First of all - I don't know what other knitbloggers did for April Fools' Day, but, you know, I don't really DO April Fools' Day. I've been on the wrong end of too many "pranks" that turned out to be not that funny, humiliating to me, and borderline painful.

And as for pranking others: I really, really loathe the shows like "punk'd" and that genre. I actually sit there and squirm in sympathetic pain for the person being fooled. (I saw a clip of one show; it was kind of harrowing - a guy ran into a dry cleaners claiming his wife was having a heart attack. The nice dry-cleaner guy was FRANTIC to call 911 to get the ambulance there, and the prankster kept stopping him, or telling him not to, or all that, until finally it was revealed that it was a prank. And I sit there, keeping on thinking of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and wondered if the formerly-nice dry cleaner guy would jump quite so quick to help the next person who claimed to be in distress.) Maybe I'm overstating or overreacting, but I look at shows like that and wonder if that kind of thing contributes to the erosion of compassion, earnestness, and civility in this society - as in "wait a minute, do I want to help this person? might they be yanking my chain?"

So anyway. No pranks here. I don't even like the sort of planned "we will laugh now" sort of silliness. Humor has to be spontaneous to work on me.

Second: got back from the Science Fair judging. It was fun. It was nice to see that many young people who cared about doing something and doing it well. There were some cool projects - not just in botany. Several natural dye projects in the chemistry section. One group built a sort of hovercraft, and I was dying to talk to them and asked if they watched "Mythbusters" (they built a hovercraft on one show) but they weren't around when I was free. One thing that was kind of hard was going around to the posters I didn't need to judge - the ones I just wanted to see because they looked interesting. The kids were all so "on stage" - like they were desperate to talk to people, desperate to show you what they knew. I told a number of them "I'm not the judge for your section" but they kept on rattling away. It was almost a bit - I don't know, is scary the right word? It was like "this is what it's like when you're in a room full of overachievers." I mean, I was a right gunner when I was a student, but I don't remember being that...intense.

I also went to the quilt shop after I was done at the science fair. I got directions from one of the women who was helping out. She warned me "it's not very big, she doesn't have very much stuff" but I guess her definition of "not very big" and mine differ. I was pretty impressed. There were a lot of fabrics there I'd not seen before, including a really funny wonderful cat print that I bought a chunk of for myself and a chunk of to send as part of my mom's Mother's Day present.

Now, the bad news is I've got a mess of ecology exams to grade, and another exam to write this weekend. I think I'm going to go home and force myself to grade the exams tonight, even if it cuts into "Joan of Arcadia," and try to write the other exam tomorrow morning, so I can do some garden-work tomorrow afternoon. And maybe sew together the chocolate brown and pink quilt.