Time flies, and I am still here

I can't believe it has been so long since I posted. In April I finished the renewal process for National Board certification and got that sent off. It pretty much consumed my time for quite a while. I then took a break and tried to get my sanity back. This month is, of course, crazy at school, and today our students started the NC standardized End of Course Testing.
Preparations for South Africa continue. It was a wonderful discovery to learn that there is now an oral typhoid vaccine, and it even lasts longer than the inoculation. I finished the series of tablets yesterday and have all the immunizations I need for the trip. I am counting down the weeks until July 29. I am also continuing to read, currently A History of South Africa, by Leonard Thompson. This was written post-apartheid and shows a real effort to discover facts and truth and move beyond bias and prejudice. It is somewhat scholarly in style (Thompson is, I believe, an Oxford don) but provides a solid basic history of the country. I understand that historians are researching oral histories to fill in the gaps about the country before Europeans arrived with written language, but this will certainly take some time to accomplish. I look forward to learning more as those written accounts become available.