Skype to the rescue!

According to the tech person at my school, all of the long distance phone capabilities of rural Alaska are down! Fortunately, the magic of the internet phone service "Skype" has allowed me to call everybody back home in Washington. I feel weird just talking at my laptop, but it works pretty darn well! And only 9 bucks for unlimited (well, 7 hours a day) calling to anywhere in the U.S. for 3 months. Total score!

Well, I have to leave for NACTEC tomorrow and I'll be gone in Nome for 4 days. NACTEC is kind of a career/life skills camp for middle school and high school students, and I am taking our middle schoolers there to learn about different jobs. Plus, we get to swim in a heated pool! Planning for the substitute is taking quite a while though...


Here's a picture of me with my new laptop! Warhol-ish.

Muktuk and Mr. Frost

The first "jack" frost of the season came through yesterday. Unlike cold weather down in Washington, where it will frost on Tuesday and be 80 degrees on Thursday, the frost in Shaktoolik is here to stay. According to the natives, it will be frosty here pretty much every morning for the next, oh, 5 months or so. Woohoo! I had to go berry picking one last time...





The crannberries can only survive a few frosts before they turn to mush. Here is some juice that I processed last week (I needed to make room in the freezer). According to my students, I've either made it "too sweet" or it "needs more sugar." Hmm, I like it just fine!



Also a new experience for me over the weekend--muktuk! There is the "white" muktuk, which is beluga skin & blubber, and "black" muktuk, which is bowhead whale. The white muktuk is pretty tasty, like chicken, but...a little chewier...with a sort of scrambled-eggish flavor. It's mighty fine when it's pickled! The black muktuk has an even stranger flavor, and chews like a hard piece of gristel. You can't really chew it down, you just have to swallow the lump of cartilage-y blubber. It tastes more like...fishy walnuts...with...almonds...and chicken again. It has sort of a weird nutty flavor. Here's a close-up:



Then here's my leftovers from a wedding reception that I took home. Homemade bread is a staple here, as is desserts involving berries. You can see the remnants of the delicious "agutuk" I had (eskimo ice cream: made with berries, seal oil, and rendered fat of some kind, a real treat if you can get past the aftertaste), and next to the fork is some pickled white muktuk.



Other than that, we had our last cross country meet in Nome. I took 6th place in the open race, but none of our runners went to state. Kotzebue and Nome have fierce cross country teams that know the course. The course has a brutal one-mile uphill climb through the tundra that just kills your legs--and it's at the beginning of the race! We got to ride in the short bus though, classic!



Here's the sprawling, 3,500 population town of Nome. They have a Subway, 9 bucks for a footlong was a real treat for the end of the season.



And one last picture, the north side of Shaktoolik at low tide.

Breathtaking view this morning

Simply an awe-inspiring sunrise this morning. My camera lense would need to take a 270 degree picture to truly do it justice:



We had our meet in Unalakleet this past weekend also. The team didn't do as well for several reasons. I was sick (and wasn't whipping them as hard during practice), the weather was stormy, and there were many more runners. Here we are, leaving in our tiny airplane. I got to sit in the co-pilot's seat!



Very strange race across the tundra though. It wasn't a circular course--we all drove 3 miles out of town and dropped the runners off to run across the muddy sponge-land. Here's Bart at the starting line:


Marie and Dorinda were getting changed when everyone left for the girl's race! Argh! I asked the superintendant of the whole district, Jim, if there were any more vehicles going to the starting line. His response was, "Sure, just take my Blazer. The keys are already in it." WOW! What superintendant in the entire U.S. leaves his keys in a car outside the school, then lets a first-year teacher drive his students down a bumpy dirt road?



It felt almost foreign, driving a car. Considering that I've ridden in a car maybe 5 times in the past 2 months. I've ridden in the back of a truck for 2 miles on my way to the airport a few times, but that's been about it. I grinned ear to ear when my students remarked, "Woah, you know how to drive?"

The flight on the way back made for some spectacular views of the Iditarod trail. Here's a collection of pictures:









That last picture of Shaktoolik really makes my world here seem small!