April backwards is Lirpa

Hi everybody...

I guess this is a Thursday update!

I'm sitting here in the computer lab at school, having just sat through a 4 hour lecture on Hidden Markov Models, Artificial Neural Networks and Statistical Pattern Recognition. Yep, it is about as exciting as it sounds.

This past week I have had several hours of school each day and then four hours at work...It has been 4 months since I worked at Ludesi (www.ludesi.com) so it has been nice to get back to that and earn some money again.

We had a great time at the island. I used the time mostly to rest. The weeks leading up to Easter break were packed with stuff to do (paperwork etc) and I hadn't really had time to reflect on much of anything for awhile. So during Easter break I slept a lot and read a lot and thought a lot (that just reminded me that one of my ninth grade teachers couldn't stand it when we wrote “a lot” and always wrote in red pen next to it, “what is this, a parking lot?”). We had sunshine and clear skies about half of the time at the island, so we sat outside two afternoons and went for a hike one time. We also hung out with Niklas' 92 year-old grandma, who is a sweetie and always gives me bear hugs. She told interesting stories about growing up on the island before the advent of modern amenities. Some of the words she used (in the island dialect) were words even Niklas had never heard before! We ate delicious food and fika and felt blessed to have such wonderful family. Little Lorentzon received a set of toys for the sandbox from Farmor & Farfar, with a Disney theme. It is really cute! Niklas received some gift certificates for clothing for his birthday and we used them on the way home – he is lookin' GOOD! We also received something to make it easier to bake Dyröbröd, the island flatbread that we like so much. I received a nice shirt and some socks.

For me, April will be a month of trying to work as much as possible to earn a bit of spending money for the trip to South Africa. Otherwise we have saved up nearly all we need for the plane tickets and 14 nights at the guest house. We just aren't sure how much we are going to need for 2 weeks of everyday living, the safari, the cultural village, etc, so we need a buffer. Oh, and Niklas got a(nother) raise at work!

The end.