General Hardin update

Turtles: We are down to 2 turtles but we feel good about that decision. Yesterday I saw one of the turtles biting at the other turtle. Then later in the day, I noticed that part of the turtle’s tail was gone! Gross! Just like the other one. All this time, I thought that something was wrong with the turtle and it looks like it just got bit off! I went to the Internet and did some looking and it seems that it is fairly normal behavior for our kind of turtle. However it is not so good for the bitten turtle. There is a great risk for infection, which is what happened to the free turtle…( his name was Thomas the Tank turtle). The Internet said to get your turtle to a vet. That is not going to happen here. For now the turtles are separated. The injured turtle will probably be set free fairly soon.
I was telling Jon the saga of the turtles and mentioned that I was a little sad, because on of the turtles actually seems to know us. He will eat out of our hands! Jon said that perhaps we could keep him but set the other one free. We will see if our friend Alex will turtle sit for us over the summer.

In other news… we have an apartment for next year. We have signed a lease and paid for 6 months rent. We even have keys and everything. We are pretty excited about it. It is in a very nice apartment complex with lots of areas for the kids to play and lots of kids for the kids to play with. There is even a nice pond just feet from our building ( where we will set the turtle free). The apartment has enough rooms for Liam to have a separate room and the girls to have a girl bedroom and we will even have a school room. There is a couch too ( we only have chairs here). The only drawback to the apartment is that it is on the 4th floor and there is no elevator. We feel that it is not much of a problem for us, but visitors might have some problems. We will try to get some pictures up soon.
We are not sure exactly when we will move but probably in the next few weeks. We still are not 100% sure where Jon will teach next year. We should know something pretty soon though.

Jon and I have stopped our Chinese lessons for this year. Things have been very busy and it was getting harder and harder for us and our teacher to keep our lesson schedule. We still plan on studying on our own over the next few months. We will find a different teacher for next semester because Max is graduating.

The last several days have been HOT! I think yesterday the high was 97! It may have been a little cooler here because of the mountains. Thankfully it is going to cool off some over the next few days. Teaching in that kind of heat is not fun at all.

We are in the home stretch for our classes. We are talking about final exams and wrapping things up. It is going to get very busy soon. I am thankful that even though we are nearing the end of a school year, we will be returning to this city in August! There is much to be done!