It has been two weeks since I started back to work. So far everything has gone smoothly. There hasn't been much work to do and the kids are still rested from their time off. I think they are, in their own way, happy to be back at least with their friends if not for learning. Today I had to grade the first big stack of book reports. This is a class where I always push the kids to do well in. A lot of them know many English words and they can read and listen well, but they have trouble expressing themselves. Since kindergarten they have learned the infinitive form of verbs and gotten used to using that in speech. They know how to make words past tense, but they don't have much practice using it correctly. Many of them are doing well and can write as much as two pages in one sitting, but I still have a few who have trouble spelling even simple words and use scrambled grammar. It takes me a while to check their books because I have to correct all their mistakes. I give them some rewards for writing a certain length, and for not making mistakes. I start with 20 tokens and subtract one point for every mistake. They use tokens to buy things at the school.

We are about half way through Lent now. Lent is a period of fasting for 40 days before Pasca (Easter). When we fast we eat only vegetarian food, vegan really, we eat no animal meat or animal products like eggs and milk, except for shell fish. Also no olive oil, which I never use anyway. This is like an exercise, a time of preparation before Pasca. During Lent there is a unique service done only at this time called the Presanctified Liturgy. Because the Divine Liturgy is a celebration of the Resurrection, and because Lent the approach to the cross, thus of sadness, Christians didn't perform the Divine Liturgy except on Saturday and Sunday, days of Resurrection year round. The Presanctified Liturgy is a sort of vespers service to allow Christians to take communion during the week. This practice is an ancient one, but the actual service was put into its final form by Pope Leo the Great in the 5th century. It has, however, fallen out of use among the western churches. The previous Sunday additional communion elements are consecrated and saved. The Presanctified Liturgy can be done on Wednesday and Friday. We have been doing it on Wednesday only.

   Making web pages is a lot of work. When I told a friend that, other than hiking, I didn't have much to do during my three week holiday she suggested that I update my web site to tell more of the story of my conversion to Orthodox Christianity. I don't think of my web site very often so I didn't realize that it had been over a year since I last updated it. I had been meaning to completely redo everything and, since the old site was full of ads and pop-ups I wanted to find a low cost server. I found found one and started designing my new site. First I needed a new banner, the old one had my old nickname 'Bill' and a Chinese name I never used much. I put my Orthodox name 'Seraphim' at the top. Next I needed to pick the characters for my Chinese name. You can read the story behind those names on my Seraphim page. After playing around with colors and designs I finally made a banner I liked using Paint Shop Pro. Next I had to change all my old pages to match the new look. Then I made the new pages for my most recent photos and added some new features. Finally, I put in the blog. There were several options, most are managed over the internet. I decided to use a program run from my computer called Blog, it is more difficult to use and the comments feature required commenters to e-mail them in, but overall it was better for my use because I could use my own format. To replace the comments feature I looked on the internet. There wasn't much, most people use simple services like WordPress or Nucleus, and what was there was out of date. I had to learn about technologies that didn't exist when I made my first web page like PHP. For some reason I couldn't get some of the PHP scripts to run properly, so I tried some CGI scripts. After a few tries I finally found one called Reblogger that did almost everything I wanted. I spent about 3 days working on this, a feature I'll be lucky if anyone uses at all, but I tend to be an obsessive perfectionist when I actually get around to doing anything.