Thanksgiving Pie = Fish

Mike making fish pie

I am discovering some advantages to being the entire middle school and high school this week.  Since we teach the core subjects and there are no other teachers, the students do not have certain classes like art and music.  This means I have a legitimate excuse to occasionally sneak an art activity into the lesson plans when it works out well.  The school hosts a community dinner on Wednesday for Thanksgiving and much of our class time this week has been given to its preparation.  Monday the high school students made fruit pie and today Mike got a chance to accomplish two things, a homework assignment for our culture class and help with preparations, by making fish pie.  It's made much like any other pie, but is filled layers rice, butter, fish, mayaonaisse, and onions instead of the fruit filling we're accustomed to.  We tried some when we first arrived in the village and I must admit it's pretty tasty.  All of the staff members are also responsible for cooking a turkey to serve, so we've spent much of evening preparing ours.  Tomorrow morning we'll be preparing foods such as mashed potatoes that need to be cooked the day of and decorating so we can eat somewhere around 12:30.  Time is a little less specific in the village sometimes, so we'll see when food actually gets served.

We've also had much more snow!!  I'm thinking we're at least halfway to the 20 inches of annual snowfall that is average for Nanwalek, so we're either in for an unusual year or January, February, and March are very dry months.  The heavy snowfall combined with persistent high winds have led to some very impressive snow drifts.  We had to wade through knee deep snow to get out of the school building this afternoon.  Sunny, being the big fat chicken of a cat that she is, has very little experience with snow and was quite curious today, but faced some difficulties.  As she stood in the slightly open doorway (to our upstairs deck where she cannot be eaten by a dog or the wolf that's been perusing the village this week) she  wanted to go outside, but the wind kept blowing snow in on her face.  By the time she built up enough courage to venture beyond the door, she was busy shaking the snow off and then had to again build her courage back up.  She never did make it past the doorway so she still has little experience with snow.  We'll try again another time.