Here are some of the things I wanted to tell you. I could talk about our winter break trip for ever and ever. There are so many funny stories to tell! I'll bore you with them this summer. We will be coming back and visiting, hopefully soon after our teaching obligations are wrapped up in the first week of June. I have to go to a conference like I did last year, and I'm not sure what week that will be. We will need to leave at the end of the first week of July to be back here by July 14 or 15.
We are into the groove of the second (very, very short semester). We have 2 weeks after this one, followed by a weeklong Quarter Break. We aren't going anywhere for this break and are going to explore around here. The weather should be nice and we are surrounded by natural beauty. After that, it is only 3 weeks until AP exams, a few more weeks and then we are finished. What a whirlwind!
The weather here is cold and we have a tiny wood stove to heat our little cozy house...or at least the living room. Our bedroom has reminded me of Grandma and Grandpa Edmondson's back bedroom, the one that was like a freezer, on a couple of nights. Thank goodness Tim insisted on bringing his very warm sleeping bags. I sleep under one of them at night and Cassidy has the other. Poor Tim! I guess he needs a third one now.
There are signs of spring already, though. The tree-sized rhododendrons are blooming. Big, beautiful, splashy red flowers are showing up over the hillside. I had to take a drive this weekend to scout out a site for my Geography field trip coming up on Friday. We went out to a valley to the north to check out a river bed and the drive was beautiful! The cherry trees are blooming and there were some other trees that I didn't recognize that were sending out their spring blossoms. I can't wait to see the mountains in springtime!
Here's a photo of the valley. It was a pretty grey day, with lots of showers on Sunday, so I will hopefully have sharper photos from our field trip on Friday. The fields right there on the banks of the river are for rice. I'll post some of the wheat and mustard fields that appear on the terraces on the mountains later. They stand out on the brown and dark green of the mountains as if they have been painted and they are stunning. I couldn't take my eyes off them as the driver wound around the roads.