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I'm back from St. Louis. We returned on Friday, pulling onto campus at exactly 4:00 pm -- our scheduled time of arrival. Everyone survived. I think everyone had a good time. Mostly. I'm glad I didn't try to get together with any of my St. Louis friends, because it wouldn't have happened. There were no major surprises to our itinerary except for the persistant bad weather, which meant we had to do a lot of on-the-fly rescheduling of things. None of the Naga kids paid any attention to the list of travel items, so my driver and I got stuck with trying to herd 10 cold, miserable, damp Japanese students through one historic site after another. I'm honestly surprised that after all the years this program has been going on, no one has thought to require the students to bring gloves with them to Wisconsin. In February. Gotta give a lot of props to my driver. He did a great job keeping up and keeping track of everyone.

Somehow we managed to get every place we were supposed to get more-or-less on time. Keep in mind that I have absolutely no sense of direction. This is not a joke. I typically navigate by a combination of triangulation and sheer luck. This works well enough, except when I'm in charge of planning how long it'll take to get somewhere. Since I'm from the Northside of Chicago, I firmly believe that everywhere is about 15 minutes from everywhere else.

Except for the first night when we lost our hotel, and the second when we lost our restaurant for dinner, we found everything with minimum fuss, and with only a few illegal U-turns.

Arrived back just in time for Easter weekend. Got to host the in-law family and watch all of them spend the day watching the NCAA basketball tournament. Since all but one of my teams is out (yes, I picked Illinois to go all the way. You surprised?) the games didn't interest me at all. DH and family did a great job pulling everything for the weekend together. The house was clean enough when I got home to not be totally embarrassing. Then, as a really nice treat, FiL spent Saturday putting up the chair rail we've been meaning to get to for a year and a half now. It's amazing how much better our front room looks now.

Spring-break is over now. Easter weekend is over. I do have today off from work, so that means it's time to actually deal with the huge stacks of essays I've been avoiding. Or maybe I'll do my taxes.