
I know I wrote last week, but I’m going to go out of turn and take this week too.
Wow, I keep thinking, next week will be more under control . . . but it hasn’t happened yet. We are still really busy with lesson planning and spending ridiculous amounts of time at the school. Although, we have noticed we’re running low on steam, and sometimes the lessons are less planned than we’d like because we just have to go home.



One of Tim’s students came by this week with a fresh silver salmon. It was the biggest fish I’ve ever handled before. He gave us the entire fish and took off. Tim and I looked at each other thinking, what are we supposed to do with this. Luckily Sam, our vice principal, had showed Tim how to fillet a salmon, but he had already cut off the head and gutted the fish. We called up one of our coworkers who is “married” to an Alaskan Native to get some step by step instructions. Our house smelled pretty fishy, but Tim successfully beheaded, gutted, and filleted that salmon.

Tim and I spoke in church today. It’s the first time we’ve been asked to speak in 3 years. Last time, like this time, we were the only two speakers, meaning together we needed to fill about 40 minutes of time. 3 years ago when we spoke, I, tragically for Tim, only spoke for roughly 4.13 minutes and Tim was left to fill up all the rest of the time. Oops. It was my goal this time to actually take my full half. A couple years ago I was asked to speak at my college graduation, which completely scared me out of my wits. I had to speak for 5 minutes . . . that was it. But what was I supposed to say for 5 whole minutes? I spent hours and days working on what to say. It turned out pretty well; at least I thought so. It was from this experience that I learned in order to speak in sacrament meeting for longer then 4 minutes you have to invest some time and effort. So I did just that. I am proud to report that I was successful in speaking for an entire 15 minutes and I had a much happier husband compared to last time we spoke. However, it was not entirely uneventful: right as sacrament meeting was starting, our neighbor decided to vacuum/shampoo the carpet on the landing right outside our door. You see, last week during our power outage, the water heater overflowed, soaking the landing between our two apartments. Apparently this triggered some mold or something else rank smelling in the carpet. The smell started to seep into our apartments. Under normal conditions, a neighbor shampooing the landing carpet would not in any way affect a sacrament meeting talk, but when you attend sacrament meeting in your own living room it can be quite distracting. So during my talk, we had lovely background sounds of a carpet shampooer. However, I don’t think those sounds were much compared to the sounds from other’s living rooms that forgot to put their phones on mute. I must admit that the smell of our hallway and our apartment has greatly improved.