Puppy says,"Now where, the frig!"


This over hang must way a ton. I hope it does not fall on anyone. It is in a place where no one else walks.
It is light, now, until ten thirty p.m., we are waiting for spring. Our principal said the we have spring, summer, and fall in the month of July.
We are doing state testing today. The test had sixty-five questions and was not timed. It is hard to get a quarter of the kids to work for ten minutes at a time. Some of the slow readers went from nine thirty till two o'clock with 30 minutes off for lunch. I don't know of any of the kids that are on ADD drugs. We just teach them when we can get them settled down. The reading test had a big 5 paragraph essay question. Tomorrow is the writing, what will they have to do, write a short story? 

Here are two nice sisters we work with in our after school program. They are the the daughters of our maintenance man and our junior high teacher's aide.
This was taken about 8:30 p. m. so the days are lighter for much longer now. 
The dog is going under the  neighbor's house to find shelter out of the blizzard.

Some moose in Anchorage.
Susan and a student with their new stick fishing pole. 

To read this picture story start at the bottom and go up. Oh, we did find the other boy in a blizzard of snow created by his shoveling. 
There are about six steep stairs. You can see the angle of the railing.
One of our students starting work on the project. There is another boy somewhere below in the snow that is 5' high at the bottom of the stairs. 
Susan and dog stood here to give you a scale to measure the snow.
I checked if your back door lock had thawed recently and this is what I found when I opened the door.....

Enough snow, already. We are having another blizzard today. It started last night and continued off and on today. All the trails through the drifts are filled again. I have to walk through them and get all wet when I go inside. If you happen to step where there is no boardwalk you immediately sink in to your waist. You have to roll to get out and hope no one sees you. Once one of our women teachers went down off the boardwalk and showed up with her nostrils full of snow. We tried to re-enact that and just could not get that to happen again. PS. The lady recovered, but gets inquiries about her nose all the time. Like she is sniffing the wrong white powder.
Sharky in his winter attire. I think it is his paws that get the coldest. Sometimes he has to find a way under our house to get out of the weather before he freezes solid. 
Playing kids. All of them are too young to be Susan's and my classes.
Susan made snow ice cream. It was sooo good. She had to go to Anchorage to for some tests. All is well and I am so happy about that. I don't know when she will be able to get back in though. Spring, maybe?
Don't walk under the snow armed with razor sharp ice cycles. Especially when the wind is blowing 60 mph. Course no one is walking around unless they have a little dog who has business outside. 

Yes, we have had plenty of snow this year. This is a walkway to the emergency generator for the school. These are a couple of our Junior High students with Susan. The hoods always remind me of home(Blytheville). Our native children call hooded sweatshirts sweaters.
A road to nowhere. Well, maybe the airport. The days are much longer now. How about some heat, please?
Our principal sent Susan to the airport to take a couple of out-of-town accountants to their ride. We had just gotten another foot of snow which had drifted as high as the pickup hood. It took a loader to get Susan out. Yes, it is a 4-wheeled drive, Ford, and 2008.
I could have been falling off the chair in the hotel room in Anchorage where I was staying for a technology convention or maybe not... double exposure?
The technology conference lasted several days. I found I don't like crowds much anymore. Once at a buffet in convention room too small for the people in it, someone kind of  pushed me getting to the cream cheese pie and I was surprised myself with the response that came to my mind. It was a physical response accompanied with a verbal blast. Verbal blast, reminds me of Sonic. I did recover before either and left for some fresh Alaska air. Susan did not get to come with me, but I sure wish she had. It was a nice break from the village, once I got used to the pitiful pace and packed place. 

Here is my honey in pile of snow another blizzard left. They are much like the blizzards we had in Oklahoma, but much, much more snow. The hand rail behind Susan is probably 3 feet high. It was packed  down to 6" before this storm. Susan is actually standing on a pile of snow and she is too light to sink in all the way.

Here is a snow mountain from our small school parking lot. A small child is having a lot of fun!
This is the bay near the Captain Hook Hotel were I am attending a technology conference. I am enjoying being out of the village, but it is really a strange feeling. Part of it is that Susan is not with me, and the other part is all the closeness and activity here in Anchorage. I hope they don't think I will be sitting in a room with a lot of people tomorrow. Right now, I would just as soon be in my classroom with my students and Susan right there across the hall from us.

  I sure am going to miss all of the students this summer. 

Same bay at sunset out my hotel window. I hear there is a swimming pool down stairs; think I will go check it out. 
The days are longer, now. This was at 6:30 p. m. The days of extended darkness never really never bothered me. Susan and I were always busy. There were always things we liked to do. Sometimes we would let some of our students into the school gym and let them play basketball. All of us had fun doing that. Our dog loved to romp up and down the long school halls looking for candy a student let fall from their hand. 

All work, no play.

Susan and I have spent the entire weekend working on a required Alaska History course. All the teachers new to Alaska have to take the course. The first lesson I did took 17 typed double- spaced pages. We have essay questions on the lessons and the two tests. I will be so glad to get this out of the way. Some of the courses at other universities let multiple people work on the same lesson and just put all their names on it for credit. Not ours, we have to do the lessons individually. We will probably do better on the tests, though. We plan to do three lessons per weekend finishing the lessons in one month. Our school district is paying for the course after we pass it, of course. 

Susan and the Yukon River. We still need to walk over to the island.

It snowed and stormed so much that we could not get out on a plane and missed a teacher in-service in Anchorage. We could have been in Anchorage 3 days at the end of this week. Now we will be here for months, unless another in-service comes up. It snowed a foot then 4o degree temps came in one day and melted a lot of the snow cover. Now, of course, the temp is in the single digits again. Oh, that is negative single digits!

Shark Boy playing with his new Spanish friend. Someone called her a teacup dog.

This was at noon, I think. Heavy clouds were moving in with a brisk breeze. Susan has her winter cough. She went to the clinic and they gave her cough syrup. I think she needs a shot of something strong with a syringe. 

Going to another village school for an in-service.

This was after the in-service trying to get all the snow machines running again after setting in the -20 degree cold.

The school building we traveled to for the in-service. This is the arrival. You see all the clothes this person was wearing.

Sometimes the snow machines stick to the snow and person has to lift their tracks off the ice or the belt will set there and burn on the pulley that drives the tracks. On ice the front skis do not turn the snow machine very well. I guess that is why the don't call them ice machines. You just sit there with the steering wheel turned saying, "OH ____!!!!" (fill in the blank with your personal preference for those times when severe injury accompanied with pain is mili-seconds away). My experience was the machine had to run into some snow or bushes at the edge of the trail before the thing would turn. 

On arrival, I think that is Susan!! Anyway whoever gave me an Eskimo kiss. We were cold and frost bitten.

The survival kit my daughter, Sarah, gave me minus the little pliers-knife handy dandy 
combo the security person at the airport took from me. They probably needed one for their kit. The knife wasn't long enough to hit anything vital, at least, on me. I should have taken the foil blanket out and put it over my head so I could have avoided a scabby nose and face. Right, I would have hit the only large tree along that part of the iced over Yukon River.  

Frosty trees in Anchorage

Even the wild animals are running away from the cold. I think the temperature has been mostly below -10 since we came back to Alaska.

A village dog may wonder why the humans wear so much clothing that you can't even smell them.

And all this time Shark Boy thought hell was hot. He gets so confused on the bitter cold snow. His movements seem to tell us, "which foot should I save from becoming a block of ice!!"
Shark Boy wondering how can we expect him to do what comes natural in an unnatural place with fox scent everywhere. And what is a fox? Hopefully, not some kind of dog eating, blizzard loving, snow munching monster. 

It was nice to come back to so many friendly kids ready to tease us and tell us "Happy New Year." Seems like most teachers are the kind of people who see mostly good in most everything and everyone.  

The days are already getting longer. I feel we have made it through some kind of trial like a Praxis II test or something. It stays light till about five thirty, now. It is really like what I commented upon before: we are too busy working with mostly fun, smiling, young people to worry much about the light. The students provide light shinning out from within their spirits with their wonderful responses to our teaching and caring. Our church from Blytheville sent gifts of pencils, socks, lotion, and snacks. Surely the astronauts could see their light shinning that day. I will always remember seeing gifts coming from good caring people back in Blytheville in the middle the world received with thanksgiving by good caring people from Emmonak at the top of the earth. 

After the Holidays and Sarah's Wedding

There is a new dog in town, Emmonak Village that is. It was -22 degrees with a -44 degrees wind chill. Cold has a new meaning for us and our dog can high step it much faster.

Bride and Groom start a new life. We all had a great time at the celebration with relatives old and new. 

Bride Sarah with her daddy. All I was thinking of was my memories of all the fun Abby, Sarah, Susan, and I had while we struggled through growing up and learning new things every day.

Sarah and Abby help each other while Susan and I are so far away. That is and always will be a great comfort for Susan and I to know our daughters are making sure each other are doing okay.

As we stepped outside the airport in Fayetteville, Susan and I were greeted by this beautiful sunrise promising what turned out to be a wonderful Christmas vacation with family and friends.