Thai noodle night

A nicely shoveled walk:



In a stark contrast to the lower 48, students here in bush Alaska love to come visit teachers at their house. I just wanted to mention one of the most useful tools I've been using as a bush teacher: the green/red dot. It's stuck on the window of my house, available for all of my students to see. A red dot indicates to students, "I am busy, please visit later." While a green dot clearly states, "Come on in! (maximum 4)" I had to put a maximum on it or I'd have students crawling all over the place. After Christmas break I started using the green/red dot, and I think it made both me and my students appreciate visiting hours a little more. I snapped a quick photo of the dot while shoveling my walk yesterday.



And what was I shoveling the walk for? For Thai food night, of course! Another quality of bush teaching is hanging out with your fellow teachers, A LOT. Because I am often at other teachers' houses for dinner, I decided to have a nice dinner at my place for everyone. Here I am woking up the pad thai:



Heavy usage of seasoning packets for the Thai food aside, everything turned out great; Except for the Wii Bowling! I had accidentally sucked up the Wii sensor bar cord while vacuuming, snapping it in half. How was the Wii going to work without the sensor bar...? After a little research on the internet, I discovered that the Wii sensor bar is just little device that outputs two sources of infared light, so....



Candles to the rescue! It's fitting that in bush Alaska we had to use regular old candles to make the Wii work. You can see the smile on Gary's face when the Wii remotes worked fine. Two candles as sources of infared light, crazy!

The weather out here is starting to turn to Spring (finally). I heard raindrops onthe roof the other day, but now it's re-frozen and back to 15 degrees or so. It was pretty slushy for a few days:



I bought my plane tickets today though...I'll be home in a short 44 days! There's so much left to do before then, gotta go!