12-11-2011

The early winter has produced some pretty strong storms up here.  Usually, the strong storms appear in February-March.  We’ve had a couple already, including this weekend.  Our house is built on four-foot stilts so when the wind blows, our house rocks back and forth.  And not in a baby-in-a-cradle kind of way, more like a house rolling down a hill with lots of big rocks on it.  The house shakes violently when the big gusts hit, and shudders unevenly with the regular wind.

10ft snowdrift outside our front door.

Our village, Nunam Iqua, sits about one mile inland from the Bering Sea.  This allows us to enjoy the severe breezes the Arctic has to offer.  Earlier this week we had difficulties on the walk to work during a storm.  This storm brought about 5 inches of snow and 40 mph winds. The problem with the combination of wind and snow is that the snow does not spread evenly.  It piles in unfortunate places.  For example, right in the path I want to walk.  Some of the snowdrifts were taller than I am. The drifts we couldn’t conquer, we walked around.  Most times in ass-deep snow.  The land is flat, so we don’t have to worry about hills and the lake we walk on doesn’t collect drifts.  The lake we walk on is also frozen.    

After a storm, the path becomes much easier to walk on because people drive their snowmobiles on the path and pack the snow down.  The majority of the time, the walk to school is a pretty easy walk.  All of us have very good cold weather gear to wear, so the temperature really doesn’t affect us; it’s the wind that causes most problems.  But walking to school in a storm is pretty exhilarating.  And exhausting.

Now, I know that sounds like a lot of whining.  But it’s not whining.  The fact is I love the storms.  I love standing at the window, watching snow hurry past at 40 mph.  I also love the fact that I’m holding a hot cup of coffee, wearing warm slippers, and have a furnace that works harder than a one-legged man at a Riverdance audition.  I love that only inches away, the storm is raging. Yet where I stand I’m comfortable and untouched by Mother Nature.  When I was in the Navy, I felt the same way about being on the submarine: at 800 ft under the surface of the ocean, I was dry and breathing mostly clean air.  Well, filtered.  Actually it was nasty, but the fact that I was breathing was a huge comfort to me.  It’s also like standing two feet from the pit-bull who’s at the end of his chain, exhorting all of his energy to break free and eat my liver.  I’m not really sure why I enjoy endangering my life by trusting that things don’t break.  I do realize the fragility of what is involved because there is no way I could ever bungee jump. 

I’ll continue to watch the storm from the comfort of my living room.  I may have to transport a teacher to the airstrip tomorrow, but the worst the storm has to offer should have passed.  I will also rethink the logic of taunting a dog on a tether.   Which shouldn’t take very long since there is no logic in that activity.  

12-3-2011

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a weird time.  Everybody knows how many days until winter break begins.  Kids are announcing the countdown when they enter the classroom in the mornings.  I try to remind them about the big picture; it’s the summer break they need to get excited about.  But it’s difficult for them to think about the summer when it is so far away.  It also doesn’t help when other teachers are so giddy about flying south for a couple of weeks.  I’m even thinking about telling the kids that there is no Santa.  I know it might break a few little hearts, but at least they won’t be so excited about the break and they could concentrate on their schoolwork.  It may seem a bit cruel, but in the long run it will be better for them. 

Sunrise out our front window- 11:15am

Getting groceries up here has been a challenge this winter.  We ordered the bulk of our food last summer.  These orders should last us for the entire school year.  We ordered a couple of hundred pounds of meat, cases of canned food, sugar, flour, etc… and most of that will last us.  The perishables are a different story.  We did an order in Oct for some items and it took over a month to arrive.  We also didn’t get everything we ordered and some items came frozen (eggs).  We order from a grocery store, Fred Meyers.  They take the order, send someone through the store with the list and a shopping cart, fill the order, and ship it.  Seems simple enough, but something broke down in their system. 

We received two shipments; one through the mail and one through a shipping company.  Their statement was that the perishables had to be shipped through the airfreight service.  This is expensive, but it does get here much faster and is kept in a controlled climate.  The problem with that was that the controlled climate was the freezer, as requested from Fred Meyer.  Nothing we ordered required freezing.  This included two dozen eggs.  Most of the order was shipped through the post office, cutting the cost of the shipping dramatically.

Our indoor porch this morning.

Most importantly, we got our toilet paper.  We were really counting on using that.  Unlike butter, I am unwilling to ration the use of toilet paper.  I don’t really want to consider how a person would ration toilet paper.  When rationing butter, you could just have butter every other day instead of every day.  Ok, butter is delicious and pretty important.  Let’s use broccoli as our example when it comes to rationing food.  But for rationing toilet paper, I don’t imagine it could work like that.   Also, I refuse to ration coffee.  I would rather go without than have only one cup a day. 

I may hold off on telling the kids about Christmas lies.  If I remember correctly, the Grinch was unfairly portrayed as someone malevolent and evil.  I’ve discussed this with Monica and she was pretty quiet on the subject.  Come to think of it, I don’t think she was even in the room when we discussed it.  Most of our conversations take place with me in the living room, talking and her not.  I find her more agreeing this way and she finds me less irritating.   Win-win.

11-27-2011

            Thanksgiving has come and gone and that once again reminds me how much I loathe shopping.  We have chosen to live in a place so far removed from shopping that we don’t even have a store in our village.  We are 500 miles away from the nearest Wal-Mart or Costco.  Being this far away one could rest assured that the crazy ‘black Friday’ thing could go unnoticed here.  But no, we had to watch it on the news, over and over.  This has become an event, with people choreographing their moves from store to store.  Some people wait in line for days in order to get in the door first.  This is the equivalent of me camping out in front of my dentist’s office so I can be the first root canal of the day.  People do this willfully, without getting paid.

           

            If it seems like I’m cantankerous about this, there is a perfectly good reason: I am.  I don’t understand it.  I must be in the minority, because after watching two days worth of news coverage, I see that most of the country is willing to stand in line in order to spend their hard earned money.  Additionally, holiday cheer is abundant.  Nothing says Merry Christmas like shoving an old woman to the ground in order to get the last 22” flat screen TV.

Thanksgiving with the gang.

            Ok, I’ll quit being so negative.  We did have a very nice Thanksgiving Day.  We spent the morning on the computer, talking with family on Skype.  Skype allows us to see and hear what others are doing without us.  What we’ve found is that they’re all having lots of fun and food without us.  After we spent some time on Skype with our families, we went back home to have our dinner.  We had all the fixens, cranberries included.  We also had very good company.  Essie, Brittnay, and Grover came over for the afternoon.  They are all teachers here too, so they did know us and willingly came over.  We all contributed to the menu and had way more than we needed.  I ate until I couldn’t eat any more, then I had pie.  I did wait for a few hours until I ate my second piece of pie.  Out of consideration to our guests, I had to try both the apple and pumpkin pies.  Also out of consideration to our guests, I kept my pants on after the meal even though both me and my pants agreed it would have been much more comfortable to shed them.

Sunset

             We did have a very nice and relaxing break from work.  Monica has been working much more than we had anticipated.  She also will be teaching the preschool after the first of the year.  It has just been funded through a grant and we have been without a preschool for a few years here.  She will be setting it up also so that will keep her busy.  That and going to college full time.  She barely has time to wait on me hand and foot.  We have three more weeks of school until winter break begins.  We are staying here for Christmas, as it is so expensive to fly south for the two and a half weeks.  Hopefully we’ll have our snowmobile so we’ll have plenty to do.  Now, I have to get ready for ‘cyber Monday’.  I really hope it’s about shopping. 

           

           

           

 

11-20-2011

Well, the announcement came and once again I’ve been snubbed by People magazine.  The sexiest man alive was given to one of the ‘Hollywood elite’, ignoring the popularity of overweight, unkempt gentlemen.  Bradley Cooper may have some primal appeal to the American women, but the ‘Scraggly Beard’ look has become vogue for the fashion enlightened.  People was on the right track but they picked the wrong guy from The Hangover.  

The banks of the Yukon River.

Last week we had a pretty big storm, even for up here.  What made it so bad was the high winds caused a big surge in the tide.  There was no coastal freezing of the Bering Sea yet, so the tide was pushed up into the villages situated on the coast.  Winter storms normally occur later in the winter and the sea ice protects coastal villages from flooding.  We are about a mile from the sea, so we were spared major flooding.  We had water up to our house, but we’re on 4ft stilts, so no flooding damages to homes in Nunam Iqua.  But this does cause other problems.  We are on the banks of the Yukon River, and when you have flooding in 20-degree temperatures, it leaves an ice sheet behind.  Also, the Yukon already had a two-foot layer of ice on it.  The sea surge buckled and broke the river ice, pushing some of that close to houses.  A few years ago the floating chunks of ice, some as large as cars, knocked a few houses off their pylons.  People were nervous about that last week.  But we couldn’t just pack our valuables in the pickup and drive to higher ground.  (no roads) (or pickups) The Yukon Delta sits at sea level and the nearest hill is 15 miles away.

The weather had all of the airplanes grounded in Western Alaska, so we had no choice but to sit it out.  As it turned out it was not as bad as feared.  But what got me thinking was, what if something happened and someone needed medical attention?  I’m at the age where sharp pains occur suddenly and for no apparent reason.  Maybe they did when I was younger and I just ignored them.  But now, I fear them.  Any pain that happens in my chest area convinces me I may be having a heart attack.  I don’t know what a heart attack feels like, but I’ve been certain a hundred times that I was having one.  Or a headache reminds me of tumors.  But so far, no medical emergencies.  Even on a clear day, it would take at least an hour for a plane to get here and then another hour to get to a hospital.  So if I do have a heart attack, I hope it’s one of those slow moving ones. 

Morning coffee without heat.

So we’ve survived the storm without incident.  Well, we did lose power for two separate nights.  We realized how unprepared we are for that, since we had only two candles.  My mom did send up a flashlight that has a crank to recharge the battery, so that gave me light to read.  The real bad part was that we don’t have heat without electricity.  We don’t have a wood-burning stove, but it wouldn’t matter if we did since there are no trees here on the Tundra.  The school has a generator, so if it got too bad we could always head up there. 

I guess I’ll have to wait until next year to see if People Magazine has changed its biased and uneducated views on the definition of the word ‘sexiest’.  Or ‘man’.  Or ‘alive’.  I should qualify for at least one of their antiquated stipulations on their competition.  It would sure enhance my career.  

10-30-2011

This past week was a busy one for us.  It began like all Monday mornings for me.  The alarm starts squealing at 5am.  I shut the alarm clock up and fumble for my glasses.  I check the bed to make sure it is still dry.  I should say I check my side; Monica can check her own.  I sit up and take off my Breathe Right strips.  I’m not sure if they help with my snoring but I have stopped waking up in a panic with a pillow pressed to my face.  I then shuffle off to the bathroom to shower and get ready for the day. 

We had a teacher in-service on Monday, so we had no students.  A quiet day and we were able to get a lot done.  We also had our parent/teacher conferences last week.  The turnout was larger than I had anticipated.  I enjoy talking to parents about their kids and showing them what we are doing in class.  There seems to be a disconnect between some parents and their kid’s school career.  Formal education isn’t very high on some people’s priority list, mainly because knowing how to solve an algebraic problem doesn’t have much to do with hunting moose and catching salmon.  We are only two generations removed from everyone living a total subsistence lifestyle here.  This culture did not have a monetary economy; it was based on being able to gather resources to survive.  If you had more than you needed, you shared it with those who didn’t.  Their language was a verbal communication, not written.  Education was not done in classrooms formally but taught out in the tundra, learning by doing.  So I completely understand why some parents don’t feel that writing book reports are very important in their child’s life.  My job is to stand in front of their children and convince them that it is important. 

Friday night was our Halloween Carnival at school.  We had face painting, ring toss, a fishing booth, and Monica and I set up our X-Box with the Kinect.  We had it hooked up to a Smart Board, which is equivalent to a 60-inch screen.  Two hours of carnival time equals about ten hours of regular time.  We had a full house at the gym and a great staff who worked their butts off to make the carnival happen. 

I also have a birthday tomorrow.  According to my driver’s license and every mirror I happen to look at, I’m reminded that I’ve made it half way to 90.  I can’t imagine what 90 will feel like.  Friday night I sprained my ankle sitting in a chair.  Not while actively taking a seat, but while I was already sitting down.  No weight on my feet.  I pivoted my foot and felt a sharp pain.  You’d think with all of the practice I’ve had, sitting on my ass doing nothing, that I could sit safely.  Guess not.

Now, we have to get ready for trick-or-treaters.  I wonder where we are as a society when we encourage children to dress as monsters and demand candy from strangers.  And if the candy is not awarded to the little extortionists, they threaten to do harm to our dwelling.  And while they’re doing this, their parents stand behind them, quietly encouraging them.  Luckily, eggs are a very expensive commodity up here so we don’t have to worry about getting egged.  Unfortunately, rocks are free.

10-22-2011

Fall is my favorite season.  The cooler air feels better in the lungs.  The leaves turn to colors that make even a drab countryside look spectacular.  We celebrate two holidays that require us to eat until we are ashamed of ourselves. We sneak up on unsuspecting animals, shoot them, have our pictures taken with them, and put that picture on Facebook, smiling with pride about how we outsmarted an animal that is still confused by headlights. Football starts Friday night and ends on Sunday night.  Fall is a grand three months. 

Here in Nunam, fall lasts for about 7 minutes.  The grass turns from green to brown overnight.  Since we don’t have any trees here on the Tundra, there are no leaves to turn color and drop.   Just one day it snows and winter is here, no fanfare.  It’s like when you are out with a bunch of friends and the weird guy just kind of appears.  Or how most people describe it: “Crap, Clay found us.” 

We finished our first quarter last week.  I’m looking at this school year like a football game.  It’s time to take stock in what we’ve done so far and make adjustments accordingly. I am seriously thinking about wearing a helmet and a cup next quarter.  Report cards are done and parent/teacher conferences are next week.  The time has gone by quickly and it has been a good quarter. 

Next Friday night is our Halloween carnival at the school.  Last year I ran the bowling booth, with me being the pin-monkey.  (Insert your own cruel joke here.)  This year Monica and I will set up our Xbox with the Kinect to the Smartboard.  This will give the kids something new and will keep me from injury.  Last year with so much bending and squatting picking up those bowling pins, I was gimping around for days after that.  It’s like I aged a year overnight.

We had a Saturday Fun Day with my class this Saturday.  With the help of Monica and two other teachers here, Brittnay and Essie, we showed a movie, made spider hats, and served lunch.  It was a good time for the kids by all accounts.  At least nobody cried.  This was the second Fun Day we had this year and I’m trying to do one a month.  This gives the kids a few hours of activities on a Saturday.  There is no other place in town for the kids to go to.  They literally have no place to go other than their house or play outside.  As I’ve said on here before, we don’t even have a store in the village.  Now that it is below freezing in both the day and night, being inside where it’s warm is nice for the kids. 

Monica and my spider hats.

Now that we won’t see many days with the temperature above freezing, it might be time to drag out the cold weather parka.  I’m waiting for someone else to use theirs first so I won’t look like a wimp.  Nothing will put your manhood into question quicker than overdressing for the weather.  Or wearing white after Labor Day.  At least I can put my shorts away now and wear my Levis.  

10-8-2011

October is here and cooler weather came with it.  We’ve had some hard frosts and we had snowflakes yesterday.  Nothing stuck, but it was still snow.  It isn’t light outside till 9am, so we get to see some nice sunrises during school; those never get tiresome to watch. 

I spent part of last week in Hooper Bay, which is a larger school in our district.  Half of the district’s teachers met there for our in-service.  We flew out of here on Wed. and came home Friday night.  We were accommodated the floor of a third grade classroom.  I did have an air mattress, so at least I didn’t have to touch the floor with my head or side of my face.  Third graders are not discriminate about where they step so I can’t imagine good things being in the carpet.  Well, gummi worms are good, but not to sleep on.  Dog poop is not good for anything, especially not to sleep on.  Now I have to take another shower.

We talked about curriculum and classroom management.  Talking about curriculum is usually coma inducing and this time it was no different.  When talking about classroom management, it became teachers trying to out-story each other.  Everyone’s anecdote was worse than the others.  It seems that vampires and werewolves are alive and well up here too.

Anytime teachers clump together, a single phrase seems to always come up: teachable moments.  In college, they told us ‘teachable moments’ were times when something unexpected happens and you use that situation to teach something important to the student blah, blah, blah.  I have found that when something unexpected happens that is a good time to yell at students.  Last week I came upon an unexpected situation and I decided to leave what was said alone.

I was showing the class some pictures I took during a vacation to Washington DC a few years ago.  When the Lincoln Memorial picture came up, one of my 4^th graders started to tell the rest of the class about the Memorial.  He pointed out that it is huge and that Lincoln’s hands are positioned so one shows strength and one shows compassion.  (I did not know that.)  The rest of the class was listening attentively as the student talked about Lincoln’s life as a lawyer and then as President.  He told the class solemnly that President Lincoln was shot in a theater while watching a play.  One of the students asked why he was killed.  The student calmly explained that Lincoln wore a tall hat and the guy behind him couldn’t see the play so he shot him.

I know, I should have corrected him and explained how Castro plotted with the CIA to kill Lincoln because of his views on Israel.  Wait, that was Garfield.  Anyways, I didn’t correct him because I saw the way the kids were listening to him.  They will learn soon enough why and how he died, but they will always remember that he was shot in a theater.  Another reason I didn’t correct him was because I was laughing so hard.  Quietly.

It is always fun to listen to what the kids infer or make up on their own.  But I guess they’re learning something, I know I am.  Transferring knowledge is important.  I for one will never wear a stovepipe hat where it can obscure the view of another patron in the theater.  Lesson learned Mr. Booth.