Up in the air

Well…  I spent the morning up a ladder.  Kerry Bidle is our schools athletic director and really is working hard to increase student involvement in extra curricular activities.  One of the ways he’s working at this is by keeping all students, staff, and visitors informed of whats going on in our school.  To do this he’s worked with local businesses to fund an electronic information system.  We’ve installed three tv’s as of last year, and have been working on adding a couple more that will allow us to push content into the Roosevelt school as well.  The system pushes powerpoint slides and video over ethernet to the tv’s.  So Kerry spent about 7 hours yesterday getting all the wires pulled through the ceiling.   Today I helped him finish up putting the ends on and getting everything hooked up correctly.  Unfortunatly it didn’t work right off the bat.  I’ve got to do some more testing tomorrow to see what the issue is.  I really hope I can figure this out.  Its pretty frustrating to work on something for so long and to spend most of the time up a ladder to have it not work out.

Well I’ve got to get on the treadmill.  Its already almost a quarter to 8.

Fast Fall

It seems as the fall has just flown by.  I can’t believe its already Christmas break this coming week.  Erin and really enjoyed our time a week ago when we went up to Canada.  It was great to get away just the two of us and spend some time together.  Thunder Bay was nice, and our time on the shore of Lake Superior was nice and relaxing.

This past week seemed to go pretty quick.  I think when your down in the trenches it can seem like its moving awfully slow, but when you look back you seem to forget those times.  Anyway it was a good week.  I went to a wrestling meet on Tuesday night and watched a few of my students who are on the Virginia high school wrestling team.  It was fun to see them compete.  They did a very nice job winning both of their dual meets.  I went to the meet after our weekly curling match.  Tony our high school art teacher, Chuck our superintendent, Tom one of our P.E. teachers and myself all curl in the early league.  We’ve competed three times so far and are sitting at 2 for 3.  I played pretty well our last game getting most of my rocks in the general area they were supposed to be, so that was good.

On Friday I was signed up to take tickets at the hockey game.  Since I was tied up with this Erin spent the evening making lefsa.  It turned out really well and I think she ended up getting about 70 pieces.  The hockey game was fun to watch.  Virginia beat International Falls after a bit of a shaky start.

Saturday night Erin and I went to her schools Christmas party at the wooden table.  It was fun spending time with the people she works with on a daily basis.  After dinner we headed to Hibbing to pick up Katie who was just finishing up about 28 hours of travel getting down here from St. Michael for her Christmas break.

Today we did a little bit of ice skating.  I don’t know how the rink will be tomorrow.  We got a little bit of snow this evening.  It seems the moment you get the ice cleared enough for skating mother nature decides to spoil the fun by dropping more of that white stuff.  There us rumored to be a pretty big storm that is supposed to hit us on Christmas eve.  If that’s the case we need to make sure we take advantage of the skating while its available.

Erin has two days of work this week and I have three, so our Christmas break is just around the corner.  I am really looking forward to relaxing and getting outside some over break.

I hope you all have a nice holiday season

Thunder Bay and the North Shore

Erin and I had dueling dentist appointments on Friday.  We both took the day off of school so we could make the appointments and when finished cavity free we headed East.  We rented a room at the Cliff Dweller on the North Shore of Lake Superior.  The view out our room was spectacular.  There’s something about looking over a body of water with no distant shorline.

We basically just checked in and then headed back down the shore to Duluth to catch a St. Scholastica Hockey game.  Erin’s cousin Brennan is one of the goalies for the team.  He unfortunately for us was not playing in the game we attended, but the saints put on a good show winning 6 to 3.  Brennan ended up starting the next night which turned out to be a televised game.  He came ready to play stopping all 29 shots thrown his way.  The saints won the second game 3 – 0.

We got back t the Cliff Dweller at about 11:30 and crashed right out.  The next morning we were leaving the country and we needed our sleep.  After our continental breakfast we were on the road by 10:00 heading up the highway to the Canadian Border.  After a couple hour drive we found our way through the border and at Kakabeka Falls just 25 Kilometers outside of Thunder Bay.

We found out that the falls were in a park of some sort and we needed a parking pass to displayed in our car window to park there.  We unfortunetly didn’t have any Canadian currency so we went back into the little town of Kakabeka to find an ATM machine.  After a quick withdrawal we broke our newly acquired 20 at a local gas station for the Loonies we need to plug into the machine what would render us a valid parking permit.

The falls were amazing with a huge drop to a canyon floor below.  The frosty trees that lined the picturesque falls looked like they’d been dusted with powdered sugar.

After checking out the falls from both sides of the river we headed into Thunder Bay.  The town of around 110,000 people is just as you guessed it like any other city.  We contemplated going to a movie, because that’s what we do in foreign countries but the show times didn’t quite match up with our “schedule”.  After driving around town a little and checking out the Bay part of Thunder Bay we headed back to America stopping off at a cheese farm and picking up some smoked Gouda from the only cheese place in Canada that makes Gouda.  The smokey flavor is very strong and tasty.

For dinner that night we drove up to the top of Lutsen mountain to a resturant we’d been to last year with Jesse and April.  Dinner was very good and with full tummies we went back to the lake where we ended our weekend by watching Iron Man back in the hotel.

It sure was a nice weekend get-a-way.  Now we have a week and a half sprint to Christmas break.