Goodness!

My oh my, Alaska's a hot topic lately...

BBC: Alaska village faces eroded future

Newtok's a village in our school district, over on the coast (obviously)

If you've ever wondered...

...about why we're living in a dry village up here, and just what that means, read this:

Bootleggers Playing Hide-and-Seek on the Tundra - New York Times, 10/12/08

Saturday Hijinx

Now that our area rug has arrived, making our living room floor a little more, well, "traction-friendly", Isaac's been working on his forward mobility. It's not exactly what you'd call "crawling" just yet, but he can definitely get where he wants to go, even if it takes a while. Good thing for me, he isn't camera shy...in fact, it's one of his favorite things to try to play with:

Hunt for White October

A fine greeting this was this morning! It kept snowing and blowing all day, too...and it's supposed to go all night as well. The bad news is it's so windy (>30mph), that most of the snow is just blowing away. Not that it's likely to stick around anyway, I'm sure there's at least a couple more days near 40 degrees in our near future (if not in the forecast) before real winter sets in.

Same goes for the river...there's ice on the far side, but I doubt it'll last. If only because it's too early for people to put their boats away, and as such will keep breaking it up to get across.

But yeah, just wanted to drop a quick post to say I hope you Wisconsin folk are enjoying your 60-whatever degree weather....I could be snowmobiling in a month ;-)

Our little theoretical physicist

Another first

I know, just about everything that happens in an (almost) 5-month old's life is a "first", but some are deserving of a photo...

FIRST SNOW! Woohoo!!

That means first snowmachine ride can't be too far off, right? :-P

Long, boring catch-up post.

Oof, I really have let this get away from me, haven't I? If you're still checking here, thanks...hopefully your persistence will begin being rewarded again soon. It's been a combination of lack of post-worthy things going on, the ease of just posting tiny updates on Facebook instead of trying to expand them into blog posts, and the fact that most of what I'd want to post in this election season would have been more suited for my old blog, and not this "Alaska Journal" specific blog. My days are pretty locked into a routine of bottles, diaper changes, and naps (while trying to fit in some school projects and other things where possible), but here goes a bit of a last-3-weeks roundup :-P

A day or two after my last post was the pushed-up date for my first Alaska PFD check. Woohoo! A nice little chunk of change. So, like many Alaskans, first thing I did was purchase some plane tickets. In my case, back to WI for xmas break. In order to save a few hundred dollars, we decided I would fly back a week early like I did my first year up here, so I'll be back in the midwest starting 12/14. Just in case you were wondering.

This year's check was even larger than originally expected, thanks to an additional $1200 tacked on by the legislature (supposedly at the behest of our Governor...you may have heard of her recently), for the expressed purpose of ofsetting the insane cost of living increases out here in rural Alaska, specifically the cost of energy. Well, in many cases, it's having another effect...people are just moving from the Bush into the hub cities, or even into Anchorage. In Bethel, I've even heard a term coined for it..."energy refugees". Now, I'm not up at school enough to be really "in the loop" as far as knowing exactly what's going on all that much in the community, but from what I hear, most of the moving that's going on here is for other reasons, but it seems (to my admittedly narrow perspective) that there's more people moving away from the village. It's by no means scientific, but we're appearing to fit the pattern. Shrug.

Speaking of Alaska news (how's that for a segue?), there was a story on the Anchorage news last night about people here paying more attention to the political news, blah blah blah, and how it can raise stress levels. They even interviewed a therapist who said people who are feeling overstressed by everything should know when to "take a break"...which I found a bit amusing, seeing that I did just about the exact same thing a few weeks back. I dunno, the whole selection of Palin and the lying BS of the Republican convention Alaska attention politically...my head was threatening to explode, so I just decided to stop paying attention for a couple weeks. And guess what...it worked. I managed to save my sanity and not go completely bonkers before election day. I hope.

One thing that's been interesting is all the attention Palin is bringing to Alaska politics. Some has been good, but most of it has been of the negative variety. While national scrutiny has blown open the Troopergate deal and the Stevens trial, it's also basically put the McCain campaign basically in control of state government, acing as council for the Governor and basically maneuvering the day-to-day operation of state affairs to the best benefit of the GOP presidential campaign. In the short term, it's helping Palin and McCain (even though Caribou Barbie's approval rating has gone from 82% to 68% here as news of some of her more...interesting...positions have come to light, McCain/Palin has basically locked Alaska's 3 electoral votes up at about a 15 point lead...you may think AK was going red anyway, but Obama had cut it to a 5 point deficit in August!), I think it's going to hurt Alaska's "solid red state" status long term. I mean, the state is still super "independent"-minded, plus lots of oil interests, etc...but when the newscasts every night are the latest gaffes by our ever-more-obviously imbecilic Governess, followed by daily coverage of our senior Senator's trial and our longtime Representative's scandals and poll deficit...well, let's just hope we can crack this ice yet.

Let's see, anything I'm forgetting? Oh, I had the chance to chaperone a trip to Bethel a couple weekends ago. Got to shop, eat out (gyros!), and watch some of the best cross country runners in the state. I was even able to bring back some goodies for Sara (sushi, anyone?) thanks to some miracles of scheduling right before we left. All in all, it was a good time and a nice 24-hour break.

At the moment, I'm going to keep watching the Brewer game while Isaac naps...with the Twins out of the playoffs thanks to a coin-flip and some shady dealing from MLB, and the Packers facing an uphill road to an 8-8 season thanks to brutal injuries, the Brewers are the only think I've got going at this point. And they're down 3-0 at this point in game one. Yee-haw.

Insanity

Three posts in 2 days? Has Shaun started smoking the crack? No, but something just happened that's so cool that it demanded immediate posting...

Yeah, that's a picture of 2 cold air funnel clouds. There were 3, I guess, and the big one was even larger, but by the time I heard what was happening and got outside, these were all that were left. Isaac and I still watched them for 10 or 15 minutes before they roped out. Not surprising they lasted as long as they did, considering my wind gauge at the house was reading 0.0mph all afternoon :-P

But yeah! 5 summers of storm chasing in WI and the best funnels I see are outside my house in Alaska? There's gotta be a moral to that story...

Catching up...

See? I told you I’d be back…

So what’s been going on here? Well, a whole bunch and nothing at all, if that makes any sense. A couple of weekends ago I was lucky enough to be able to chaperone a Cross Country trip to the village of Toksook Bay out on Nelson Island. I’d never been there, and had heard that it was a pretty cool place, so I really wanted to go. It was the first X-C meet of the season, and Nunap only had three runners that had gotten enough practices in to be eligible to travel, so Coach Carey didn’t necessarily need a male chaperone, but since the school had gotten a charter airplane instead of paying seat fare, my tagging along to help didn’t add to the cost of the trip :)

The races there are a part of a community-wide Berry Festival, so there were all kinds of things going on, and people visiting from all over. We went to see the traditional dancing for a little while, but for the most part the kids wanted to do what the kids always want to do when we travel…go to the store, hang out with friends from other villages, and stay up as late as possible. As it turned out, I had brought along Guitar Hero for the DS (always prepared…and I was never even a Boy Scout!), which proved quite the popular little activity with the students. At least until the battery ran out. So the rest of the nights were spent playing, reading, talking, and trying to sleep while the fiddle dance raged…if a fiddle dance can be said to rage…until 2am.

The races themselves were fun to watch. Toksook is right on the ocean, but there are some pretty substantial hills, cliffs, and rock formations, all of which the running courses took advantage of. The weather was not the best for a race, it was windy, cold, and spitting rain, but all three races went off without a hitch and the Nunap runners pushed hard and did well. As I said, it was a small group, but there wasn’t a whiner among them…which, to be honest, was a nice change of pace from most chaperoning trips I’ve done.

After staying another night, we flew back early Sunday afternoon. Our flight out on Friday had been interesting, flying low and on an indirect route around the hills because of low cloud cover, but on the way back it was clearer and we were able to fly as high as I’ve ever been in a bush plane – over 3000 feet. It made for some good views, and I was able to get my camera out and take a couple of pics as we were about to land back in Nunap.

So, while it was nice to take a little trip for a couple days, it was even nicer to get home. After all, I’m used to having a lot of baby-time these days, so I missed the little guy. I have to say, staying home during the school day has been working out pretty well. Yeah, I’m going a little crazy, and yeah, there have been some frustrating days (did I mention he has a couple of teeth already?), but on the whole it’s been a lot of fun. I try to get as much stuff done as I can during the day, both around the house and with my side projects. I’m starting a Radio Club at the school, as some of my students last year really took an interest in writing/recording/producing music, and I’m hoping to help them point some of those skills in the direction of their writing phases, expose them to some music that isn’t Tupac and 50 Cent (though, yeah, that stuff has it’s place…it’s just really all that some of them listen to), and I’m hoping to eventually get them to produce a few podcasts, in radio show format, to get them out there for everyone to hear. I’ll let you know once there’s a link…

But back to Isaac. It’s amazing how much he’s changing, getting new skills, discovering new things. I was a little worried the other day that he was getting sick, because he was sort of grabbing at the side of his head, until I realized that nope, he has just discovered his ear and was playing with it. He’s really taken quite a liking to Loki, trying to follow him around, and keeping a close eye on him whenever he’s romping around playing, or even just sleeping in the living room. I can’t wait until he’s old enough for them to play around together. I think they’re going to have a lot of fun.

Otherwise, not too much else going on. Missed the Packer game Monday night because our satellite had only been partially working for a few weeks (no ESPN, or half of our other channels), and I tried messing with the cables in a fit of desperation. The result? No TV at all, and of course the store didn’t have the hardware I need to fix pieces that had rotted from just laying on the tundra for who knows how many years. I managed to hook up a different cable Tuesday evening (the one from Carey’s house, because she doesn’t’ get TV and was nice enough to allow me to steal hers), which required a bit of monkeying around and belly crawling under her house in the muck, but at least for the moment, we have a 90% functioning TV connection. At least enough that I’ll be able to watch football this weekend…and really, isn’t that the main function of television, anyway?

Filler...but with video goodness!

Yeah, I've got a lot to catch up on (this not getting up to school and online every day thing is really messing up my blogging habits, eh?), but while you patiently wait...

He can do this for hours, just cycling through his toys, getting excited about whatever it is that we happen to be holding and forgetting about what he's got. So...I thought I'd film it. Sorry if it's boring, I'll admit this video probably has a very specific target audience...*cough*grandparents*cough*

K, more before the end of the week...promise!