Home on TOMORROW

Going "home" this week is stirring up some weird feelings in my head. I've been dreaming of grass, trees, motorcycles, and my dog for the past month or so. Strangely enough, I haven't been dreaming about people, even though I miss my friends and family very much. I wake up and I can feel the grass under my feet, smell the Washington wind in the air, picture the mountain in the distance. Well I did have a dream last night that my sister was a land baroness in Hawaii and I ran a motorcycle stunt crew on her private resort, but that's pretty much par for the course.

Some people in town ask me if I'm coming back next year, quite a few actually. I've told them that I will try to have an answer after Christmas, but I don't know if I'll have an answer for them...

Here is our school play! These are all of my middle schoolers (8 of them) in a play I "adapted" from an old play we had laying around. Originally it was called "Quarrel in the Candy Shop," but I changed to it include "eskimo foods" and this is the result:

Self-Portraits on the thawed beach

I made a trek today to this spot:



My roomate, Rob, has two strange passions up here in the tundra: self portraits and insanely long walking treks. He'll come back after leaving at 9 am in total darkness and return at 5 pm in total darkness, with a camera-load of self portraits taken throughout the day. I channeled the spirit of Rob on this Saturday and took a six mile walk out to "second bend," a place on the Tagoominick River. After slipping on some extremely slick ice on the river, I snapped this shot by the ocean.



My travels ended at about 2pm, and the sun had already hit his peak and began to descend for his 19-hour away time. I snapped one last self-portrait before going inside to some leftover chicken and rice.



When I got home some students came over and asked to play the Wii. I told them I'd be glad to let them play, AFTER THEY DID MY DISHES!!!!! Muwhahahaha!!!!! Another came over and wanted to play, and guess what, THE FLOOR NEEDS CLEANING TOO!!!!! Hahahahahahahaha!


I tell my students that I don't make promises. If I say I'm going to do something, than I'm going to do it. Especially if it includes defeating my students in Wii Bowling! They're boxing each other in this shot:



I'll now attempt to load a bunch of cool pictures I've taken into a slideshow (and I'll throw some ham in there too).

Weather Trade With Washington

40 degrees and raining at high noon, wow! This picture was taken yesterday. Just like a wonderful December day in Washington, but wait, I AM IN SHAKTOOLIK. The weather in Seattle is 25 degress with snow! Holy cow! This Washington weather has got me all pumped up--but everyone else hates it! They want snow for their snowmachines, but I want to run on the beach. All of the ocean ice has melted and it was washing out of Norton Sound is big clumps.



The ocean ice is basically all melted now. I went for a run last night and I felt like I was walking on the moon. Big clumps of brown ice, a howling wind, and strange colors in the sky. If I were an eskimo 2,000 years ago (or 100 years ago), I would definitely have believed that spirits were haunting the beach. I swore the wind sounded like a plane coming in to land, or a person trying to talk to me (in a screaming voice nonetheless).

The color of the arctic winter sky still seems bizarre to me. Like an impressionist painting exploded where the sun should be. Lots of pastel colors--light blue, yellow, and orange. Check these shots of the sunrise (at 10:30 am) this morning. The sun didn't peak out until about 11:45.





I waited another half hour and got another shot from the ocean side of town. The blue was beautiful, but it still looks strangely unnatural to me. I'll be home for X-mas in just 19 days! The students are getting a bit restless but we'll get through those standards.