Year-end Highlights

Hundred Man introducing himself to the
Kindergarten/First Grade students.

So I did a terrible job of keeping my blog updated last year!  I am hoping to do a much better job and be more faithful this school year.  Goodness knows, it's already been a crazy school year with plenty to blog about.  Before I start in on the recent, though, I'll quickly cover the highlights from last year.

We had wolves hanging out in the village over the winter, which served as another reminder of why I did not bring my favorite puppy with me.  I know he's not smart enough to know they are NOT here just to play with him.

We had a couple visitors in the classroom.  Mr. Reinseth wasn't feeling well and had to go home early on the 100th day of school, so Hundred Man came to school to substitute in his classroom.  A student of Pythagoras also came to the middle school and high school classes to share some math insights.

Pythagorean student sharing her wisdom
with the class.

Nanwalek was just a few miles away from the epicenter of a 5.8 earthquake.  I remember wondering how people in California could respond so quickly to earthquakes while in Missouri we aren't even sure it was an earthquake until after it's over.  Well, I discovered after sitting through one earthquake lasting longer than a quick second that is all you need to know and respond without thinking.  We were sleeping when this earthquake happened.  I had time to wake up, realize what it was, get up and in the doorway, and still have time to wait for the shaking to stop.  I didn't think to wake Mike up until the shaking was over, however.  I'm guessing that means I still need to work on my responsiveness.

There's a lot of cool and fun stuff that I'll leave out for the sake of time and space.  There was also lots of whining about too much or not enough sun that I'll summarize with "Why can't the sun just be normal?!" and leave at that.

Unkind Thoughts

It's so close!!

I am vividly remembering some of the unkind thoughts I had about sunshine a few years ago.  Winter in Alaska is so dark for so long that it feels like it will never end.  I convince myself that sun all night is better than dark all day and beg the sun to return.  I watch the tip of the point with each sunset waiting for the sun to finally touch the ocean as it goes to bed each night.  It doesn't actually mean anything, but it makes my heart feel like we are finally escaping the clutches of darkness when the sun hits that point.

This was taken at 9:00.  Even though the sun
is down, there's still plenty of light.

Alaska, though, is a land of extremes and the sun refuses to break that pattern.  It's like the sun spent the winter hibernating and then, once we changed our clocks for Daylight Savings, it woke up and decided to stay out and party all night.  Okay, so it's not out all night just quite yet, but it is still very much messing with my sleep schedule.  The sun is rising around 7:30 in the morning and setting around 9:00 at night.  Throw in twilight and we have visible light for almost 15 hours a day.  With the sun so high in the sky when we come home, our brains do not realize how late it is and they are not ready to go to sleep when it's bed time.  Not only am I having unkind thoughts about the sun, my screwed up sleep schedule is also making me have some very unkind thoughts about mornings.

Sunrise.  There's a magic window in the spring and fall when
the sun is at the right angle to make the snow look pink
at sunrise.

I may have an on again, off again relationship with the sun of Alaska, but I can't deny the beauty that comes with sunshine.  How blessed am I to get to experience this part of God's creation!  (But it would be nice to experience it without messing with my sleep schedule.)

Winter

Winter is in full swing in Alaska.  When we came seven years ago everyone told us "We don't get a lot of snow."  and it snowed, and snowed, and snowed, and snowed some more.  We lost track after 15 foot of snow that winter, but that was nowhere near the end of the snow.  More came, we just lost count.  We were assured on our return that kind of snow was not typical and that they barely even saw snow for the last few years.  Well, either they tend to undersell, or we are snow magnets because we've had lots of snow already.  We haven't seen the ground in something like three weeks.  And that's with several days of rain to work on melting the snow down.  Whatever the cause, it's still beautiful and still brings a little bit of magic with every snowflake, without me even making magic snowflakes.

While the snow may be magic, the darkness is not!  If I could make magic sunshines I most certainly would.  With winter solstice last week, there was a tiny window of hope.  Then I realized that, while solstice meant we were going to be gaining light every day, it also meant that we were only half of the way through winter.  It already feels like forever since we had real sunlight on our way home from school and that forever is only one half of the time we have to endure.  Winter is my favorite season, but the snow is much prettier when it can sparkle in the sunshine instead of the playground lights.

This pictures shows where the sun is at 1:30 in the afternoon.
I miss you sunshine!!  Please come back!

When it rains on top of snow and then freezes overnight, the
snow grows these super cool ice crystals.  I took a bunch of
pictures trying to do them justice.  If the sun had been out,
it would have been easier, but that's already a sore subject! 

Medical Care in the Village

Medical care in the village can get tricky.  We do not have a hospital or emergency room or even an urgent care facility.  We have a clinic with a very thorough and fantastic nurse (I am definitely a huge fan of his).  But, he is obviously limited in what he can do in Nanwalek.  If you need emergency care, you have to fly out.  That can get tricky, though.  If it's too windy, the planes can't come regardless of your medical condition.  Then, we are also limited by daylight.  If it is dark, they can't come either.  During this time of year, the first plane typically comes in around 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning and the last one typically leaves Nanwalek at 3:30 and absolutely no later than 4:20 under any conditions.  That's not a huge window.

That window decided to make my life a little complicated this weekend.  Saturday about noon, my belly started hurting enough to make me quite uncomfortable, but not enough to be alarmed.  As the day progressed into evening, however, it got progressively more painful.  By 6:00, Mike was googling symptoms for appendicitis (he never googles symptoms, so that itself is a cause for concern) and it got very real when we realized I had every one except the nausea and vomiting.  I also had quit eating when the pain started so I had nothing in my stomach so that missing symptom didn't make either one of us feel better.  I wasn't at the emergency room level of pain yet, but it was disconcerting to know that my window to get on a plane was closed already.  By 10:00, I probably would have gone to an emergency room if I could have and was deciding whether or not I should go to the clinic and get a medevac out.  I was feeling that badly.  Not knowing for sure what it was, though, I was hesitant to go this route.  I really didn't want to be medevaced out to find out it was something really stupid like gas.  That is my luck after all.

By 11:00 I was seriously questioning my survival.  I still did not want to be medevaced out, but was also very concerned that, if it was appendicitis, it might rupture while I was in a place with no facilities to take care of me.  Obviously, this spurred a conversation with Jesus.  "Please, God, don't let me die over here.  Like, really. [as if he doesn't know I'm serious] I can't die in Alaska.  I can't do that to my parents or my husband.  That's not okay."  So we talked some more about the faith of mustard seeds again and I struggled with how to phrase my prayer.  Obviously, I didn't want to have appendicitis, but I'm sure there are worse things.  Don't let me die is also very specific.  There is a huge expanse between healthy and happy to dead.  I didn't really like the idea of that gray area either.  So I settled with "Jesus, I trust you.  I'll be okay," and let him define okay for me.  Sometimes I may overthink things and be a little too detail oriented.  Maybe Jesus is trying to break me from this habit.  He is Lord of all.  He doesn't really need me dictating requests to him like I know best.  Who knows.  As I'm writing this, I'm thinking I was probably an idiot for not going ahead with the medevac route, but I had a good little chat with Jesus and good lesson from the experience.  So I'll say it was part of His plan and that can make me feel better about possibly being stupid.

I spent much of the night waking up, looking at the clock, and counting down the hours until the first flight in the morning.  By 3:00 Sunday morning, I was miserable enough I probably would have gone for the medevac if I hadn't already had a conversation with Jesus about trust and hadn't been half asleep.  Somewhere around 6:00 in the morning, I realized I had been doing my math wrong and had to add an extra hour into my formula the next flight.  I was very sad.  Somewhere around 8:00, I started to feel better, but not okay.  The weather was terrible, so the planes weren't flying Sunday morning.  I couldn't get out to go to the emergency room.  The pain wasn't going away, so I gave up and went up to the clinic.  They did a thorough exam and contacted a doctor in Anchorage.  Since my pain level had dropped significantly from the night before, he said there was no need for a medevac and recommended I get on the next flight out and get to the emergency room in Anchorage.  Fortunately, we were able to fly out of Nanwalek through a little lull in the winds, got flights up to Anchorage, and got to the emergency room.  I would not ordinarily be eager to fly out on a bad weather day or go to a place so soon after a major earthquake where they are still having aftershocks, but life seems to like laughing at my expense.

I won't bore you with all the details of the ER.  It's all pretty standard. Vitals, blood work, poke and prod tender places that do not appreciate poking and prodding, pee in a cup, perhaps spill some of that on my pants (that's probably not pretty standard, but sometimes you just have to learn to laugh at yourself) and wrap the process up with a ct scan.  All that to decide that I do not have appendicitis and need to follow up with a regular doctor some time and have my gall bladder looked at.  So, I guess I'm glad I didn't go the medevac route, even if it was probably stupid at the time.  I'm pretty sure my conversation with Jesus played a pretty big role in the outcome, anyway.  For the record, I am slowly feeling better.  I feel like I've had abdominal surgery even though I didn't, but I guess the pain without the surgery is better than having the pain and surgery.  The weekend was obviously full of "only in Alaskas", but there was one that was kind of cool.  We flew back from Anchorage with Johnathan Hillstrand from "Alaska's Deadliest Catch"- not worth the pain by any stretch, but still cool nonetheless.

Shakin' Our Groove Thing

We've been channeling some classic music here in Alaska recently.  I'm sure almost everyone has heard about the 7.0 earthquake that hit Anchorage last Friday.  I doubt many have heard about the 1800 aftershocks (as of 9:00pm Mon) they've had since.  I didn't actually count, but running through the list, I think I saw about a dozen 5 pointers and at least 2 dozen 4 pointers.  The irony of the entire event was I planned on going home after school on Friday to blog about a 5.7 we had about 70 miles away from the village last week.  Obviously, that earthquake got one-upped before I could write that blog.  Mike and I didn't feel the Anchorage earthquake, but several in the village did (FYI Anchorage is about the same distance from us as St. Louis from Doniphan).  What really kind of puts this earthquake in perspective is that Mike had time for someone to come to my room where we were chatting before school, ask if we felt it and tell us about it, then Mike went upstairs to his office and called district office about 100 miles away where they were still shaking from the earthquake.

At our distance, we had no real damage (maybe a few new little cracks etc) from the earthquake, but an earthquake anywhere in Alaska always has the potential for serious damage here because of tsunamis.  Our tsunami warning system alerted immediately so we got to evacuate the school to our designated safe place on the upper road in the village at the base of the mountain.  Of course, we had snow and ice on the road from recent weather and it was raining as we were climbing up so it was extra slick.  The tsunami warning goes off automatically for major earthquakes, but I'm not sure what the cut-off range is - they didn't alert for the 5.7 last week.  They also have a buoy system in place to measure waves to detect tsunamis for warning purposes and help gauge the size, location, and timing of any tsunamis.  Then the Coast Guard also flies around to monitor the waves.  Using that information, they were able to cancel our warning early, so we only had to stand outside on the side of the mountain, with no shelter for two hours instead of three.

To add to the fun, we had every dog in the village with us.  Some were friendly, but others wanted to fight with each other making it a bit dangerous for our kiddos.  Then the siren went off every 12 minutes and I swear it lasted the entire 12 minutes so that there was no break - at least that's how it felt.  My kitty was not happy about any part of the whole situation.  The siren already had her stressed out, then her terrible mother had to scoop her out of her safe and cozy dresser drawer to shove her into a carrier and take her for a ride up the side of the mountain too.  Needless to say, I was in the doghouse.  When I brought her back home, I gave her some salmon and all has been forgiven.

I stole this picture from https://earthquake.alaska.edu/earthquakes .  It shows the earthquake activity in Alaska over the past couple weeks.  If you go to the website, it also has a listing from the most recent. I don't really have a way to mark our location on the picture, but we're in the middle of that blog.

Water Works

Water Works is often used to refer to plumbing, it's even used as the title for that specific public utility card in the game of Monopoly.  During the last couple weeks, that phrase has become a bit of an misnomer in Nanwalek.  Can you really call it water works if the water doesn't work?  Here's a little timeline of our water fiasco.


Friday Night (Nov 12): The water line that runs through the creek and has been exposed for a couple years, finally has an accident and gets busted.  The water is still running, so it's not a cause of concern yet.
Saturday morning: Got a quick shower in after a morning run on the runway - little did I know it would be my last for a while.
Saturday evening: Increasing loss in water pressure until we have no water left in teacher housing.  We also got our first snow, so I scooped all the snow off of the porch with a dust pan to melt in a bucket for future use.
Sunday morning: The village does the best with the materials they have on hand for the problem (a clamp and a bunch of tape) and does a temporary patch job.
Sunday afternoon: We have water!  I think about doing laundry, but am nervous because the water pressure is still low so I decide to wait.
Sunday evening:  We have no water.  Crap!  Forget laundry, I should have showered when I had the chance.  Text Mike (who is about to get on a plane in Arizona) to let him know and get an idea of what to do about school the next day.  Take some pictures of the pipe in question, e-mail them to district office and wait for word back.
Sunday night: No word on school yet, so assume there will be school and use my melted snow to shampoo my hair and get a rough bath.
Monday morning: Still no water in the house and I'm convinced the water coming out of the faucets at school is only emptying out the pipes in the building.  Just in case, I save all of the water in milk jugs, when I check for water.  If we don't have any more water, I will be very sad that I ran good water down the drain.  School starts and Mike returns to take over the problem.  He spends the next two days on the phone dealing with it.
Monday afternoon:  Send kids home early.  The Borough (our version of a county) decides what part is needed and agrees to buy it and send it over on the plane on Tuesday.
Tuesday morning: No school - surprise!
Tuesday noonish: The barge shows up with it's load of treasures for the community.
Tuesday early afternoon: The plane company calls to say they have the part and will send it over on the next flight.
Tuesday late afternoon: The plane circles the runway, does not land, and flies back to Homer.

After the rough fix Sunday morning

Tuesday later afternoon: We call to ask about the plane and they say they cannot land on the runway with the barge on the beach.  Of all days for the barge to be on time, it picked today!
Tuesday evening:  It gets too dark for the plane to leave before the barge is finished.  The part will be on the first flight in the morning.
Wednesday morning: No school.  We get the kids ready to leave for a Middle School basketball tournament.  I never thought I would see the day that I would be excited about getting to take a shower in a middle school locker room.
Wednesday afternoon: We fly out and the part gets put on the broken pipe.  The community has water and I am headed to a locker room shower and looking forward to every second of it.
Wednesday late afternoon:  In another part of town, workers driving pilings in for a new building puncture an underground water line.  No water, again.  Community scrambles and puts together a quick fix.
Thursday morning: They have school
Thursday evening: Quick fix quits.  No water, no school Friday.
Friday: Finally, water is on and stays on!!

Fingers crossed, it will stay that way.

A little video showing the rate of water loss right after the rough fix.  It got much worse as the day progressed.

Winter Games

Winter is a cat.  Of course, I would be able to find a similarity between anything and a cat if I tried, but in this scenario, I think it really is a suitable analogy.  First, it sneaks up on you out of nowhere and pounces with great ferocity.  While you're still reeling from the attack, it runs back in the bushes and hides out for a while.  Then, when you've decided it has given up and gone home, it sneaks out and smacks you on it's way back into some other bushes to hide.  It's like we are winter's mice and it's going to tease and play with us until we don't know if it's coming or going and give up in exhaustion.  I know that seems a little dark, but hey, so is winter (pardon the pun).

If we're talking about sunlight, winter is in full-swing.  I'm already apologizing to the sun for all of the negative thoughts I had this summer and am begging it to return early.  However, if you're just looking at the weather, it either doesn't know if it's coming or going, or is playing a very vicious game of cat and mouse.  Our fall temperatures lasted far longer than normal.  We were somewhere around a month behind Doniphan getting the first frost of the season.  But, when the frost came, it pounced and brought really cold temperatures all at once.  There was no gentle transition from fall to winter, just a "Bam! Here I am! What do you think of that?!"  We had highs in the low 30s with high winds making it feel even colder for about a week, and then it was back to the upper 40s like that frigid week never happened.  Then, it crept in and dropped a baby snow on us early in the evening.  It was big wet flakes that only built up because it came down so heavily.  By morning the temperatures were up and there was absolutely no trace of any snow left.  (There wasn't any trace left on my porch as soon as it stopped snowing because I scooped it all into a bucket to melt so that I would have water - but that's a very long, yet to be finished story.)  Now we are back in the 40s hanging out like nothing ever happened while Missouri got tons of snow!!!  This is not fair.  I'm not sure who I need to lodge a complaint with about this cruel irony, but I will have a strongly worded letter waiting once I figure out where to send it.  I wonder what Terry Wood is up to these days?  He may be a good place to start.