We had just a couple days between the start of in-person school (April 6-8, 2021) and the start of spring break (April 10). It was kind of bizarre, but schools would be fined for every day that they were not open after April 1st, so they were strongly incented to open as early as possible in April even if it was only for a couple days before spring break. Mike visited his office for the first time in a year in early April. His busines unit was going to be moved to a new building, so he wanted to retrieve his personal items and bring some stuff home before his stuff was moved to the new building. He reported that it was very, very strange. Everything had been left as it was. When people had left the office back in early March 2020, they didn’t know they were going to be gone for an entire year. Mike’s desk had a container of wasabi peas on it which he’d been munching on during his last day, and a spoon, and other stuff that he had left casually spread over the desk a year before. And it was all still there, just as it had been. The world had been turned upside down, and yet here on his desk this container of wasabi peas had not moved at all. In other news, my friend Kristin in Germany suggested that Ellie and her daughter, Franziska, might like to correspond with each other as pen pals. Ellie thought this was a great idea, so she wrote a long-hand letter to Franziska, and in early April she got a reply! This was very exciting, and Ellie wrote one back, and the pen pal relationship began to take off. I also got a plexiglass shield for my computer keyboard and mouse. The cats sometimes walked across my keyboard, which added lines of letters or deleted what I was writing, which made writing very challenging. I solved this with a plexiglass shield to protect the keyboard, which still left room for my hands to type. This worked great. No more lines of random letters and symbols, or missing chunks of text!