Hello all. As you might already suspect…we work a lot.  It seems like the past few posts have all been short and primarily focused on the fact that we work a lot.  Well, I hate to say, but this week isn't really that different.  However, here is what happened this week that was different than last week.

Hughesnet
Our local internet provider is a satellite based internet service very popular out in Bush Alaska.  It's called Hughesnet and provides us with the closest thing to "high-speed" internet obtainable at home.  We have had it installed for the past two years we've been here.  For the most part, things have worked as they should.  This year, our internet has been finicky at best.  For some reason, we continue to lose connection, regain it, and then lose it again.  As you could imagine, this is quite frustrating.  As a internet-based graduate student, internet at home is kinda a must.  For the past 2-3 weeks, I've (Tim) been staying at school late to finish assignments.  As much fun as it is to physically be in the school from 7am to 8pm, I'd rather be home sitting in my comfy Lazyboy.  So, I started to investigate the problem, calling Alaska tech guys, and even Hughesnet Tech Support - India division (now that's a whole other story by itself!).  Because of where we live, getting a technician to come look at our dish is rather expensive, as it usually requires airfare from another city.  Everyone I contacted seemed to agree that my dish was out of alignment.  So, I purchased a little doo-hicky (official name) to fine tune the adjustment of the dish.  After a couple of days of adjusting here, talking to thick-accented tech support agents there, we were able to fix our problem. Apparently, internet dishes are difficult to adjust because they have to transmit a signal, not only receive.  It's funny that the tech support guys continued to tell me that "adjusting the dish is more like art than science".  What? Art?  That's how they describe it?  Well, if that's true, than my inner artist was probably like Jason Polluck all over the place. :)  Feww, rant over.

Hand Picking Trash
The Togiak Student Council has been working very well this year.  They decided that they wanted to go to the State Student Government Convention in Wasilla in October.  In order to go they needed to raise money because it's about a $700 round trip airfare from Togiak to Anchorage.  Kaitlyn is one of the advisors for the Student Council and has been working hard with them to make their goal.  This past week the Student Council was hired to pick up trash downtown as a fund raiser.  Kaitlyn and her crew worked for a few hours hand picking trash off the ground and beautifying the village.  She spent most of time picking up trash with a middle schooler named Miles, who has no affiliation with Student Council; he just wanted to help.  Kaitlyn says he was a chatty kid.  

Homecoming
This week was Togiak's first-ever (or at least first in a really long time) Homecoming Dance.  Togiak doesn't have a football team, or many dances actually.  The teacher in charge of the Yearbook hosted the dance as a fundraiser.  Funny how I didn't see any Yearbook students there.  However, Kaitlyn participated by opening the concession stand and having Student Council man it.  I (Tim) created the music playlist of clean music, and another teacher, Brian Mason, sat in the room and played the music.  It worked well and was open to all students, including community members.  It ended up being a dance with mostly 2-5 graders there.  It was actually quite fun.  I think we had 5 high school students show up.  The dance was from 8-11 on Saturday night.  I was just glad that I didn't have to sit in the room with the music. :)  

Graduate School
I have been working on a completely different type of classes this semester than I did last semester.  I am taking Instructional Design (creating instructional material) and Graphical Design for Learning.  Surprisingly, the two classes are very similar.  Last semester I spent a great deal of my time building websites and learning html code.  This semester I'm learning how to better learn.  It's interesting, but I still like the web development.  I just redid my personal graduate program website.  You're welcome to go take a peek.  It's currently still under development. http://edtech2.boisestate.edu/timphillips/index.html

This week was busy.  Do I sound like a broken record yet?  I think I write that same sentence week after week.  This week had a bit more variety to the busy than most weeks do.  Monday and Tuesday Tim and I worked as usual, 7:00ish am to 7:00ish pm.  I did take some work home to do later in the evening as well because Tim and I were both trying to prepare for substitutes.  I knew for several weeks that I’d be going into district office at the end of the week to do some work for the science committee.  Tim was also asked to come in to do some work with setting up Google Docs for the district.  What I didn’t know until Monday morning was that we were leaving on Wednesday afternoon not Thursday afternoon.  That meant I had to have two days of sub plans ready before school started on Wednesday morning as well as doing my regular planning.  I managed to get the plans finished and I was so looking forward to having a little variety in my work week.

Tim and I got on the plane about 5:30 pm on Wednesday to head to Dillingham.  We had to make a quick stop in Twin Hills to drop off a passenger.  Twin Hills is just across the bay from us.  It takes about 5 minutes to fly there.  Just as we were about to take off again, our pilot noticed some screws missing from the plane, so we were delayed while we waited for another plane to arrive with the necessary screws.  I was actually a bit excited for the delay because I’ve always wanted to go to Twin Hills (simply landing on the runway does not count) and our old coworker and neighbor lives there now.  We could see the school from the plane, so Tim and I just walked over and knocked on Billy’s door.  It was a fun little surprise visit.  He gave us a tour of the school and his apartment.  We even got to see Meghan (the lead teacher) and Andy.  They showed us their studio apartment that is in the school.  After spending about an hour and a half with Billy, the second plane arrived and we were on our way again. 

Kyle, from our district office, offered to let us stay with him in Dillingham, so rather than get a hotel we got to stay with him and his wife.  I thought that our work at district office would be relaxing compared to working at the school, but I was exhausted by the end of the day.  Our task was to make a supply list, shop for, and fill out purchase orders for all the science equipment for every middle school and high school science class in the district for the next 6 years.  We had two days to finish the task with 3 of us working one day and 4 of us the second day.  By Friday afternoon my brain felt like mush and I could barely speak straight.  We ended up staying Saturday as well to get a little more work finished.  The job is complete, but we got a good chunk of it finished.  I said I would stay for part of Saturday, but I needed to get back at least by early afternoon to do planning for next week.

Tim and I got home about 2:00 pm on Saturday.  We took some time to visit with Heather, put our things away, eat, and start laundry, and then it was back to work.  I worked until about 10:30 pm on my lesson plans for Monday.  I did take breaks to change laundry and run to the store, but it was a lot of work.  I don’t think I’ve ever looked so forward to a Sunday before.  I couldn’t wait for the break from work. 

Today I slept in, went to church, and some other meetings, made egg rolls and had dinner with some friends.  It was a nice and much needed day.  I’m bracing myself for yet another busy week next week.  I’ll just take it one day at a time. 

Prepared to be amazed.  Our little indoor garden is growing like crazy.  Take a look at the picture to see how much growth we’ve had in one week!

This week was similar to the previous ones this school year.  Tim and I arrived at the school between 7:00 am and 7:30 am each morning and stayed until 6:30 or 7:30 pm.  But, this week was a bit more upbeat than week’s past.  My parents called last Sunday evening to tell us they were leaving Idaho on Monday morning to start their journey to Togiak.  Awesome!! My dad needed to transport a plane from Rexburg to Anchorage.  As long as he was getting that close in a plane he had control of, he figured they might as well stop by and see us.  Tim and I have been so excited.  I had much more motivation to work hard during the week and get as much accomplished as possible so I could play hard with my parents when they showed up. 

If the weather were beautiful my parents would arrive as early as Thursday afternoon.  Unfortunately, weather was not beautiful.  They made it about half the distance they expected the first day because of bad weather.  They made it to Smithers, BC on Tuesday, but then had to spend all Wednesday there due to bad weather.  Thursday they made it to Ketchikan and then had to wait out some more bad weather.  Tim and I decided at this point we better change our sub day from Friday to Monday.  No problem.  We could still spend the weekend with them. 

Saturday I worked hard at the school to get prepared for a substitute on Monday and get plans ready for Tuesday.  I was hoping we’d be picking up my parents on Saturday afternoon.  Weather, once again, was not our friend.  My parents were stuck in Cordova.  In fact, the weather in Cordova was bad enough that even the ferry canceled their trips for two days.  My dad called me this morning and explained that the weather wasn’t supposed to get any better for 5 more days and he and my mom were going to leave the plane in Cordova and take a jet back to Idaho.  I would be lying to say that Tim and I weren’t really disappointed.  I’ve been trying to look at the “bright side” of things.  My parents are not flying in dangerous, life threatening weather . . . thank goodness.  I really had a good time looking forward to them coming even though they never actually came.  We’re really looking forward to seeing them in January.  Hopefully that trip doesn’t fall through. :)

We now have a bed in our second bedroom with clean sheets.  We have clean towels too.  Anyone want to take advantage of that?

Tim and I have wanted to get some sort of indoor garden for nearly two years now and we’ve finally done it.  We are now the proud owners of an AeroGarden.  We planted salad greens two weeks ago and they’re already sprouted and growing well.  It’s a pretty cool thing.  The lights turn on and off themselves according to the amount of light needed by the type of plant growing.  I just have to make sure I fill the water when it gets low and replenish the nutrients.  One of the other teacher’s in the district owns three AeroGardens and absolutely loves them.  He says that he’s family could actually use some more.  I’m excited to be able to make our own salads in the somewhat near future.

This week has been really busy.  I was roughly adding up numbers in my head and I think it’s safe to say that I worked 65 hours in 6 days.  One night Tim told me I was not allowed to stay past 8:00 pm.  I can’t of chuckled thinking, yeah, like I’d be here that late.  Before I knew it I looked up at the clock and saw that it was past 7:30 pm.  I packed up and headed home.  I jokingly told Tim that I’m trying to put all my hours in before January.  That sad part of that statement is how close it is to the truth.  If you take my sick days into account that I will be using for maternity, my current work schedule really would add up to an entire school year’s worth of hours.

Tim has been doing quite the juggling act with preparing for school and taking his master’s classes.  It’s hard to take online classes without the Internet.  It has been a bit of a struggle because our Internet at home hasn’t been working well or hardly at all. After spending so many hours at the school, Tim doesn’t really want to spend more time there to do homework.  I think he’s managing well though.

That’s right.  It’s happening.  Tim and I have been selected as adoptive parents!  We can’t express how excited and happy we are.  The birth mother is expecting a girl on January 2nd.  We have met her, her 5-year old daughter, her parents, and her sister.  Without getting into too many details, we feel very blessed to be working with such a thoughtful and careful birth mother.  It is obvious that her decisions and words are well thought out and well informed.  There are so many positive decisions the birth mother has made that I think many adoptive couples worry about. 

For those of you who aren’t very familiar with adoption nothing is final until it’s, well, finalized.  That can’t occur until a certain time frame after the birth.  (To my knowledge that time frame can vary from 10 days to 6 months after the birth depending on the state in which the birth occurs.)  Technically, nothing is legal yet, and the  birthmother could decide not to go through with it.  Tim and I feel comfortable that she is set in her decision, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt to have a few more prayers in her direction and our own.

Nothing else really seems worthy of mentioning after that announcement.  The rest of our week is going to pale in comparison.  (I’m 100% okay with that.)  Tim and I worked liked crazy.  We were at the school between 7:00-8:00 am each morning and stayed until 6:30-7:30 pm each night.  I think we would have worked earlier (and maybe later too) if we both hadn’t been feeling a little sick still.  Tim seems to be mostly better and now that it’s been a week and a half I think I might be able to say I’m getting better too.  (Crossing my fingers here.)

Saturday Tim and I had a chance to clean up around our house a little, do some shopping, and visit the post office.  We spent the rest of the day at the school working until dinnertime.  After dinner we headed to the beach to harvest some silver salmon from the teacher net.  Tim has really been looking forward to get ting some salmon this year and smoking it.  We just purchased a smoker last month.

Today was extremely busy with church callings.  Tim started church at 9:00 am this morning and I didn't get off the phone with church related things until 3:00 pm.  I was recently called as the primary president.  I’m  trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do and trying to figure out how to train everyone else on what their jobs too.  There’s definitely more responsibility being the president and than a counselor. 

We had some friends over for dinner tonight.  I like having time on the weekend to socialize with people and share a meal.  We had the Crabtree family over as well as Heather.  (We missed you Kim.)  Nate is our new vice principal.  He and his wife have two kids.  Nate's kids taught me all sorts of things about how cool our coffee table is.  I had no idea that it could be a bed, an oven, a pet shop, a truck yard, a dinner table, and a trampoline.  We even had an imaginary food fight with all the pies (throw pillows) that were cooked in the oven (coffee table).  It’s fun to watch the imagination of kids at work. 

Tim and I are really looking forward to Labor day.  We’re going to go into work for the majority of the day and attempt to get caught up.  I say attempt because I know in reality we will never be caught up.