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.

Teacher in Charge

I'm sure many have heard me say I have no desire to be a principal.  I have never had a desire to be a principal.  I sometimes question the wisdom of getting my master's degree in admin when I don't want to be a principal.  So, who did my principal decide to leave in charge while he was living it up in Arizona?  This girl.  Not only did I not get to go to the super education conference in a beautiful resort, I got to be the go-to person for all of the problems in the building.  A week being in charge has had no effect on my feelings about being a principal, except to reinforce them.

To begin with, we were already short staffed.  On a normal day, we have five regular classroom teachers, one native language teacher, and me as the sped teacher and three approved substitutes.  Our custodian resigned the week before so I started the week with no custodial staff.  Two of our five teachers went on the trip to Arizona thus taking up two of the three substitute teachers.  The third substitute came back from a trip to the doctor with instructions to do nothing for 45 days.  After covering the two teachers out for the trip, we had no substitutes.  On Wednesday, one of the three remaining teachers had to attend a training, but we had no subs to call so we were scrambling throughout the day to keep her class covered.  At the end of the day, though, we could all take a deep breath and go home feeling satisfied because we had made it all work.  Job well done.  Then Thursday happened.  Two of my three remaining teachers called in sick.  We had no substitutes to call.  Then, one of the scheduled substitutes did not show up.  Summary of all of those numbers: I had four teachers out of the building with only one substitute in the building.  We were really scrambling to make that day work, but we did and all was well with the world.

Until the weekend.  Then we had a water issue that put the school and half the village with no water.  So I'm stuck texting Mike and sending pictures trying to figure out if we can have school on Monday with no water in the building.  When Mike's plane landed Monday morning, I greeted him with a hug and said, "I'm glad you're back, and it has nothing to do with liking you." 

A is for apple . . . and Arizona

Nanwalek is an Apple school so we have all kinds of technology and toys.  Every student has an ipad, every staff member (included aides) has an ipad, and teachers have macbooks that somehow have to learn how to share a classroom with their inferior cousins, the regular, non-apple computers.  We also have a couple regular Mac desktop computers (or whatever Apple calls them) and a few super cool little gadgets called spheros or something that look like a ton of fun.  Every year we have a chunk of funding provided to purchase apps and also get on-site visits several times a year from Apple staff to help with any issues and provide training on how to use all our great toys for learning.  Our kids have done some pretty amazing things with this stuff.  It's pretty nice!

When I think of Arizona, I don't usually think of apples, though.  I don't usually think of any vegetation when I think of Arizona, actually.  I'm sure this is a bit unfair to Arizona, but it is a desert.  Apple, the computer company, though, doesn't seem to mind the desert thing, so that's where they decided to have their education conference.  Mike and a couple other teachers got to attend since we're an Apple school and had a ton of fun, so I hear.  I was not invited to the party.  Mike got to go through another Apple school and discuss some of the things their doing with the technology and then attend the conference where they had all kinds of fabulous PD for everyone.  He also spent a large part of his time sending me way too many pictures the resort and conference and their fantastic meals - grrr!  So while I'm looking at just how fabulous everything in Arizona was, I'm left behind as teacher in charge to deal with any snags that came along.  Bigger GRRR!  That adventure, however, is another blog entry all in it's own.  When I get a chance to get the pictures off of my phone, I will post all of the pictures my little stink bug sent me so that you just how onery he was.  GRRR!

Halloween Festivities

This last week has been very busy, being the week of Halloween.  Halloween is a big deal in the community.  I haven’t done an official survey, but I would venture to guess half my students or more like Halloween more than Christmas. We started the festivities with the annual Halloween Carnival last weekend.  Teachers and community members all had booths with games or food for everyone to enjoy.  The basketball team ran concessions and the jail, where you could send anyone to the slammer for $1.  I did some time there myself and “carved” my name in the wall (they put up a piece of paper for all of the inmates to sign).  The kids could also play hallway bowling, pin the bow tie on Mr. Bones, a cakewalk, basketball, frog toss (don’t worry, the frog wasn’t real - no frogs were harmed at the carnival) and then there was my game.  I am not creative so I searched the internet for fall festival ideas.  I found a ping pong tic tac toe game that I thought would be fun.   We quickly decided getting three in a row was unreasonable so we just considered getting the ball in one of the nine cups a win.  Since there was no three in a row element, when I tried to explain the game, most of the parents said “Like beer pong?”  Leave it to my luck to find a way to inadvertently bring a drinking game to a school function.

We then had trick-or-treating Wednesday evening.  Mr. Crain made an announcement in the morning letting the kids know that trick-or-treating ended at all of the teachers’ houses at 9:30.  Several teachers expressed their appreciation, because the kids really get into their trick-or-treating.  A few of the kids brought the cutsy little pumpkin buckets for their candy, but most used their backpacks or pillow cases.  The nolstagia in me loved the pillow cases but I know it was more about practicality.  The cute little buckets aren’t nearly large enough to hold all of the candy they would get.  I saw a couple backpacks that were almost full by the time they got to us.  Nanwalek does this trick-or-treating business right!  So much so that I was happy to have parent teacher conferences on Thursday and Friday instead of school.  I’m hoping they have depleted much of their candy supplies over the long weekend and the sugar rush is over by tomorrow morning.

DJ Bones rocking it out with the disco lights!