Teaching In Alaska

After a misleading week of toasty 15 – 20 degree weather we were struck with a cold front that dropped the temperature from 11 above to 20 below zero within the school day.  I made the 5 minute walk to school today and reached the school with frosty eyelashes and a partially frozen nalgene of water.

-18 F, -33 with windchill

This past weekend I became the owner of a Yamaha 4-wheeler, paid in full: my first vehicle purchase ever.  I bought it from Dan Eide, our principal and family friend.  He gave me a tutorial on how to change the oil last Saturday laying on my back on the ice when it was much warmer than it is today.  The machine is too cold to start at the moment, but come next fall I plan to be all over the place camping and fishing and berry picking.  Watch out.

This is Bernelle and Kameon perched up on top.

I have a few pictures from the past three months to catch up on.  Christmas in Cook was a blast.  We played outside on the lake, stomped through the snow, ate tasty Christmas treats at big family celebrations, and rested up for the new year.  Mom and Dad were greatly missed, but we kept them involved by checking in and I was lucky enough to meet up with them on my return trip through Anchorage.  Here are a few of my favorite pictures to share.

This was on a few hour hike after a pretty nice snow fall.  The walk was only a couple of miles and on a perfect day.  We drank hot tea before heading back up the trail toward the car and home.

Outdoor adventures since returning to Saint Michael after Christmas have been minimal, but I did set up a walk to Whale Island at the end of January with some of the kids.  I couldn’t let a winter pass without visiting the island.  Last year my companions were Master Son and Trevor.  This year my company was much younger, but just as delightful.   Here they are:

I brought with us a thermos of hot water, a few cups to share among 7, a zip lock bag of trail mix, and two twix bars to break up into pieces.  We snacked on our treats in a stomped down pile of snow at the top of Whale Island surrounded by willows.  The rumble of an airplane broke the silence above and Gavin said, “We’re making the sky jealous; it’s stomach is grumbling.”

The following are some pictures that capture moments of pride and excitement in my easily pleased life.

Basil and parsley fresh from the garden.

My first crock pot chicken noodle experience... Success!

The last food meal picture is a dinner date I had with Charlee.  She admits now to being skeptical but the experimentation turned into a fantastic classy and fresh gourmet supper.  Charisa, a good friend from Tacoma, introduced the idea.  We stir-fried chicken on the stove with sliced chunks of carrot, steamed some rice, and pealed off leafs of lettuce.  The lettuce was used to roll up the chicken and carrots with the rice along with some homemade peanut sauce.  Hm-mm, good!  And Charlee made a salad with avocado, tomatoes and cucumber.  Try it!

Recently I have had some new comments to my blog.  Thanks for checking in!

Last year my Christmas present from B.J. and Erin was an ultra-cool aero garden.  Quite frankly I was intimidated to begin the process and set it all up, but three weeks ago I bit the bullet and decided to dive right in and GROW. (FYI: it is super easy to set up and I never should have delayed the process.)  And look at the results!

A closer look at these beauties….

I was itching to test out my fresh greens, so for breakfast yesterday I whipped up some scrambled eggs with frozen peppers (a prized purchase from labor day weekend visiting with mom), some mozzarella cheese, and ground pepper.  I carefully clipped two leaves worth of the Italian Basil and Purple Basil and tore the leaves over the meal.  Here is the result.

It looked good enough, but now the creation needed to be tested and tried.

Success!

Thanks a million to Erin and Bill for the amazing gift finally put to use!

The past few weeks have flown by.  I was filled with energy when half of the BSSD schools came to our site for the district October Inservice last week.  How fun it was to see friends and goof off and be social!  We watched Yup’ik dancing and drumming, had an evening of square dancing with live music from Nome, and learned how to play the rambunctious game of Field Crumpet (a person over in Stebbins earned three stitches playing this sport during the inservice!)  The weather has been beautiful: sunny and crisp out with a fresh layer of sparkling snow.  Tonight is our halloween carnival.  There were some side-splitting costumes walking through the halls today, hopefully I’ll snap some more shots tonight during the festivities.  Enjoy!

Here Shaun and Linsey are racing in for the final steps of the fun run wearing their hippie rainbow glasses: a gift from the infamous John Lindula out of Elim.

There is some media I would like to include, but until the technology starts to sort itself out.  I do have more on its way!

There are many great pictures to share; enjoy!

Mom: pre-Apollo ride at the Palmer State Fair

Mom: during Apollo ride at the State Fair

Doesn’t she look happy?  She keeps telling me, “Never again!” I don’t understand it.

Jaylyn shared his new puppies with me one afternoon after school.

Then we went and played on the beach…  

and in the water…

“Alap’aar!” they cried (cold!)~ my brave Yup’ik children.

My pant legs were rolled up right there with them.

What a perfect day in the sun.

Now, a few more pictures from camping with Charlee, Carrie, Mike, and Bronco

The wave of all waves.

Jodi’s baby…

Charlee’s baby…

This weekend Charlee invited me on a camping trip across the channel along with Mike and Carrie (Carrie is our new 5th grade teacher and Mike is her fiance).  Bo and Ursula, Charlee’s brother and sister-in-law, motored us across the wavy waters to a small island on the other side along with little Mikel, age 4 ( I think) supervising the journey.  We stayed at Charlee’s families fish camp where she grew up spending her entire summer months pulling in fish nets and enjoying the midnight sun.

Below we have Mike and Carrie on our journey out to camp.  The second picture is Charlee, our instigator for this camping trip, lounging in the sand.

On Saturday I woke up early–the light was just starting to poke through strands of clouds–and went for a walk around the island.  As  I neared my return to camp, Bronco (Carrie and Mike’s dog) greated me and I could see Mike and Carrie sitting out with their backs to me in front of the cabin.  I sneakily and stealthily tiptoed through the tall grass that led up to them taking a few pictures along the way.  Bronco lept ahead of me and I thought for sure my cover would be ruined.  With lightening speed I ducked down into the grass to not be seen and to hopefully capture the perfect picture of the two of them.  I crept forward a few feet more for a clearer shot, only to realize that the figures I had been hiding so stratigically from were in fact some old, rusted metal tanks.  You have to admit, they are a pretty convincing couple.

Oh no!  It seems I am running out of memory room for pictures?  I’ll get to the bottom of this!  More to come: pictures from playing out with kids and looking at puppies, also, Charlee’s Aaroe.

Hello all!  Kristina and I have been having an incredible time so far traveling the buses and trains across southern Europe.  We stepped off the plane a week and a half ago in Madrid, Spain.  After settling into our hotel we took to the streets, found a relaxing and beautiful park known as Retiro and paid 4,50 euro to rent a row boat and glide out onto a huge pond.  It was a glorious sunny day and we felt like the first day in Europe was already the best day.  Thus we decided that at the end of each day we needed to be able to say to one another, “This is the best day of our trip,” making each day better than the last. 

I have so much to say about each location we have been, but so little time and really pictures would make the explainations all the better.  So far we have visited Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, and are now in Venice, spending three nights in each location.  Each stay has been completely unique and marvelous.  We have had incredible luck in transitions and have met some great new friends at our hostels and sitting in parks or on trains. 

Well, I must be off, but until the next post: Cheers!

Tae Kwon Do has reached Saint Michael, and Master Son will be with us for the rest of the school year training children and adults every week day. It is an incredible program and I am hoping to see it really take off. They want for it to be a five year commitment with new Tae Kwon Do masters every six months. Master Son has won my approval, for whatever that is worth. he is so kind and patient with the kids. I want to know all about him but conversation is very limited. I asked him last weekend while teaching him how to play cribbage on our living room couch (which he picked up with impressive speed) how long he had been studying English, and in not so many words he said, “Since I came here.” You can imagine the exchange of charades that have flown back and forth, most “conversations” ending with a shrug and a smile.

Last night Dan came home with a moose, so this morning I was being trained as a moose carver. Dan had hauled the main parts and pieces in for the night and they were laying down the hall on a tarp between the two apartments (Scotty and Trevor’s, and Dan and Bonny’s) beyond all the junk that clutters the space — furniture and file cabinets, boxes and what not. Dan and I would grab one leg between the two of us (he would hook a rope around one ball from the hip socket and I would grasp the hooved end with all the fur still attached) and we would squeeze our way around the hall obstacles, through their front door, and heave the leg up onto the kitchen counter to be carved up into smaller chunks: roast, stew, or burger meat. One leg weighed as much as me: 150 lbs to be cleaned up and vacuum packed. With dry, sticky blood up to our elbows, we made it through three legs before calling it quits to head over to Jodi and Dale’s house for the super bowl party.

That is a picture overview of the process.  Pretty exciting.  And then we were all ready for the game!  Now I need to spend some quality time in my classroom getting ready for the week.

I don’t have any daring adventures or exciting events to share, but instead some little tid-bits that are neither here nor there, but rather everyday stuff in between.  I live in a little red home with pealing paint and a grizzly-gray front door.  We share our front stairway with Miss Jill and take turns sweeping away the snow drift.  My house was only about 20 yards from the old school, which was nice for working late nights.  The new school is much farther away, but I love the crisp morning walk to work beneath a blanket of black sky speckled with clusters of stars and one brilliant moon.

This past Thursday felt like the first few weeks of painful struggle and tug-a-war with the kids that I faced in the old school.  By the end of the day I’m not sure who was counting down the seconds until the bell would ring more: the students or myself.  The kids kept saying things like, “I hate school,” and “I won’t come tomorrow” under their breath and outright and I felt like joining in with the chorus.  But Friday was a new day and when I came out in the morning to greet kids as they were eating breakfast, I couldn’t help but run back to my classroom for my camera to snap a picture of Susie and Lydia serving food in the lunchroom.  Check out what is hanging out on the floor in the background.  Pretty classic taste of AK bush.

On Friday, Trevor and I took off as quick as possible to do a little winter camping.  We had Scotty and Brian drop us off at the canal and then made tracks south across the water toward the mainland; our goal was to get as close to the mountain as possible.  When we set out it was already dark.  We had cloud cover, but it was a pretty bright walk due to the two day old full moon, and the clouds kept in some extra heat making the temperature about 25 degrees.  The next day was 10 to 15 degrees cooler, but while we were out and about moving around I felt pretty toasty, so I was pleased with that (I was testing out a parka that I’ve had for just over a week now). At night, though, I was a pretty chilly kid, so I’m trying to think about how I need to prepare for my next winter adventure, whenever that may be.  I am thinking a sleeping bag liner may be a smart purchase.  More than anything, it was nice to get outside and away for a day to enjoy the frozen tundra.

Walking on Ocean Ice

This is a picture of our tracks behind us as we walked back toward town Saturday afternoon.  To the left you can see the small hill that sticks out from the rest of the horizon: the mountain we were shooting for when we set out Friday night.  As the picture portrays, it was a pretty nice day to be out and about: a slight wind but all and all, pretty great.

Below is Trevor also excited to be outside.

I ended Saturday night by having Charlie come over to make some home-crafted pizza.  To do so I had to pick up some ingredients from the AC, pizza sauce was one of the ingredients on the list.  We had a blast putting the pizza together (even made a pepperoni map of the state including St. Lawrence Island and Kodiak), but I didn’t realize until after the pizza came out of the oven that I completely forgot to put on the pizza sauce!  Problem solved by making a dipping bowl for those who wanted sauce for their cheesy bread pizza.

Well, that is the most recent!  Hope everyone is doing well :0).

There is just so very much to catch up on, realizing my last post was the day before school began in August. My only hope is to briefly state that there were rough patches in the beginning weeks/ first two months, but there have also been delightful adventures and memories and things to laugh in memory of. Instead of wading through, and poorly recalling. significant moments from the past, I’ll share some shiny new tales from the last two weeks.

This past weekend I took a fairly impromptu jump over to Unalakleet (flying over with Doug and peppering him with questions about sights he’s seen from above, like whales, walrus, seals, and polar bear) for an Iditarod lesson planning work weekend. We spent the day Saturday digging through BSSD wiki resources and pooling together ideas for lessons in all subject areas come the time of the Iditarod beginning March 7, 2009. For me, this was a golden opportunity to fully appreciate the sources at my fingertips through the BSSD wiki pages and to just sit and spend time exploring. Many folks put together great plans and units even within the short time we were together, that are easily available to every teacher in the district. It is all just so smart.

And with such a sweet group coming together from all over the district, we had a blast outside of the office too. Saturday night was spent sardined into Jon and Rebecca’s nicely sized living-room with three guitars, a mandalay, and a fiddle: an unbeatable combination for a toe-tapping time.

There is more to smile about and share, but unfortunately my time is cut short by the necessity to do these things called work and preparation, and I am struggling to upload a photo.  Alas, there will be more to come; no guarantees on when that may be, but more to come all the same.