I didn't have a whole lot of pictures to choose from this week.  On Thursday we had a beautiful, sunny evening with a beautiful rainbow.  Tim and I were admiring it out our living room window.  I decided to go outside and take a picture; however, by the time I got outside the rainbow was gone.  You can still enjoy the picture of the rainbowless, beautiful, sunny, Togiak evening.
    This week has been busy, but good.  I only made it to cross country practice one day this week.  The coach, Mike, was a bit sneaky.  He called my room after school to ask me if I was coming.  I told him yes and then he hung up, not telling me the plan.  When I got there, he started explaining the route.  It was then I realized why he got a commitment from me before telling me where we were going.  We ran to the dump, up 2-hill, and back.  It is 2.5 miles to the dump.  2-hill is very steep and rocky.  It was also windy and rainy.  All that being said, our 5+ mile run wasn't too bad.  I was so proud of all the middle school runners.  The first time I went to practice with them none of them even made it half way through our 3-mile route without stopping to walk and they all suddenly had twisted ankles and sore knees.  Monday, however, all of them made it the 2.5 miles to the dump without stopping.  They were scared out of their wits to go up 2-hill, but they went anyway, and they didn't do too bad on their way back either.  Phrases like "I can't do this and this is too hard," that I heard two weeks ago had turned into "I can't do this . . . wait, yes I can.  It is hard, but I can do it."  I couldn't believe my ears.
    We finally got word that our 4-wheeler was shipped from Anchorage to Dillingham.  We were so excited to get a phone call later that day, assuming that they were telling us they were shipping it from Dillingham to Togiak.  Unfortunately, the call was to tell us that our 4-wheeler didn't fit on the plane.  No wonder nobody out here has a 4-wheeler as big as the one we just bought.  We have tried going all sorts of different routes to get it here.  You can't drive it across the tundra.  Even in the winter, I don't think I would trust a 4-wheeler between Togiak and Dillingham.  Bringing it on a boat could work, if we had a boat or a friend that hadn't already winterized their boat.  The barge doesn't have enough stuff on it to make a trip.  There is one man in Dillingham who has a plane big enough to bring it, but the price tag is also big: $1600!  We're hoping that we can find some other people in need of a large plane that can split the cost with us.  We've heard rumors that there might be some fencing coming out to Twin Hills (our neighboring village), maybe we can jump in on that.  I guess the good news is that Tim and I are confident that when the day comes that we want to turn around an sell this 4-wheeler that it will be a hot item that goes for a good price.
    I don't feel like I've told much about our week, but I don't feel like there's much to tell.  We're finally getting into a bit of a routine.  We love our new principal and the staff this year.  We are so grateful to be getting along better with our classes and our students.  We are just happy to be here and happy for the changes from last year.  We just had to turn in midquarter grades, which means the school year is already 1/8th over.  I can't believe how fast things are going.

    On Monday Tim stumbled upon a 2007 Can-Am 4-wheeler for sell on Craig's List.  We'd been contemplating getting a 2-seater snow go for the past few months.  (Snow go is what snow machines or snowmobiles are called here in the village.)  However, since we spent money on laser surgery this summer, we decided we should hold off.  However, a few weeks ago, Tim's 4-wheeler overheated and needs quite a lot of work.  So when Tim found this 4-wheeler on Craig's List we decided to look into it.  It is a 2-seater and since it is a Can-Am you have the option to buy tracks for it.  That means in the winter you can replace the wheels with tracks and use it as a snow go.  Hours later we had agreed to buy it.   I must admit that Tim is not the only one anxiously awaiting it's arrival.  It's pretty fun buying a new (well new to us) ATV.  Within 24 hours, we already had a good offer on Tim's broken 4-wheeler as well.  Not bad.  We have to wait for the machine to get shipped from Anchorage, but we should have it within a week or two.
    I have been trying to make it to cross country practice at least half the time.  I want the exercise, the company, and I think it's a good opportunity to form a good relationship with the kids.  This week our cross country coach has to go to Dillingham for some training.  I offered to be his substitute coach while he was gone.  Wednesday and Thursday I ran with the kids.  None of the high school kids showed up for practice, so it was just me and 5 middle schoolers.  It was a lot of work to keep them going the whole time.  They all wanted to stop and walk, pick berries, or wander off into the tundra.  I had to keep telling them, hold your pace until we get to this pole.  Keep up with me until we get to the stop sign.  Don't give up.  Let's do this lap without walking, etc, etc, etc.  Although not all of them completed their entire run, I did survive practice and thankfully their official coach did return.
    This weekend the student council wanted to host a basketball tournament.  Mike Tozzo, the MS and HS special ed teacher, and myself, are the advisors.  We were a bit nervous about putting on a tournament with such a short planning period.  Especially since everyone here is just used to playing it by ear.  We managed to put it on though.  I was lucky and Mike agreed to let me solely worry about concessions and he had to worry about the games.  I think I got the better end of the deal.  I spent the last couple of evenings sitting in the hot concessions room, boiling hot dogs, and fetching soda.  It went fairly well though.  There was no blood or fights and I think we actually made some money.  Now, we're just going to have to have a chat with all the students on student council who didn't show up.  We had one student show up one of the nights.

     This week we started out a bit cautiously.  One of our students died in a 4-wheeler accident a week ago yesterday.  We weren’t sure what to expect at school.  I was amazed at how un-phased the students seemed.  There were a little more subdued than normal and you could tell that a few were deeply affected, but I felt as if they just wanted us to carry on and give them their work.  The two boys that survived the accident didn’t show up for the entire week, understandably so.  I’m always worried about how I should best handle situations like this, but it seemed to go okay.
     We had our first snowfall Wednesday night or Thursday morning.  I am always excited when it first snows. It was gone by the end of the day though.  We are supposed to have some snow later into next week though.  We’ll see if it happens.
     Tim’s wrestling tournament got cancelled this weekend, which turned out to be a blessing.  The tournament had caught everyone off guard and a lot of his wrestlers were discouraged that they were not eligible due to grades.  Several had decided just to quit.  Luckily, after the tournament got cancelled, most of these wrestlers came back.
      We had stake conference this weekend.  It was very good.  There was a lot of focus on the temple, missionary work, teaching our families, and listening to the spirit.  I was amazed throughout the conference how much our stake takes care of us.  Our branch doesn’t contribute much to stake callings or even to our own branch presidency, but our stake is very mindful of us and makes sure we’re taken care of.
     Yesterday I played volleyball with the school team again.  I think it will be a tradition from now on to have a faculty team play against the volleyball team each Saturday.  We played for 2 hours.  I’m starting to rather enjoy volleyball.  
     Unfortunately, we don’t have too many exciting things to report this week.  It was rather normal.  I hope all of you reading this are doing well.  Have a good week.

This week was our second 5-day week of the school year.  I must admit I quite liked the 4-day week thing, but I guess we can’t have holidays and in-services every week.  We did put in a few 13-hour days this week trying to keep up.  We were, however, successful in saving some time on Monday evening for Family Home Evening.  I felt like that was a feat in and of itself.  
     Tuesday, Tim and I left the school around 4:30 pm.  Tim had to pick up some ice cream to serve to the winning class from spirit week.  The class who participated the most in dressing up was considered the winning class, which was not a hard task, since I only had 3 students dress up all week.  Needless to say, my class was not the winning class.  Tim found 2 gallons of ice cream for $30 at the AC store.  On our way back home, I drove in front of Tim because I don’t have a windshield on my 4-wheeler and I don’t like getting dust in my face from Tim’s 4-wheeler.  When I parked in front of our building I was completely confused to find that Tim was nowhere to be found.  I couldn’t figure out where he went. After about 5 minutes he rode up, looking a bit flustered.  The ice cream and fallen off his 4-wheeler and he had stopped to retrieve it.  The container had ice cream and gravel all over it.  I took the ice cream inside and started cleaning it up, so I could find the crack and tape it up before it melted any more.  I only found two very small cracks and had it all fixed up before Tim even made it inside . . . at least I thought I had.  Tim then told me that the lid had fallen off and the ice cream had landed top down, so there was gravel inside the ice cream.  Since the ice cream cost $15 a gallon and the store was a 3-mile 4-wheeler drive back to town, we spent the next 15 or 20 minutes meticulously spooning out all the chunks of gravel.  The good news was that if we missed any, it would just looked like Oreo chunks.  The bad news is that if we missed any the kids would likely chip a tooth.
     Thursday Tim took his first sick day.  Corey Cejka, our English teacher, also took a sick day.  So our staff of 5 was down to 3.  Tim was able made it to school for our after-school meeting and our college class.  We are taking a class over distance delivery once a week.  I didn’t get to start lesson planning for the next day until 5:30 pm.  I made my lesson plans a lot faster than usual.  Tim, on the other hand, had another class to attend from 6-8 pm.  I don’t even know how he got things ready for Friday.
     Friday I got a big package in the mail: a new full-size piano keyboard!  I was so excited.  I have always been against electrical pianos, but I finally decided a keyboard is better than nothing at all.  So far I love it.  It is definitely not an acoustic piano, but it’s pretty good.  The best part about it was that I got a $100 discount because it was “blemished”, but I have yet to find the blemish.
     This weekend we witnessed our first basketball tournament. They are probably the most popular fundraiser in Togiak and most the village gets involved.  Anybody will host a basketball tournament to earn money, the basketball team, the yearbook staff, the cross-country team, the volleyball team, or the wrestling team.  People live for basketball here.  Originally I was supposed to play on a staff team.  I was a little nervous about it since I haven’t played a game of basketball since I was 12 and to top it off, I already had 2 things scheduled on Saturday on top of my regular lesson planning.  It turned out that some of my teammates were sick, so we cancelled.  Later I found out that my team just got replacements and played anyway.  I felt like a jerk for “backing out”, except I had no idea that they were still playing.  In the end, I was not too sorry that I was replaced.
     Friday night and Saturday night Tim and I played Killer Bunnies with our friend Heather.  I am so glad there is someone else in Togiak who loves to play crazy games.  To top it off, we also had a Chinese potluck dinner on Saturday night, which was so good.
     Saturday evening, I watched the Relief Society broadcast online.  Sister Thompson spoke about visiting teaching.  I thought it was pretty cool when she shared the story of the sisters in Alaska who could only visit each other by traveling by bush plane, so they communicate by letters, email, and phone calls.  She was talking about my relief society!  Just earlier this week I dropped my visiting teaching letters off at the post office. It was my first time making a visiting teaching “visit” in this manner, so I’ll have to let you know how it went after I receive (or not receive) a replies. 

     This week started off with an inservice day.  I love inservice days.  We had about 3 hours worth of meetings, but the rest of Monday we had to plan for the week.  It’s nice to be able to get ahead of the game a little.
     The honeymoon phase is over.  The kids are starting to act more like themselves and we’re having a few more discipline problems than the first two weeks, but overall it’s still going well.  
     Thursday night we had an open house.  All the teachers had to be at the school from 6:30-8:00 pm.  The entire village was invited to come meet the teachers, have dessert, and hear the principal speak.  I haven’t gotten any feedback from our principal and have no idea what he thinks of me.  However, he did introduce me as the “dynamite science teacher”.  I guess that’s good.  I only had a handful of parents actually come meet me.  It was a pretty relaxed evening.  The bad part was that it took my usually planning time and I definitely didn’t feel like lesson planning for the next day after 8:00 pm.  
     Since you couldn’t attend the open house yourselves, Tim and I decided to take some short videos of our classrooms so you can see where we spend 70 hours of our lives each week.
     Tim and I (and the rest of the teachers) seem to be getting burnt out from all the extra hours of planning.  Friday morning we got to the school around 7:00 am and the power was out.  One by one all the teachers trickled into my room to sit around and talk.  Everyone was stressed out that their lessons weren’t going to work.  They didn’t know what to do, but it seemed no one had the energy to think of a solution.  The power did come back on about 8:30, so our lessons could go on as planned.
   Power outages have been all the rage this week.  The power has flickered on and off several times a week since we got here, but this week it has been going off for 3 or 4 hours at a time.  Saturday morning it was off when we woke up.  We had no electricity or water.  It came back on around 10:30 and then went off again right as we started to make lunch.  This morning the power went out in the middle of sacrament meeting.  Tim and I waited about 15 minutes to see if it would come back on and then headed to the school in hopes we could use the phone there.  Unfortunately, the power was off there too.  So church was very short and sweet for us today.
     From zero to three . . . Last weekend I finally got a key for my 4-wheeler!  I ordered two keys from Anchorage.  This involved pulling the ignition out of my 4-wheeler to get a number for the order.  I tinkered around for about an hour trying to get the ignition out.  Finally I gave in and asked Tim for help.  I also called Warren for help and finally went next door to ask a fellow teacher, Greg, for help.  Greg just popped it right out!  Anyway, the point is that the wires on my 4-wheeler could no longer handle being pushpin-hot-wired.  I was going through several pushpins a day, since they were melting on every 4-wheeler ride.  Friday morning of last week, Theo, the middle school math teacher came to me with a 4-wheeler key and explained that last year she had borrowed my 4-wheeler and had lost the key.  She couldn’t find the key anywhere, so the previous owner had just used her spare key (the one I lost promptly after arriving).  Theo had just reached in the pocket of her jacket she had apparently not worn in a very long time and discovered the long last key.  That afternoon I received my two replacement keys from Anchorage.  So in one day, I went from zero keys to three keys.    Although, I was very grateful that Theo found the original key since my replacement keys were cut wrong.  I had to send them back to be recut.  

Tim and I have had a few interesting foods since we arrived here: akutaq (a-goo-duk), muktuk, and bear.  I’m not very good at spelling in Yup’ik, but I looked up all the spellings, so I think they’re right.  Akutaq is “eskimo ice cream”, traditionally it is berries and fish mixed in seal oil.  The more modern akutaq is berries, sugar, and crisco and sometimes fish.  It has no resemblance to ice cream.  It’s not even served frozen.  It’s bearable, but not good.  Muktuk is whale blubber along with the skin.  The skin is about 1/2 an inch thick, bluish-black in color and has the consistency of an eraser.  The blubber is very chewy, salty, and a bit fishy.  I don’t feel like I need to eat it ever again, but apparently, it’s quite the treat.  We’re told by some Alaska Natives (not to be confused with Native Alaskans), that bear is disgusting.  I guess that you never know when you’re going to get a pocket of fat or very tough meat.  Tim and I were lucky.  We ate a very young bear and there were no fat or tough meat surprises, but it was very bland.  We added lots of pepper and salt.