This week we celebrated my 31st birthday; as well as Kaylee’s 3 month birthday. We celebrated Kaylee’s accomplishments by placing her on the couch and taking a bunch of pictures of her. For my birthday, Kaitlyn organized a potluck and game night at the school. We have a great group of teachers here in Togiak and we really enjoy spending time with one another. For our game we played BANG! The Bullet which we got for Christmas this past year. Most of the people haven’t played it before, which made it super fun. Sadly, we forgot to take any pictures of the event.
The Beast
One of the best parts of my birthday was fixing my four-wheeler, nick-named “The Beast”. You see, Kaitlyn and I bought this fantastic two person four-wheeler last year and it broke down this past fall. The break down was actually quite a small thing. The four-wheeler has an automatic transmission and gets its drive from a belt. Well, that belt broke. When I went to replace it I found that part of the cord that makes the belt had wrapped around the crankshaft and had done some damage. So, in order to fix it, I needed to order another part to replace the damage done by the belt cord. Once that arrived and everything was put back together it was drive-able again. Except, that something was wrong and it didn’t feel right. Since I wasn’t sure what was going on, I parked it so I wouldn’t do any additional damage until I could figure out what went wrong. Well, right after I parked it Kaylee came and since then I haven’t really had time to work on it, go figure! Additionally, since it hadn’t moved in a while it had literally froze itself to the ground and was immovable. Now that it’s Spring Break and the temperature has warmed a bit I was able to get it out. It only took about 20 or so gallons of hot water to unstick it from the ground. I took it to the school Friday night, let it thaw out and worked on it Saturday morning. I cleaned up all the parts I thought were the issue. Turns out, the problem was the oil dipstick. I had purchased a new one in the fall and failed to realized that the new dipstick didn’t come with a rubber gasket. The lack of a rubber gasket let water into the engine. We replaced the gasket and changed the oil and now she purrs like a kitten. I’m so happy to have it running again. It’s been sitting out front for nearly 4.5 months.
This week was also the precursor to Spring Break for the school. This meant that the end of the quarter was coming up and all us teachers needed to get all our lessons taught and graded before the end of the week and our students left for break and forgot all the rich content we covered in class. I don’t know what it is like for other teachers, but I always seem to be a little behind my pacing guide, so I was in a frenzy all week. Granted, our school doesn’t actually have pacing guides for the classes I teach, so all my pacing guides are self-inflicted. Things were going smoothly until Thursday morning. When we got to school we were informed that all telephone communication (landlines) and our internet was not working. We soon found out that previous night’s windstorm blew down a telephone line (which also carried the internet cable). This was problematic for us because we couldn’t enter grades, or even attendance, without the internet. Friday was suppose to be an inservice for the teachers to enter grades, however, since the internet was still not working (and because of other storms, the parts needed to fix the problem wouldn’t be in until the following week) we were told to go find internet somewhere else and input your grades. Kaitlyn, a few other teachers, and I went to the library to use their internet, but they were out too. So, we simply went back home. We just told ourselves that Spring Break started a little earlier for us. :)
