Recent Happenings

11-13-03

Greetings!  It's a beautiful day here on the Delta.  Sunny, blue sky and about 15 degrees at most!  Freeze-up has come and gone and come again, this time to stay until May.  It froze up first around 10/22 while I was in WA celebrating my dad's 65th birthday (congratulations!).  I came back to a river choked with 4-6 inch thick ice!  Fortunately for me, I flew from Bethel to Kasigluk on a plane with a bunch of students from Akiuk who were returning from a Speech competition.  This meant that someone from the school would pick us up at the airport and take us back by boat.  Sure enough, there was Carl Berlin in the school boat.  I went with the first load of kids since I wasn't dressed warmly enough.  My job was to sit in the bow with another guy and jab our ice picks at the biggest blocks of ice, attempting to shove them aside, away from the prop.  Hard and mostly futile work!  We crept along at walking speed, scraping up and over the ice, listening to the bashing of the poor prop.  Somewhere in the middle of this trip, leaning over the bow with my spear, it struck me how surreal and how very outside my life experience the whole thing was.  Everyone else in the boat just looked slightly bored and cold, since they go through this every year.  The ice lasted about a week, melting slightly by day under the sun and heavy boat traffic, and freezing back by night.  Then, the temperature began rising, all the way to the mid 40s, and within 3 or 4 days all the ice was gone.

We knew that couldn't last.  On Sunday afternoon (11/9) it snowed an inch or two, and the ice began creeping out from the river banks.  Tammy and I and a neighbor named Andrew made a great snowman and then had a snowball fight.  Andrew got me right in the face!  Yesterday, Wednesday, the ice was nearly too thick for boating again.  And today I spoke with a teacher from the other side (Akula) who came to work via snow machine.  I may try and walk to get the mail with a neighbor friend later today.  I'll be very careful!  So now we have a taste of what freeze-up time is all about.

On Friday the 7th, there was a slumber party at the school for students from Tammy's and Robin's classes.  For Tammy's class, it was a reward for reaching a certain level of collective points in the Accelerated Reader program.  We played lots of basketball, ate pizza, watched some movies, and we taught them how to play sardines, which was a huge hit.  Then before 2:00 it was lights out and time to sleep, and they did it!  Definitely the best behavior I've ever seen at such an event, and I'm used to having them at church!

What else is new here?  Tammy and I go to Bethel tomorrow for another teacher in-service.  We will be staying at a B&B, which should be fun.  I have enrolled in a class through the Center for Distance Education at UAF (Univ of Alaska Fairbanks).  It is a 3 credit english class, and it is all about how to write a successful grant proposal.  The final for the class is to actually write a real proposal for submission to a foundation.  I'm excited to try this!  So right now I'm making a list of groups that could most use the funding, as well as researching who I might submit the proposal to.  I'm finding that there are many options!  I wouldn't be surprised if I wrote more than one proposal.

The last thing I should mention is the new way I'm handling photos.  We've been taking so many that space on our website could become an issue in the not-too-distant future.  With that in mind I researched the different sites out there that will host your digital pics for free.  There are tons of them!  But I narrowed it down to a few we will probably use.  The first is grove street.  They are a free hosting service for photos, and they don't try to sell anything.  I'm going to use them until we reach our 100 MB limit, then we'll add another site into the mix.  Anyway, what this means is that when you go to our photo pages, you will now find a link at the bottom of them pointing you to our various albums on grove street.  I think this will work well.  Please email me at schneidler@yahoo.com if you have any technical difficulties, or of course just to say hi, we would love to hear from you!

OK, ta-ta for now.  Tammy is going to LA over Thanksgiving for the wedding of a good friend, and we'll both be in WA from 12/24-1/3, and in Anchorage from 1/3-1/7.