out ill over the last two weeks. In fact, several schools in the area have had very high attrition rates this winter.

The fever finally broke late Friday afternoon and I was feeling remotely human again by Saturday morning, so Delynn and I went into Basel for a bit to visit the bookstores that carry English books. They carry English titles but it seems criminal to charge 20 Swiss Francs for a paperback novel (That is about $18.00). Even though I had a gift certificate from Christmas, I could not justify spending that much on a trade paperback. Luckily, we have some adult fiction books at the school library that we can read. I have just started getting into Agatha Christie a bit and re-discovered John Grisham (we have several titles from both authors...). As families transition to new assignments, the RIA library is often the recipient of home libraries. We also received a copy of Divine Conspiracy recently and are looking forward to diving in.

After much searching at the bookstore, I decided to spend the gift certificate on an intermediate-level German language workbook. We have a couple of beginning level workbooks but I need something a little more challenging. One of my fellow RIA'ers and I are looking into taking a German conversation course at night school (Volkshochschule). Even though we live in Germany, we really don't get all that much opportunity to speak German during the day. It is also a nice opportunity to make some contacts outside of school within the community.

Just as a side note. Something I noticed again when we were at the book store. Think about this. When you look at a shelf of books (This should be easy for librarian friends), which way do you turn your head to read the titles? Hmmm. Maybe you should get over to Barnes and Noble more often... So, most of us turn our heads to the right because the book titles are written from top to bottom along the books' spines - right? Well, guess what? In Europe, the titles of books are written from bottom to top along the spine, so you would need to tilt your head to the left. Sorry, no reason is forthcoming, just an observation. Again, perhaps this is an easy question for our librarian friends.

Hey, and while we are talking about different (not wrong, just different) things, try this one on. When you open a door to enter a store, do you push or pull? This is assuming that the door does not operate in both directions. Now, when you leave that same store, do you push or pull? I seem to remember reading that in the States that by law the doors have to push outward on exit. Am I right? I have noticed most shops here are exactly the opposite (i.e. you push to enter and pull to exit). It is all very comical because pushing on a "pull to open" door can cause one's face to get planted in the nice clean glass. I'm sure someone is laughing...

Keep praying please for the health of our students, families and staff. Our director will be heading back to the States for the annual NICS conference next week, so we could also use prayer as new teachers make decisions to come over to Germany. For us, we can't believe sometimes that we are actually here and can't believe of a better place to be.

Love all - Serve all.