Basketball Trip

This past weekend I took a trip with the high school basketball team to a nearby village.  They needed a chaperon because the coach is not  a certified teacher and all trips like this require the presence of a teacher.  

These gatherings work like this:  4-5 nearby villages get together in one spot for a series of games that last for about 24 hours.  I'm going to keep this relatively brief because I talk about the trip on Every Atom #2 (which is nearing completion and should be out by the end of the week).

Here's a brief time line: 

Friday:

10:00 - We're informed that the plane is on the way to pick us up.  We get our gear on (all students are required to wear snow pants, boots and a coat on the plane).  We pile into the snow machine sled and are dragged to the airstrip by Our Fearless Leader.  A visiting junior high basketball team deplanes and then we pile in.

10:30 - We're in the air.

10:45 - We do roller coaster and I curse loudly enough for the nearest student to hear me.  He laughs.

11:10 - We land.

11:15 -1:30 - We hang out at the school waiting for the school day to end.  We go to the store which is much bigger than the store in our village (they have Fair Trade coffee and organic pasta & tea).  The kids are fed lunch and we get assigned a classroom to stay in.  Games start at 1:30.

1:30 - 10:00 - Games are played with a dinner break and then bed.

Saturday

8:15 - 9:30 - Wake up, breakfast, prep for games.

9:30 - 11:00 - Two more games. 

11:30 - 12:00 - Board plane, fly to The Village (no roller coaster this time), arrive home.

Kissing in the tree

One of my students, who's not the world's greatest speller, just caught me and Ben high-fiving in the hallway, and sang this little song:

Sara and Ben, kissing in the tree,
K-I-S-N-Y-N-T!

A brilliant new take on an old classic.

Zora update

Zora had her surgery yesterday, apparently she swallowed some kind of fabric, maybe part of her rope toy or maybe a sock - and pieces of it were lodged in two different places in her intestines. The surgery turned out to be pretty expensive but Zora is okay for now. Our tenants are being fantastic and making sure someone is home at all times for the next several days, and giving her 3 kind of medicine - anti-nausea, anti-biotic and painkillers. Apparently her intestines were pretty inflamed from that stuff being lodged in there for a few days, so the risk of internal infection is on the high side.

We're glad to know she's okay for now and will update the blog if anything big changes.

Zora

As many of you know, our tenants are also taking care of our dog, Zora. It worked out really well for us that they were willing to do so and from what we can tell they love her a lot and are taking great care of her. They've called us a couple of times with questions and sent us pictures of her from time to time. Saturday night they called us to say she had vomited several times and did we want them to take her to the vet. We said they could wait till the morning so the next day they took her to Dove Lewis, the animal hospital in Portland, where she got some anti-nausea medication. But by Monday morning she was still throwing up so they brought her back and had to get x-rays taken. The doctor said it looked like she had eaten something that was now lodged in her intestine, and would need surgery to remove it - at a cost of $2700 - $4500. We were kind of stunned. On the one hand, we love Zora so much and we don't really feel like you can put a price on that. On the other hand, we have talked in the past about how much we would spend on her if she ever got seriously ill and we both felt that after all, she is a dog, not a person, and we would not be comfortable spending huge sums of money on her medical care. I know some people may have strongly different opinions about that, but that was our thinking. So we decided to call our regular vet, actually it's just a clinic that we usually take her to. They said they could do the surgery for $400 - $1000. I have absolutely no idea why there would be such a huge range in price, but we were both relieved that we wouldn't have to decide whether or not to do the surgery. $1000 is still a lot for us, but it's manageable - $4000 really was not.

Anyway Zora was supposed to go in for surgery this morning, so I'm hoping to hear from our tenants some time this afternoon or evening. We'll let you know how she's doing when we hear.

Podcast #1: Every Atom

Here's our podcast episode #1.  It's called "Every Atom".

Here's the link to the podcast on Podomatic.

If you download it from Podomatic, you will have to manually add it to your iTunes library.  

As of right now, the podcast is under review on iTunes.  I'll update here when/if it is approved and you can subscribe to it.  

Note:  The listening experience may be clunky this time around.  We only have the onboard mic for recording and we had to learn our way through GarageBand.  The next one should be better and more timely.

UPDATE:  Every Atom is now available through iTunes.  You can search the iTunes store for it or follow the link from everyatom.podomatic.com.

Honey Bucket

Today, due to the sewer line being frozen, we're all using honey buckets.  This means that there is a 5 gallon bucket in all of the bathrooms with a toilet seat and cover on it (they're made for just this purpose).  The tool we need to unfreeze the line without destroying it is stuck in Athol and very few planes are landing - in fact, just one company landed one plane yesterday and that was the first one in 5 days.  Not the best.  The other option is that someone can snow machine over to The Bay to borrow the tool.  With enough snow and a good path, you can get to The Bay in 15 minutes.  But there's almost no snow on the ground so it would take nearly an hour.  Good times!

In related news, I'm trying to really restrict my fluid intake today (and probably for the rest of the week).  By the end of the work day I've usually had 2 liters of water and a french press-worth of coffee.  Today, I've had just a few sips of water and 3/4's of a cup of coffee.  The headache is coming on.  More good times.

On the plus side, I was talked into chaperoning the high school basketball team to their game in another village this weekend.  This despite me not being a coach.  The guy who is a coach is not a teacher and all trips like this require a teacher to attend.  So on Friday, weather permitting, I'll head to the village where our junior high team was stuck for eight days last year.  It keeps getting better.  

Finally, I think I start teaching a high school elective in journalism today.  This should be pretty fun.  I'm going to mix in some media awareness and online safety stuff (using a game called Smokescreen) and maybe some blogging or podcasting - we'll see.  

The wind has died down significantly and it has warmed up a little.  Excelsior!

Windy icy no-school weather

It is icy here like nothing I've ever seen. The entire road through the village is a sheet of ice, as is all of the ground surrounding the BIA and the school. Anyone without cleats is pretty much guaranteed to take a spill at some point. And if the ice doesn't get you, the wind will. For the past 5 days or so it's been very windy, and yesterday school was actually canceled due to dangerously high winds - gusts of up to 80mph. Normally if school is closed due to bad weather, we teachers are expected to report anyway and put in a work day. But yesterday even we got to stay home. Today school began as usual, but at about 10:30 OFL announced that a sewer line was frozen and even flowing back into the school (ew) and so the school would be closed.

How have we been entertaining ourselves? Well, playing our instruments of course, and I've been trying to get a little ahead in my classes. Drinking tea with E, and watching Harry Potter movies (we just finished #4). Also, we made a podcast! We've got it all edited and are just learning about how and where to post it. We will post the link along with instructions for how to download (for those of you uninitiated into the world of podcasting) very soon!

Back to school

It's the end of our first week back to school and I think we're both feeling pretty readjusted to our normal routine. The actual getting back to it is never as bad as the day or two before, I think. Anyway we only had a 4-day week with the kids, which also helped make the week a little easier.

I'm definitely feeling a bit anxious about the next 8 weeks. Basketball practice has me at school every night until 6, and then I'm taking 3 more classes this quarter. Plus we have 4 basketball games, 3 of which will mean overnights in neighboring villages (and hopefully we won't get stuck anywhere - last year the basketball team got stuck in another village for NINE DAYS). So it'll be a busy two months. But basketball will be over by the end of February and then my classes will be done in mid-March. I'll still have two more classes to take after that, but that'll be a little easier without basketball.

We had a wonderful time on the east coast, seeing our families and some friends. The time always goes too quickly, of course, and it's always a little tricky trying to see both of our families. But I relaxed to the point where I forgot what day it was, and I love when that happens.

I was sort of hoping that there would be a ton of snow here in the Village when we got back, but there still isn't much. In places you can see the tundra grass sticking up. I guess the snow will come eventually. The wind has been pretty crazy though. Today it was really hard to get up the hill to school. At one point B and I couldn't take the next step, the wind was basically just keeping us from moving forward. And it's SO loud, it sounds like a roaring ocean.

Not too much to report - we're working on a podcast and will post the link here when we finish our first one.

Oh, one other quick story - for basketball the kids have to fill out these eligibility forms that list all their classes and teachers. One of our junior high students, she's a little scatterbrained at the best of times and couldn't remember what she had first hour. Instead of checking the schedule or asking a friend, she handed in her form with the first box labeled "learning whatever". Which turned out to be reading.