Holidays in the bush

I meant to write during Thanksgiving Break, but other things got in the way. 

The days since my last post have alternated between stressful whirlwind and slow, painful trudge, with a few highlights along the way. 

Thanksgiving was a nice diversion, a chance for the staff to come together and share a delicious meal. It was also a refreshing break from the kids, the responsibilities of teaching and our ever-present homesickness. 

This is not the first time I've ever moved away from my friends, family and everything I know. It's not even the second. Mike and I have both had extensive experience in dropping everything we know. We figured this would be helpful on our new adventure and it has been, to a point. We are not miserable here, not at all, but we are discovering a deep love and appreciation for the people and places we left behind. It is curious, because beyond all of the specific things I miss in Seattle, I also miss the city itself.  A place can be more than the sum of its parts this sum can have character all its own. The city has moods, as if the collective energy of our individual lives contribute to an almost tangible whole. If you live in Seattle and need an example, think about the first sunny day in May after a relentless, rainy winter. The joy in the air is as warm and palpable as the sunshine on your pale, Vitamin-D deprived skin.Maybe those connections and feelings come only with time, or maybe small villages don't have enough humanity per square inch to make them quite as tangible. Either way, I miss being a part of Seattle's collective consciousness. 

In other news, the sea has fully frozen over and is safe to walk/ ATV/ Snowmobile on. It's quite an experience to walk out onto an ocean that was liquid just a month or two ago. It is also hauntingly beautiful out there, like a white and blue desert. 

It is also really damn cold out. Most days hover around single digits and negative single digits, but some days get down to -20 to -30. Our pipes have frozen twice, once on Thanksgiving day (good thing I'd already done my cooking) and last weekend. Not having running water SUCKS. Thankfully, we have excellent and hardworking maintenance guys who fixed it reasonably quickly.

Here are some pictures of our backyard frozen waste: 

These are from Thanksgiving, while there was still some liquid on the sea:

Last weekend, with the freeze complete.

Mike is walking on water!

On an unrelated note, 

 Mike has found a new hobby: he makes beautiful jewelry out of chainmaille rings. 

He's quite good at it and has almost sold enough to cover the costs of his materials. Not a bad way to occupy your time. Plus, I get free custom jewelry, which is GREAT. 

Other than that, our lives have been relatively uneventful. We go to work, we come home, we do it again the next day. We count the days until winter break. 

I am beyond excited to go home. 

Love you all and see some of you very, very soon.

Winter is coming

"Now is the Winter of our Discontent / Made glorious Summer by this sun of York..."
Halloween has come and gone and with it the short, unremarkable time that passes as fall on the shores of Norton Sound. There are no trees here so there are no leaves to fall and no woodsy, musty smells to herald the slow march until winter. Instead, there is only a moment between the end of summer and the first snow that feels a little like the earth holding its breath as if to ask, "Are you ready? It's almost time..."
And then the snow arrives.
 It is slow at first, teasing. Will I melt off in the daylight, or will I finally begin to hide the earth from you? Is this the beginning of the end of the brown gravelly ground and the beginning of the white depths and endless shades of grey?
The week before Halloween gave us our first permanent layer of white. Since then, there has been a slow and gradual covering, occasionally beaten back by the sun but never fully letting go. They tell me soon all we'll see is white until May.

The most interesting and surprising transformation for Mike and I has been the sea. A day or two after Halloween, right around my very first parent-teacher conference day,* The ocean started freezing. We are far enough north that this is perfectly normal and we've been told by the end of the month it will likely be safe enough to walk on. No one thinks much of this, but both Mike and I are fascinated.
The ocean. Is freezing. Like, solid.
Next month,  WE WILL BE ABLE TO WALK ON THE SEA. Holy f***, that's cool. (Literally. Ha!)

These are pictures from last weekend, as the shoreline was beginning to freeze over:

As the tide came in, water froze in layers over any piece of debris that was handy. Kinda like layers on a pearl, I'd imagine.....

This used to be a bike tire. I suppose sometime in June it might become one again.....

Here is the same shore, a week later (today). The ice is starting to reach out onto the water:

 Here is a piece of tundra on the way to St. Michael, the neighboring village. Someday soon all that brown will turn into white......

Last month we also had the rare pleasure of watching a beautiful Aurora display, which I described last post. I finally got my lazy butt in gear and edited pictures from that night, so go look!

Also, here is a blurry picture of the local dogsled team out for a practice run. Because that is the sort of thing you see when you drive over to the next village on a saturday afternoon for groceries.

On a final note, I miss you all terribly. Election night was particularly heartbreaking, mostly because I couldn't celebrate properly with all my like-minded lovelies on cap hill. I won't get into it on a public blog (I'm not about to bring that wackyness down on myself), but suffice it to say I was thrilled that my guy and my ballot issues won and I feel optimistic about the future. I hope all of you are doing splendidly. I will see most of you soon (6 weeks! Yaaaay!).


*It went fine. People were generally nice. No one yelled at me. All was well.

On PFD checks, Northern lights and snow,snow, snow...

"You know, you get paid just for living in Alaska."

I have heard this many times in various forms, mostly from people who don't live here and mostly in sort of a "Alaska is crazy-pants, but at least there's perks,"kind of tone. I've also heard people get paid for having children. I've often wondered what the real story is. Now that we live here, I think I have a fair idea:

Every year, every qualified Alaskan (read: anyone who has lived here more than a year and has filled out the necessary paperwork), receives a check or direct deposit from the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). What is this mystical PFD? From what I understand, the state of Alaska, just like many other states, requires licenses to use their natural resources (like oil and whatnot). Corporations and other organizations pay for these licenses and that money goes into a big 'ol investment portfolio.  The profits from that investment fund then gets doled out every year to AK residents. The amount of the check depends on a few things: how much money is paid in licensing, how well those investments are paying off and probably a bunch of other things that I haven't taken the time learn or care about. 

(if you care, here is a convenient website).

The bottom line is: yes, you kinda get paid to live here. And you kinda get paid....a lot. This year every one got $878. Per person. Even if that person is under 18 and not really in a position to know what to do with that kind of money. This may be where the whole "You get paid to have kids," thing came from.  This is also considered a "low" number....PFD has been as high as 2 grand some years. 

The checks started hitting direct deposit accounts last week and arriving by mail this week. The sudden influx of money has caused quite a stir around here....it's been a challenging week with the students. 

Mike and I aren't cool enough to join the PFD party yet, but if we stick around up here we'll certainly try and get in on it. Free oil money sounds great to me :)

As some of you savvy FB friends may have heard, after our crazy PFD-influenced week, we were rewarded on Friday night with some spectacular Northern Lights. The Aurora Borealis is something we've both always wanted to see and though we caught a smaller one a couple weeks ago, Friday's show was full-sky mystical awesomeness. We attempted to take pictures, but it was way too cold to keep your hands out of gloves for any amount of time and I don't own a cool enough tripod to get any spectacular shots. 

Instead, here is a video of the same night over in Olnes pond near Fairbanks.

Our view was not quite as bright (there is a surprising amount of light pollution in the village), and it is in time-lapse, so it's moving way faster than in real time. That is what surprised me the most about seeing the Aurora...whenever you see it on videos, the lights seem like they're dancing like crazy. In reality, most of them move and change almost imperceptibly, like clouds. Actually, they are a lot like really awesome light-clouds. Except that clouds don't move in snaky waves or blink and shimmer, which auroras totally do. When it got too cold outside, Mike and I moved indoors. Luckily, we could still see enough sky from our kitchen window to keep enjoying the show. That's definitely one of the perks that makes it all worth it up here. We may have to deal with all the unique challenges that come with living off the road system in a native village, but at least we can watch the aurora from our kitchen.

UPDATE (11/10/12) Pictures!!!!! Blurry, but recognizable:

In other news, it started snowing with a little more attitude today. We've been getting little piddly morning sprinkles occasionally for a few weeks, but none of it has survived past noon. Today we got enough to survive all day and build up about an inch. No big deal up here, but enough to paralyze Seattle for a day if it happened there :)

All in all, we're doing just fine up here. There is enough excitement to keep us entertained and busy, but not too much to handle. I've gotten my work week down to around 60hrs/wk, which I feel is a pretty rockin' accomplishment for a first year. I'm still not getting enough done, but I'm not in crazy stress land, so all is well. 

How are you all? I miss you. 

A trip out of the village and the first snow

Phew! It has been an exciting three weeks!

Firstly, as some of you might have noticed, I got the opportunity to leave the village for a few days for a training. The training was at the Mat-su district (just outside of Anchorage) headquarters in Palmer, AK. The district put us up in a nice hotel in Wasilla for two nights, then gave us a night in Anchorage before flying us out. The flight out of the village was gorgeous. It was a clear sunny day and I got to see some amazing sights. The little Era plane that picked me up had to stop over in two other villages to pick up more teachers, so I got a little tour of the north country.

The shoreline near Stebbins:

 A random jut of Alaska:

 Over near Shaktoolik:

 The village of Koyk. They have TREES! I was jealous.

 The view from my hotel room in Wasilla. It is pretty there:

 I really enjoyed the training, it had useful strategies that I'll definitely be using in my classroom. The Mat-su teachers and trainers were all very friendly and sweet, and the food they served us delicious! But beyond that, I really appreciated the time to get to know the para-pro that came with me from Stebbins (she is an AWESOME person) and the folks from other village schools that I car pooled with. The training was in Palmer but our hotel was in Wasilla, so we had a little bit of a commute to chat during.* One of my companions was a super-cool native from Wales, AK. Look it up. It is on the very western tip of the middle chunk of AK. The natives from there hunt musk ox, caribou, reindeer, whales and bears, both the grizzly and polar kind.** You have to be incredibly hard core to make your life there. He told us amazing stories about his life and shared crazy videos of him and his family chasing bears on snow machines. It was awesome. And now I kinda want to teach in Wales. My favorite moment of the training came when Mr. Wales used one of the conceptual mapping techniques we were learning to map out a lesson on properly killing, harvesting and eating a Musk Ox. Apparently two had wandered into his village that week and the staff took advantage of the moment to bring the kids out and give an impromptu cultural studies lesson***.
After our final session on Saturday, we got to spend a night in Anchorage before flying out. I took advantage of the time to do some shopping and a healthy amount of beer-drinking. I'm not gonna lie, those beers tasted wonderful. :) I haven't missed them as much as I thought I might, but that doesn't mean I didn't appreciate the crap out of them when I got them.

The trip back from Anchorage was full of awful. We got to the airport at 9:30am, but didn't board a plane until around 5:30pm. All of Era's planes were grounded due to an outdated flight recorder system. All other flights were cancleed, but because we were a BSSD charter, they managed to find a plane from a subsidiary airline (Hageland, the Tweeto-owned arm of Era) and send it down to get us. Still, I didn't get home until almost 10pm that night. Not fun, especially considering I had to go right back to teaching the next morning.
All in all, by the end of this week I'd managed to work two full weeks of 12ish hour days with no days off. Turns out, that's about how much I can take before I start to break. By friday, I was a hot mess. But hey, this is what I signed up for, and at the end of the day, I do still love the job.

Friday night the community organized a "disco dance" for the kids in the village. Mike and I had a great time showing up and dancing with our students. It was really wonderful to relax with them in a non-school setting, and they were all happy to see us there. I hope we impressed them with our leet dancing skillz :P

This weekend we spent our time relaxing and playing Ikuza, a Japanese-themed risk-style game. Mike is way too good at it, of course. It also snowed for the first time today, though it didn't come anywhere near sticking and occasionally switched over to hail. Still, I guess this is how it starts.

And now, I leave you all with some fun Stebbins slang that I've learned:

"I jokes"- used instead of "just kidding"
"Arah!" - basically the village version of "oh man!" or "awww!" or "harrumph!" It is my favorite, but I fear not for long, because I hear it ALL the time:
Me:"Yes, you DO have to do all the problems on the quiz." 
Kids:"Arahhh!"




*No, I did not see Russia or a single Palin, in case you were wondering.
**Natives in this area get hunting licenses for all of these animals. They use every part of everything they kill and are fined heavily if they don't. From what I understand, Alaska Fish and Game comes down really hard on anyone who abuses the system.
***and by "cultural studies lesson" I mean they KILLED AND HARVESTED A MUSK OX. FOR SCHOOL. I f*cking love Alaska.

more Firsts!

This last week has marked a series of firsts: First week of school, first ATV ride and Mike's first (potential) job in education.
So first things first...er, so to speak:                                

Last week was our opening week at school. There are a thousand things I could say about how it went- the good, the bad, the amazing, the hilarious....etc. But in order to protect my school, myself and my students, I'll be keeping those stories to a minimum. If you're interested, you can always call, skype or email me, or wait until winter break, and I'll regail you with stories.
All things considered, our first week went fairly well. There were the typical ups and downs and 13 hour days, but none of that is new to me. The students are different in many ways from any I've worked with in Seattle, but not in ways that seem insurmountable. The culture is  very different from ones I have known and worked with, but the kids are much like any who live on the edges of our world.  They all have huge challenges outside of the classroom that they deal with every day....challenges most of us can only begin to imagine or relate to. It is my own challenge to keep that in mind and teach with an open heart and with as much love, support and consistancy as I can. That said, these kids are some of the toughest and most resilient I've ever met. They play outside in any wheather, they rarely cry for more than a few moments after getting hurt, they are lightning-quick with forgiveness. I feel truly lucky that I'll get to know them over the year.

Some of you may be wondering what Mike's been doing this whole time. Don't worry, he has been far from idle. Nothing is official yet, but it looks as though he may be getting a part time job at school as an aide/ librarian. He's pretty excited about it, but it is a totally different work enviornment than he's used to. Mostly, it's a very good change. Other than that, he'll be starting online classes with Bellevue College in about two weeks.
We've also both started doing the p90x workout program. It's hard to find excersize options out here, but there is a small gym available to us. It's nice to be doing something together. It helps keep us both motivated.

Last but not least, in our week of firsts.......our first ATV ride!
Yesterday we borrowed a shiny yellow ATV and went exploring.
This is the aptly named "driftwood beach."

There was a lot of friggin' driftwood. 

But also lots of picturesque views:

We had some fun on the rocks.....

And then went to a different beach, where we discovered birds and more fun rocks:

Also, target practice:

And that about sums up where we live. Birds. Rocks. Water. There are bears and wolves and foxes too, but we didn't see any on our trip. 

And with that, I'll leave you with my favorite piece of driftwood: a huge tree stump that looks like a creepy spider. 

Happy Labor day, y'all. 

P.S. If we're FB friends, I finally posted wedding, beerfest and Stebbins albums. Enjoy. 

A tale of 13 hour days and Shadow's (mis)adventure

“All great changes are preceded by chaos.” -Deepak Chopra

There has been no shortage of chaos in our lives lately!

Last week, our staff along with three other schools', gathered in Stebbins for a week of 13 hour inservice trainings. The staff not housed here in Stebbins got the pleasure of sleeping on cots in our classrooms all week.....a total of around 70 extra people living and working in our tiny school. This could have been an incredibly stressful and trying time, but it didn't quite turn out that way. 

Because our days were so long and we hosted so many people, the district provided plenty of food for us. 

Just for reference, here was our crazy schedule:

Breakfast 7-8am

Session 1: 8-noon

Lunch: noon-1pm

Session2: 1pm-5pm

Dinner: 5-6pm

Session 3: 6-9pm

All other things being equal, it's a pretty intense schedule. I can't imagine being away from home and family and sleeping on a cot on top of that. I was very thankful to have my own home and husband to come home to (though he was also often in trainings with me). Even so, I had no shortage of personal drama to deal with. Shadow escaped out of a window sometime on Monday. He's done this before, but this village is full of stray dogs and other dangers- there is a reason the only cats in the village belong to teachers and stay indoors. The first night I was pretty scared, but kept it pretty much together. By Wednesday, I was a hot mess. I managed to keep focused during actual trainings- there was plenty to keep me occupied- but coming home to a cold, silent home with untouched food and water bowls after a long, intense day was heartbreaking. Mike was incredibly sweet and supportive throughout the whole thing, as were my co-workers and admin staff. I was floored by how much they cared about me and a cat they'd never even seen. Everyone had words of support and gave me space and time to freak out when I needed to. My principal's wife was especially wonderful. She helped me spread the word to the village, make "Lost Cat" posters, hugged me when I cried and tried to cheer me up with cat stories of her own. The principal and facilities staff even ripped a panel off a building and crawled under to look for Shadow after a group of kids told us they had seen him. He wasn't down there at the time, but it was such a lovely gesture. 

Thursday morning, our friend Erick called us during breakfast. I went out to the loading dock behind the school to chat. Not five minutes in, Shadow appeared at the corner of a shed, meowing and looking a little ragged. He was completely fine, if a little dusty and hungry. I grabbed him and carried him home through the school. Most of my co-workers and other staff members from other schools who knew what was going on cheered and congratulated us on my way out. It was a sweet moment. 

Ever since, Shadow has been super-affectionate and happy. It is so wonderful to have him back. 

The rest of the day (and even now) I felt I could take on anything because my home was complete again. 

Whenever something like this happens, I look for the lesson I can take from it. What is it that life is trying to teach me? I learned that I can handle a large amount of emotional and mental stress with Mike's support, but that I really need both him and my kitty to feel strong and happy.  I also learned that I absolutely picked the right place to start my career. This group of people is irreverent, supportive, outgoing, super-smart and passionate about education. I have a lot to learn, but luckily I'm surrounded by some wonderful teachers :) It's going to be a fantastic year. 

And now, Shadow and Mike have a chat:

A tour of Stebbins

Some of you may have seen these already, but I thought I'd share some videos and pictures of our new home:

First, a quick video of the front of our apartment and the school. I have a super long commute:

The small blue building next to the long main school building is my classroom. I am in a portable this year. It's a nice little room and I can literally see it from my front door, so I'm not complaining.

Here's a better pic of our front door. The apartment to the right belongs to our tech guru. Convenient.

Mike and I went for a walk up the hill next to the town. It was pretty.

Here is a view down the main street. Nothing is paved out here.

The larger building on the right directly behind the red one is our village store.

....hmm. The power just went out (again) and wifi has been twitchy lately, so I'm going to wrap it up for now. Plus, it's almost time to pull the net and prep salmon again (it happens every day at 4). More as soon as I can.....