Busy

A lot has been going on lately.  I’ve just begun a Master in Educational Technology from the University of Alaska Southeast.  The program is all online except for one summer class held in Juneau.  I’m currently taking 3 classes totaling 9 credits.  This all on top of teaching and continuing my efforts with BWCACAST.

On the BWCACAST front, I’m still kicking out episodes from the summer trips.  I’m currently releasing episodes from the trip we took in July with my parents.  I have one ready to release this coming Tuesday, so be sure to drop by the site and check it out.  I’ve also got a couple of really fun episodes in the works.  First I did an interview with a man named Joe Priatle from Ely.  He’s 91 years old and has been making snowshoes for 70 of them.  He was kind enough to allow me to film him re-rawhiding a pair of snowshoes my Uncle Zac gave me.  It was a lot of fun watching him start out with the rawhide straps in what seemed to be a haphazard criss-cross and evolve into an amazing web.  I’ve also had the good fortune to team up with www.blackriversleds.com.  They make a very nice toboggan sled for winter camping.  They sell the sleds completed or you can buy a kit from them.  I’ve partnered up with them to do an episode on putting one of their kits together.  I’ve got all the parts and hope to shoot putting it together this coming weekend.  With the sled finished up we are planning a winter camping trip in the middle of February.  I don’t think we’ll go very far back into the BWCA, because we’ll be leaving after school on Friday and have to be back by Monday.  It should be a good time though.

School has been going well.  Our student broadcasts seem to fluctuate from week to week with more and less professional shows.  For whatever reason some of my students feel that everything needs to be funny and joking around takes precedence over just about anything else in their lives.  I continue to work with them to provide a quality news program once a week.  My web design students are great to work with.  We keep plugging away at a variety of php mysql open source cms’s, blogs, galleries, and soon wiki’s.  On a side not I’m really hoping for a snow day tomorrow.  Its been snowing since last evening and doesn’t plan to stop until tomorrow at 4:00 PM.  The National Weather Service says we shouldn’t drive unless we really need to and yet our school district hasn’t made the decision to close school for tomorrow.

Erin and I spent yesterday making venison snack sticks.  We kind of got a late start on things.  But we took 10 lbs of venison, 8 lbs of lean burger, and 2 lbs of pork.  Ground them all up together.  Split into two 10 lbs batches we added in the seasonings for a pepper batch, and a hot batch.  It then took us about an hour to stuff the first batch into collagen casings.  Once stuffed we hung the snack sticks in a smoker and smoked them for 3 hours.  During that time we stuffed the second batch.  When the first batch was done smoking we put them in the oven at 200 degrees to finish them off.  The second batch went into the smoker.  This all went down around 9:00 PM.  It took over 3 hours for the first batch to reach the recommended 160 degree internal temperature.  Sot it was 12:15 AM before I was able to take them out of the oven and put the second batch in for their cooking time.  I ended up having to get up at 2 Am, 3 AM, 4 AM, and finally 4:30 AM before the second batch was done and I could turn off the stove and get some good sleep.  Needless to say I took a nap today.