Recent Happenings

1-31-05

Hello!  It has been waaaaay too long since I last updated this site!  The pretty rainbow picture was getting extremely outdated.  Its sort of like journaling.  You start a new journal and write in it every day, then every other day, then once a week, then...  Hopefully I can get back to doing an update at least every couple of months on this site.  Here in the epicenter of global warming, it has been...cold!  Actually, today wasn't too bad, about 10 above with light breezes.  But most of January was a "biter", as Tam would say, generally around zero or less with high winds pushing the chill factor to -30, -40, -50 and worse.  This means that we stay inside all the time, only going out to scurry between home and the school or a neighbor's home.

We returned to Kasigluk after a restful break on January 10th, to find that the stove oil had run out for our building and our home was freezing.  Our toilet and the kitty's water bowl were frozen, our leaky faucet had a giant stalegmite going up to it from the bottom of the sink.  Gimli was hunkered down into his blanket, deep in survival mode.  : - )  Our friend Carl quickly had the boiler going, but it made for a good story as Tam and I just stayed in our outdoor clothes in our apartment for several hours.  We ended up watching a bunch of Seinfeld shows, as we sat  beneath our down comforter in our snow gear on the couch.

Basketball has continued on at high gear, and I've been busy coaching TWO junior high teams this year due to a large turnout of kids.  Our little gym just isn't big enough for me to know how to keep 22 kids busy at the same time during practice.  So I make the more committed "varsity" kids come at 7:30 am, and the "jv" kids practice from 6-7 pm.  We've had several games already, and we're having fun.  I love having influence in the kids' lives, and I enjoy teaching the game.  My ideal would be to just be an assistant coach, working with small groups of kids on specific facets of their games during practice.  With that in mind, I am really glad that my friend and assistant coach Danny will be running the jv practices from now on.

Tammy and I are in the middle of moving!  Why are we moving?  The shortest answer is that this place has 2 little bedrooms instead of 1 big one, and we like the idea of having a room for a baby.  It also has a pretty good-sized living room that we like for hospitality stuff.  We started in earnest on Saturday after basketball was over.  Man is moving fun (not! as our kids would say).  We're just getting through the stage where you can't find anything ("My kingdom for a FORK!").  J  Ah boy, its late at night and I'm cracking myself up here.  We are only moving next door, the apartment right next to our old place, in the same building.  So we don't even have to box stuff up, just cart the books over by the armload, which is nice.  We have had several kids volunteer in cleaning and hauling stuff for us, tasks which they have performed with their usual inexhaustible zeal and gusto.  They are a blessing to us.  Thanks Jesus!

Here is a cool example of God being good to us.  We recently bought an elliptical, which is a fancy-schmancy piece of exercise equipment that costco had on sale.  Kind of an electronic machine that you do this arm/legs thing that is a cross between a bike and cross country skiing.  It was expensive but Tam is excited about it as an exercise option that she can do regardless of season or weather conditions, and she can do it at home, in any state of dress, etc etc.  ANYway, the thing weighs 288 pounds!  I asked Tam if we could saw it into 5 pieces and send them to ourselves via USPS, but she didn't like that idea.  My buddy Joel picked it up for us in Anchorage, and with help in the costco parking lot got it into his SUV, although they couldn't shut the door.  Brrrr.  So they took it straight to Northern Air Cargo, where Joel had a codeshare discount (75% off!  And I had no idea!), saving us $150 on the shipping to Bethel.  Then one of our neighbors picked it up for us in Bethel in his truck and refused payment for hauling it to Kasigluk on the ice road, although the hovercraft would have charged us $70.  Finally, three young guys helped me haul the thing from the riverbank by our place in to our new guest/baby room.  HEAVY!

Oh, another great thing that has happened (how could I forget this one?) is that LKSD, our school district, has agreed to pay for all of my schooling in exchange for my commitment to work for them once I finish the program.  This is about a $25,000+ benefit that we are super excited about, since I wanted to work for them anyway!  In case you haven't heard, I'm pursuing a masters in Speech-Language Pathology so I can work with kids in local schools here as an SLP.  I started the program in January of 2003, and the first 3 semesters have been all pre-reqs.  The Masters program begins this fall, and I've applied to East Carolina University.  Everything is distance-delivered, and the program is administered by some folks at the University of Alaska-Anchorage who received some grant money to be used in an effort to raise up more local SLPs to counter the shortage here.  So far I've enjoyed the classes, and I'm genuinely excited about what my job will look like!  I guess the big variable at this point is whether I'll get into grad school, but I'm pretty sure I will.

The other class that both of us are taking right now is Conversational Yup'ik.  We're working on our first 10 words right now (well, I am.  Tam is already ahead of me!).  Next time you see us you'll have to ask for a few Yup'ik words.  The language is...veeerrrrrrrrry different from english.  We're really excited to be taking it and hope that we can "learn a little, use it a lot" from week to week until we actually have some "conversational Yup'ik" skills.  See, this is the problem with only updating this web page once every 100 years.  WAY too much to talk about.  I could go on forever but I won't.   Quyana for reading our latest news!