April

APRIL

Well, April was an interesting month filled with a lot of the usual and some of the unusual – you’ll see what I mean….never a dull moment with us as always is an understatement.

The month started and Conner went back to school just in time for Jamieson to go off for the month. Bruce and Jamieson pretty much jumped on the place the next night and took off to home to see everyone. We realized it had been nearly 18 months since everyone had seen him and Bruce was feeling the big guilt.

Of course the next morning I got up and realized that the interior light was left on so the battery was flat – good thing Conner had one more day off school. PHEW!! Happy Good Friday to us!!! I still find it a little weird that for such a religious country Good Friday isn’t as big a deal here as it is at home, what with all the meat eating going on! We had a quiet Easter weekend, Conner and I went out for lunch and we spoke to Bruce, Jamieson and the rest of the family on Skype in the afternoon.

The next week was pretty much normal, Conner at school, he had a track meet which was our first track experience. It was fun, just like at home so it wasn’t too different an experience. I spent the week in and out at work and the usual Justin and Jeremy over every day after school. Nothing too exciting sorry! Jamieson had a basketball game on Saturday afternoon which they lost but they did a great job, the other team was HUGE and they were rattled at the start but kept it close in the end and only lost by a couple so it was a great team effort.

Tuesday rolled around and off to the airport I drove…. I was sitting in a gas station waiting for Bruce to call and tell me they were through customs…waiting, waiting….ring ring
Hi Honey, we are in stage 2 customs, the advice I got from the homeland security call center was wrong and I can’t come in because the visa is expired!! PANIC!!!
2 hours later I picked them up with Bruce having to go and pay for their new temporary visa in San Fran in one week. I think we should be thanking our lucky stars on that one.
The nice customs people believed that he was given the wrong advice and they were allowed in.

We continued through the month with a little bit of work for me, Conner had Track training and track meets , basketball on Saturdays which the team was doing really well. We ended the month with Alexie’s (Millie’s daughter) birthday party day (Long day). I got to go into the limo with all the girls. We got picked up at 11.00am but had to pick up around 15 kids….oh boy did that take a lot longer than we thought. 2 hours later we made our way to the bowling alley/ lazer tag place for the actual party. Bruce and the boys met us there at around 2.30pm and the party began. They got to do all the things even though they were soooo late so everyone had a blast it was just Millie and I that were exhausted.

The next week Bruce headed off to pay for the visas a did some appointments while he was in San Fran and our month officially ended with a school furlough day – California lost 22,000 teaching jobs so the teachers union approved 3 furlough days to try and get some more teachers jobs back. Don’t you love a place where the Govt doesn’t care that they are cutting 22,000 teachers jobs, they haven’t approved a budget yet, they put their state workers on Furlough every Friday with more days to come and the politicians take their usual time off because they can!!!!! Conner’s middle school class is already at 41 let’s see what happens after the cuts are in place. SCARY huh??? Those cracks for some kids to fall through are getting wider and wider.