Veteran's Day through Thanksgiving break

Its been three weeks of cold, but clear weather. That doesn't make me happy because I want to go ride my machine...

We finished volleyball season with a 5th place finish at the regional volleyball tournament in St. Mary's.  Its nice to have my afternoons back to myself, but I sure do miss interacting with those kids. They really are a great group. Basketball starts soon, but I am not coaching this year. That also saddens me. I really enjoyed getting to know the girls and getting to travel with them. However, I know that their coach will do fabulous with them. :)

Thanksgiving week was tough. It was hard to see that everyone was headed to Mom and Dad's for the holiday and I wouldn't be able to make it. However, there are some cool pilot dudes in St. Mary's who invited me to join them for dinner. It was fun to go hang out with them, be away from school, and just relax a little. Jana and I went on Wednesday and came back Friday mid-morning. Friday afternoon Jamie came to visit. It was fun having her here and I spent the entire weekend being LAZY! I chuckled on Monday when my students and I were talking about what we did all weekend. They couldn't believe that I laid around watching TV all weekend... To be honest, I can't really believe it either... But it happened.

Tomorrow through Friday we're hosting the Native Youth Olympics for the 4-8th graders. I am excited to see the kids compete, they've been so excited about it all fall. I am also interested to see how it will all work out logistically... Our school isn't huge, so I'm interested to see how it goes when we add another 100 or so kids to the building. I'll let ya know! :)

I was just looking... I'm gonna be the broke girl for the next year or more until I finish my Master's degree... holy cow!! $1600-$2000 bucks a term because I'll be taking between 5 and 6 credits a term. Sheesh! Guess I better start saving now so I can afford it. But I'm excited to be taking classes again, and it will be nice to have my Master's finished too. ***UPDATE: I have no room to complain about cost of my Master's degree... A co-worker is currently in a Master's program and dropped $5000 this term alone for 5 credits... Thank you Eastern Oregon University for an affordable, yet still high-quality Master's degree program.***

I guess thats all. I thought I had more to update about... Have a fabulous weekend and I'll post again after NYO is over.

Cheers!

Craziness of my life. Catch up day!

We finally got some snow at the end of this week. The weather report was saying we'd have snow all Thursday night and freezing rain as well, so I was super excited when I woke up for work on Friday... Opened my front door and.... NO SNOW! Well that just put me in a grouchy mood for the whole day. By lunch a few people had let me know that it had started snowing, and I felt all was right with the world again. :) I didn't take many pictures, but you can check out Jana's blog at janaalaaska.blogspot.com. But good news is we've got white on the ground, now I'm just doing my snow dance every day in order to get enough so I can get my machine out and go play! :)

Last night we were going to have some female staff members over for a girls night... Zoey and Culea had shown up and they were watching something with Sarah while I was in my room on facebook. Next thing I know, Sarah is saying, "Um, Sammy. The light just went out." So I go out to check it out... and notice smoke coming from the light bulb in the hood above the oven... I immediately turn off the light and the smoke stops, then flipped it back on and it started smoking again. So I unplugged it, found my Leatherman and began to take apart the hood so I could see where the fire was. Turns out, no fire. No melted wires, no apparent heating of anything... So, I called Diane filled her in and she called her husband (he is the director of maintenance for our district.) He called me to see what was going on... After 10 minutes of flipping breakers we finally figured out which breaker it was that was affected. (It hadn't originally tripped, so it wasn't apparent.) Once we had it narrowed down to that breaker it was time to figure out if it was the heat tape, circ. pump, or fridge tripping the breaker... After a few more minutes of trial and error we figured out it was the pump. By this time, Clark had shown up to help so I got off the phone with Bob and was asking Clark. We couldn't really come up with any way to fix it, so our maintenance guy, Max, is headed here now to fix it. That meant that we didn't have the pump last night, so no toilet flushing, showering or running water in general... And our house didn't burn down last night, so I'm still not sure what the smoking light bulb was all about, but maybe we'll get that fixed today too. :)

Volleyball season is coming to an end... This weekend we didn't travel. It was nice to have the whole weekend at home to relax. We leave Thursday morning for St. Mary's for the regional tournament. We'll play thursday and friday all day then the championship game will be Saturday morning. We've got a good chance to play quite a few games, the kids are doing really well this year. I'll keep you posted on that. :)

Its been a crazy week in the classroom. I've had kids out all week with strep throat or other illnesses. Its been just as busy as ever though. We've been preparing for Thanksgiving with a fun Naked Turkey project. We get to talk with a class in Kansas on Tuesday to share our turkeys with them. I am excited for that. :)

This morning as I was waiting for Max to come, I decided to clean my room a bit... I came across my knitting bag. Holy moly I need to get going on dish clothes. Then I decided that I'm tired of doing just the same old dishcloth pattern, but I don't know how to purl so all the other cute patterns are off limits. So, I googled "teach yourself to purl" and got a good website that lays it out pretty clearly step by step. I haven't actually started anything to practice purling, but I plan to tonight. :) Hopefully its as easy as it said... If it is, then I found a cute pattern for a knitted ear warmer/headband thing that I'm going to try. :)

This morning I woke up to a missed call from dad at 530 AM. Those of you who know my father know that this is nothing out of the ordinary in my life. :) However, the entire message was in regards to whether I've been doing my research on pilot's license related business... Guess thats what I'll spend my afternoon doing as soon as I finish my lesson plans. Thanks for the reminder, Daddy-o!

Continuing Education

So... I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about a Master's program... I've already got some graduate credits through Eastern Oregon University. I've been doing some research on different colleges and programs... I have gotten some good input from some important people in my life. (Thanks Karyn and Sam and everyone else who has contributed to my Master's degree dilemma.)

Last year, well like 20 months ago now, I started taking some classes from EOU toward a Master's degree. At that point it was mostly because I wanted something to do in addition to my substitute teaching for 6 months. And now I'm in my second year of teaching in Bush Alaska (which I LOVE, don't read into this wrong) and I don't have much of a social life to take me away from homework and being focused. Okay.... I do have my snow machine, but I definitely feel like now is a good time to be working toward a Master's degree.

So, after much debate, research and contemplation I've decided to finish out my Master's at Eastern... I'll be doing the Curriculum and Instruction focus area because I've already got my Reading and ESOL endorsements... This won't lead to another endorsement on my license, but if I ever wanted to get into a district office position, it could lead into that, potentially.

I am hoping to get this finished over the next 16 months... So at the end of my third year of teaching I'd also have my Master's degree. Maybe even sooner if I can stay focused and love college as much this time around as I did the first time. :)

Mount up for Eastern Oregon!

Volleyball updates...

The past few weeks have been SUPER busy... We hosted volleyball games 3 weeks ago. The kids did awesome, played hard and enjoyed hanging out with their friends and family from the visiting schools of Pilot Station and Scammon Bay.

The following weekend we traveled to Emmonak to make up for the weekend of games that got cancelled because of high winds and not being able to fly. We had another successful weekend losing only to Emo. The kids are improving with each game we play. Its so fun to watch as a coach that they're actually listening to what we've been saying and actually doing what we've been practicing...

This weekend we traveled to Kotlik for our third weekend of games. We played Mountain, Nunam, and Kotlik. I am pleased that our kids did so well. We lost only to Mountain Village and I know that if we are to rematch at the regional tournament, our team is capable of overcoming Mountain.

Here are a few pictures from the games yesterday... I'm not very good at photographing our playing, I'm more into the coaching aspect of the game. Ha!

Her serving is SOOOO much improved. She is working hard and doing well her Freshman year.

Most of us are remembering to be down and ready. 

Time out! 

His serving has also vastly improved this season. Too bad he's a senior and won't be playing with us next year.