A big event!

It's a big deal when the dentist comes around.  In and out of school all week.  The kids have appointments for cleanings and fillings (if they need them) and they are only here for a week, so we make it work.  It's pretty fun and an exciting time for some.  A little buzz in the school about clean teeth and the ominous threat of cavities for those who haven't been the best brushers.  Fluoride applications and the like seem to to be the talk of the town, or my little part of it anyhow!

Just before Spring break, it happened.  Not only was it Dentist week, but I had a student lose a tooth!  It was pretty fun I must say.  I'm a secondary teacher.  Most times, if a student looses a tooth where I'm teaching, it was from a fight.  That doesn't happen very often thank goodness, but it's exciting!   

Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle.  She worked for several minutes just trying to get that darn thing out.  It was so cute, she was so determined to have it out by the time the dentist was at the school that day.  My phone call to the dentist earlier that morning allowed her to bring a special tooth box for our little wiggler to keep her tooth in once it was out.  Then talks of the tooth fairy, where she was to put it ensued and it was a great treat to have an elementary student for awhile.  So many experiences have been mine this year teaching here, I will never forget them!  It was even better coming home from Spring break and seeing both front teeth missing!

Basketball Tournament Trip

Sports in Alaska are so very different from what I was used to in Oregon.  Each contest requires a flight for the team, sleeping on floors and several nights away from home.  All the students get together for a few days of community service, competition and creative outlets of many sorts.   In the middle of February, we had our basketball tournament.  Well, we tried to have a couple of competitions but it didn't really work out that way.  The first one was cancelled due to weather.  Because of that cancellation and a delay, I got to go as a chaperone to the district tournament in Kokhanok (Cock-a-knock).  Not having been there before, I was pretty excited to go!

Another flight, over water, past some mountains and getting to see some beautiful ice was amazing.  You'll see that as the water freezes it creates some beautiful patterns.  Many of which I try to capture but I'm sure just don't do it justice!  We also get to see some mountains as we fly that are just pretty amazing because we don't have them very close in Egegik.  Out the plane window, past the wings, you'll see a little hill that looks like a someone decided to push a pencil up from under the ground.

Once in Kokhanok, we get our belongings settled into the classrooms and the gym for the nights ahead.  I was smart this time and brought one of the foam pieces off my bed and folded it up underneath me!  Best sleep I've gotten on a trip this year!  We had the usual group meals, basketball games and I spent a lot of time at the scoreboard this time!  Every game except for one, I was the scorekeeper.  I must say, one of the games with the hometown crowd was pretty intense!  

This trip included the token walk with Jerik from Chignik Lake.  This time there was no Dorothy slipping and falling.  Just a nice little walk to the store to check out what they had there.  Talks about anything that came up and plans for the future while walking in the middle of Alaska.  Things that I'll never forget and was happy to experience.  Thanks Jerik for lending the ear all those times! 

This time the kids got to learn how to make fish camp stoves.  I had never seen one before and I quite enjoyed the experience.  I was amazed at how good some of the kids were in making them.  They of course said they had made them before and knew just what to do.  (Go girls!)  Snip, snip, snip of the tin snips and they were done in no time flat!  I've included a picture of the final product in use, a great little piece of camping and survival gear that could be very useful in the future!  Thank you to Kokhanok and their staff for being such great hosts and to Colter for the dance!  Oh, and speaking of the dance...someone from Perryville has a blackmail picture of me dancing....I think it's the Macarena.

Kokhanok Runway, just before "The flight"

Sunrise and Snow

The cold weather here surprises me often times with some wonderful shows.  I get beautiful sunrises and amazing sunsets.  The colors in the pictures often times don't come close to doing them justice but I continue to take them anyhow.  Maybe sometime I will get into photoshop and get them closer but for now, you get to see what the camera saw.  An early  (well, not so early) morning peachy sky out a classroom window.

We are often times also surprised by the the amount of snow that blows around here as well.  A few inches will fall and then the wind picks up, blowing it from someplace, to my front door.  Drifts, piles of snow massed by the wind are amazing pieces of art made by Mother Nature.  This particular one is right outside my front door and requires shoveling from time to time.  27.5" tall and about 4-5 feet long with a width of 3 feet.  That's a lot of snow to move!  This time I only went as wide as the shovel was because I just didn't want to move any more.  Besides, I only needed to walk through it right?

The other beautiful part of this is my one little classroom window.  When the wind blows just right, the snow piles up on the bottom creating that "picture perfect" snow pile at the bottom.  I love it!  Too bad there wasn't a little Christmas tree outside with lights just outside that window!

These pictures were taken quite awhile ago, they could have been taken today though.  Right now I sit and watch the fresh 4" fall off a neighboring roof as it slides down the steep incline.  Plop, Plop, Plop.  I think it would be fun to stand underneath. Just once  :)

He's ok!

You know, it's been a rough year here for me.  Home life hasn't been the most wonderful for us because so many "experiences" we didn't want to deal with have come up while I was away.  When you are 2,000 miles away, it's not the easiest to just hop in a car and get there in a few hours, much less get on a plane immediately and be there in 8.  For me, it's at least a full day and about $1500!

When making the decision to come up here alone, I looked at the state of everyone at home.  Everyone included our "fur kids" too.  I didn't expect to have my husband have to put one of our dogs down in November without me there.  I knew that he was old, but honestly, I didn't expect him to get so bad before the school year was up.

When we took Ryan (pictured here) in for a teeth cleaning, we sure didn't expect him to come back with really high liver enzyme levels either.  We knew he had a mass on his leg they were going to look at and some skin tags on his elbow to remove, but the super high enzyme levels, that cancer word tossed out as a possibility.  (We know what that can mean)  This here I'm sure caused lots of worry for my husband as, well he might not admit it, but this is his FAVORITE "fur kid."  Again, when you are 2,000 miles away, an expensive plane ride, and at least 24 hours from being home, there's not a lot of comfort that can be given in a Skype hug.

Crying together doesn't help.  Words can only go so far.  I'm not sure we were prepared to deal with so many "big events" this year.

The good news though, is with the treatments, the teeth finally being cleaned and the tumor removal (which was not cancerous!), we can rest easy for awhile and enjoy Ryan and his faithful personality.  Eric and I have rescued him twice.  Once from Hopes Haven, where they had him so he would be away from the abusive situation he was in and now from some medical situations.  He in turn has rescued us many times over.  Each time he "talks back" and puts a smile on my husband's face, snuggles in close for a hug, or just protects by being close.  We know he loves us for who we are and I know he's saved my husband from being so lonely while I am gone.  

We love our Ry-Ry  :)

Ice Fishing

Smelt or smolt?  Which one did you get?  One you put back in, one you keep.  I wish I could show you pictures but the truth of the matter is, we didn't catch a darn thing!  

I could make up a beautiful story for you and talk about how they jumped out of the hole right into our bucket, but that would be a lie.  I could also tell you that we dipped our little hooks in and they hit them right away, that also would be a lie. 

What I can tell you is that I had another wonderful experience and learned how to do something I never thought I would get to do.  Ice fishing is something that was done to survive.  Now, many items can be bought from a store, shipped in and it's not a requirement to ice fish anymore just to survive.  I enjoyed getting the opportunity to see how it is done and experiencing the thrill of stepping out onto the frozen river, standing around hoping something would hit and relishing in the warmth of the jacket as the wind whipped by.  

Learning how important it is to scoop the hole so that the ice doesn't freeze over, watching the ice build up on the line as you wiggle it to entice the fish and standing there in the wind and realizing why people do build the little shacks on the ice when they are out there for days were all great experiences. BUT DANG, it was COLD!  BRRRR!

You might ask, "why make a hole in the ice in the middle of the river and then stand right next to it?"  Well to catch fish of course, silly.  That and because they have been doing it for years and I don't need to ask questions as to why it works, it just does.  Not enough of a hole to make the pressure crack the ice around it where you stand, but just enough to access the water below.  The mind tries to play tricks on you, well maybe just me, but as I stand around the hole, I swear I slid closer to it, the ice melting under my feet and edging me closer each moment.  I know it wasn't happening but the fear of a leg "post-holeing" into the freezing cold water was one that kept creeping into my mind.

To say the least, we had fun, got some good pictures and enjoyed the view of the mountains and the company we kept.  The only part that wasn't so great, my fingers got a tad bit cold.  Frost "nip" they call it when I took off the gloves to take some pictures of the mountains.  It was VERY cold!

These Mtns. caused frost nipped fingers.  BRRRRR

City Dock with the Mtns. in the background

Holding the fingers trying to keep them from hurting so much!

The Deep Hike

A long hard walk through the snow.  A beautiful blue sky and some wondrous sights to see was the adventure for the day.  You never really know what will happen on a hike through the village but the guarantee of some adventure is definitely there.

The snow had been falling quite often for quite some time and the clear beauty of the day was exciting.  What do we do on an exciting day?  Go for a walk, of course.  When it snows a bunch and then you go walking, sometimes the snow gets rather deep in spots.  Trudging across the road, it's not really that deep.  The road has been plowed several times.  Step off of the road and you hit deep snow.  We hit the lake just by the school and it was immediately knee deep sometimes deeper.  Along the way I found a few things that peaked my interest.  I stumbled along snow sitting on interesting dead plants, students upon hills, and a fox on a hill that we crept up on and watched as it saw us and then decided to leave.

It looks great, a fantastic mountain....we'll let you think that.  The boys showing the way.

I was thankful to be in the back of the pack.  The rest of the trekkers could break the trail and I could just tramp it down a bit more.  Through the snow we continued across the lake to the banks of the lake where the kids knew it was much deeper.  They had a plan in mind, knowing how deep it had been in the past few days while they had been out walking around.  Now, they wanted to see how deep it was and put me in the lead.  Let's see if the teacher could actually get through it!

Imagine for a second if you will, two students who are 6'2" plus, pushing a 5'4" (almost) teacher in front of them to see just how high up the snow is.  Well, in the beginning I was up to my waist in snow.  Each time I took a step it was walking from the hip.  Not just moving the leg and the knee but actually picking up my leg, swinging it up and over the snow at waist level, and then taking another step.  A few steps in, I found myself chest deep in snow.  Time to be in the back of the pack again, I was just not up to that task of blazing the trail.  Don't get me wrong, it was fun, it's just hard to walk when you can't bend at the waist any longer.

We ended the day with some flips off a snow bank, gymnastics skills coming in handy.  The walk was long and tiring but I did have fun once again and will continue to enjoy each experience I have in Egegik.

We got a good amount of snow, the tree was looking rather festive.

So much snow and wind

The snow just kept coming down, blowing around and just socking our town with lots of the white stuff.  Just outside the school I'm here with the school truck in the background and you can see that my hood is covered in the flying snow, houses are still hard to see and I've got my face pretty much covered up to protect it from the chill.  The wind is brutal when it is so cold and it gets hard to see when snow is blowing into your eyes.  Instant watering can happen when the wind flies right into your eyes too.  Then you have a problem, tears plus cold wind can equal ice right near the eyes.  Long eyelashes sticking together isn't always that fun.

Anyhow, with all the winter weather, it was fun to walk around the school grounds and see what it was like to walk in the wind and snow but I was glad that I did just walk around the school and wasn't somewhere that I had to walk to find shelter.  While the blizzard was in our area, planes didn't fly.  That means that the mail doesn't come.  When mail doesn't come that also means that food doesn't come either.  I was still waiting for my milk to show up from Anchorage at this point.  (It finally came but it was delayed because of this storm!)

Once the storm had passed, roads were plowed and the village started to breathe again.  Mountains of snow started to appear near our little school parking area and the younger kids were excited about them.  A snow slide formed on one side and we climbed up and down the other to take pictures time after time.  

The older kids have the exciting job of shoveling the boardwalks here on school grounds so that everyone can travel safely from building to building.  They had quite the workout!  They had a good amount to get rid of and with each toss, I swear more just fell down onto the boards.  They got it pretty clear though, enough so we could get around.   You see a 4-wheeler here pretty buried in snow and then a picture of myself kneeling on the shoveled boardwalk.  Most of that snow is gone now as we have warmed up over the last week.  Now we have piles of snow where the drifts were and some bare areas.