It has been a very stressful week here. I appreciate your prayers. The good news is that the weather is starting to warm up. I can hear the birds chirping outside. The trees are all starting to blossom. Spring is here, and this Holy Week, I am reminded of the promise of new life and hope.

This weekend I went back to Seoul and walked past the Deoksugung Palace again. I took this picture of the band (it's for you, Sal) during the changing of the guards.As soon as I took it, my camera flashed "low battery" and shut itself off. I'm hoping to make it back soon to take some pictures of the cherry blossoms. All the flowering trees here remind me of Northern Virginia and Washington, DC.

Last week one of the littlest, cutest, sweetest girls in the whole school jumped up and bit her lip as she landed. She must have bit it just right (or wrong, as the case may be), because it resulted in blood everywhere. Besides being a little shaken up, she's okay.

I had a pretty good morning with my preschool and kindergarten kids today--only two criers, no wet pants, no vomit, no blood. That's what I call success. The preschoolers were tickling each other when I went into their classroom, so I taught them to say "tickle, tickle." It's probably not the most useful expression they'll ever learn, but they had a lot of fun with it.

The rest of today was equally uneventful, except for two more crying kids and one very loose tooth which managed to fall out in the middle of class and caused quite the excitement in an easily excitable class.

There was a lot of yellow dust in Seoul this weekend. It blows in from the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia and causes quite the problem here in Korea. All sorts of health and environmental problems are attributed to yellow dust. According to the Korea Times, this weekend's yellow dust storm was the worst since 2002. You can see the haze in the photo below at Deoksugung Palace. Click here for an interesting newspaper article about this weekend's yellow dust storm in Seoul. Click here for a website that explains the Asian dust cloud phenomenon, complete with satellite pictures, photos of extreme yellow dust haze in Beijing, and photos of yellow dust haze as far away from Asia as the Grand Canyon.

I got out to take some photos today of the cherry blossoms here in town, since I'm afraid I'll miss the peak in Seoul, even if I do make it back there this weekend.