Almost Home

Here I sit in the Seattle airport… a very familiar yet very unlikable place right now! I have a 10 hour layover through the night and am too cheap to leave and get a hotel room. So I’m toughing out the freezing cold air that makes it impossible to sleep in, plus I now know they do their construction work in the middle of the night. It’s nearing 6:00 am Seattle time, and I’m due to board within the hour. So needless to say I’m very sleepy and a bit impatient. This is the last leg of a very exhausting 3 days of traveling, from the sled ride by a snow machine, a bumpy 1 hour bush plane ride, a jet flight, then the two 3 hour flights.

I am very much looking forward to this summer vacation. It has snowed in May more days than not, but thankfully the weather was beautiful when it came time for us teachers to leave. I cleaned the house and packed on Thursday, and Friday fortunately flew by. We toted our luggage to the school, waiting for our plane. It is a messy ride up to the airport, so we put all our luggage in trash bags and threw them in the sled behind the snow machine. I took the ride up in the back of the sled, making sure we didn’t lose any luggage. Kevin was driving and could only go so far on the snow machine, because the airport is on high ground and the snow is scare near there. So we dropped the luggage off on the boardwalk and made several treks to retrieve all the bags, which was about 100 yards from the airport. The ride was bumpy and stomach wrenching, as the pilot was a trainee and wasn’t use to such strong crosswinds.

We spent the night in Bethel, where I got stuck with having to tote around my guitar for the entire trip… they wouldn’t check it because of the long layover! It’s been such a dang hassle! Just when I thought I was a pro at all this traveling business, too. Ah well, next time I’ll know. Mom and Auj will meet me at the familiar arrival spot in Dallas and I have been so excited to see them that I have to stop thinking about it, because I get very impatient with the slow pace. Right now I’m too tired to think straight, so I’m sorry for any typos or lack of flow.

I was really excited for about an hour the other day – there is a survival skills course that includes fun activities too – skiing, ice skating, gun safety, archery, skinning meat, etc. (If you want to see the whole list look below). But when I ran it by Grant he said we don’t have room in the budget to buy everything necessary. Hopefully in the future we can make it happen though! So instead I will teach computer applications for an elective in addition to my other classes: health, 9-12 literature, and a literature lab. 

Culture Week was a little chaotic, but fun nonetheless. I was on outside duty, shoveling snow for 3 hours every day. The original plan was to go riding out on the tundra learning arctic survival skills, but no Yupik person volunteered to go, so instead we shovel pathways for teachers to walk to school and shoveled out boats.

Survival Skills Class

Boat safety

Salmon fishing/prep

First aid

Trail hiking

Basic wilderness survival

Berry picking/prep

Gun safety/care

Snaring/skinning/meat prep

Suicide prevention

Yupik dance

Snowgo safety

NYO

Cross country skiing/snow showing

Ice rescue

Ice fishing

Ice skating

Archery

Bike riding

Nutrition and fitness

Community service