Back in the swing of things

Hello again,

Well things here have picked up now that we're finished with the second week of school in the new year. This week has gond by really quickly, and I think that the next one will, too. We have been having multiple sunny days in a row here, which has made everything a lot easier to bear. The lake is frozen, but since it keeps dipping up to 0 degrees and maybe for a few hours a little above, I have been advised not to try walking on it. We took a walk today and saw people skating, but yesterday a little girl drowned not too far from here because the ice broke under her, and it took 40 minutes for the fire department to get there.

My classes are going pretty well. Got to have Nonsense Olympics with the seventh graders, games where they had to balance balloons on rulers and stuff like that, and have been working on Martin Luther King with some of the older grades, because there isn't a lot of material about him in the books. Sometime around seventh or eighth grade they read part of "I have a dream", but that's about it. I figured I'd try and use the holiday as a springboard for getting it into the lessons.

Yesterday I went swimming in the thermal baths in Bad Saarow. Oh man are those a good idea. It was so great to finally not be wearing five layers of clothes. You can swim inside and outside, and there are all kids of different jets and whirlpools and all of that so you can sort of get a massage. I also tried out the music/light therapy pool, where they play music underwater, then you lie on your back and look at the colored patterns on the ceiling. I liked it except for the music selection. But what can you do to change it?

Tuesday night to Wednesday morning we had a short, light rain shower, so that the entire world on Wednesday was a giant icy marble, it seemed like. I had gotten used to looking for the not slippery parts of the packed snow that is the road in front of my house, but there were no places that were not slippery. Walking to school takes usually somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, and this time it took more like 15 to 20, because you had to go the whole way with slow little baby steps. ridiculous. But today it was sunny, and most of it has melted.

Alright, I am going to get a move on, but I hope that everyone is doing well, and that you are not slipping on ice all over the place like we are here. But if you have the time, do write, Most of my new email lately has just been advertisements that I never read anyway. Very sad.