Crabbing or is it just big holes in the ice?

I am a tired kid.  I got up this morning at the early hour of a quarter to eleven.  Made some buttermilk pancakes to prepare myself for the days adventures.  Around 12:30 I was layered up to beat the cold.  It’s only about 20 below and the wind non-existent.  It makes for a pretty nice day.  C.O. and I headed out across the frozen ocean to check out crab pot.  We arrived at our destination about 7 miles from the village.  It had been about 5 days since we had last pulled the pot.  In the mean time about 7 inches of ice had formed.  C.O. had built an ice saw during the week.  So we chiseled out a hole and used the hand saw to cut the hole out.  We pulled the pot out, and there were a bunch of starfish, and a tiny crab.  🙂  We threw them all back and dropped the pot back down.  We are pretty sure we’ll catch all those starfish again.  Since we dropped them down the same place we drop the pot.  From there we headed further South.  Rumor has it that the people that have gone out in the past went more towards Nome.  So that is the direction we headed.  We found a spot that looked all right.  Another words we were on ice and didn’t feel like driving any more.  So we got out the chainsaw and started the lengthy process of cutting such a large hole in the ice.

As you can see there, I am running the chainsaw.  Also in the picture are the ice chisel and tongs (to pull the blocks out) that C.O. made.  They both work really well.  We were pulling out some pretty big blocks of ice with those tongs with a lot less effort than doing it by hand.  We did however run into some troubles with the chainsaw.  At first it didn’t want to start.  I don’t know if 20 below is exactly in its operating range for temperature.  We eventually had to poor gas directly into the carburetor to get it started.  Unfortunately the pull that got the chainsaw started ripped the pull cord out of the machine.  We later found out that the starting mechanism was made of plastic and broke into a bunch of pieces.  So we used the chainsaw until it ran out of gas, and without a pull cord, couldn’t get it started again.  So we were left with the chisel and the hand saw.  Fortunately we had cut most of the cuts needed to get the top layer of ice out.  So with much struggling we finally got the first foot and a half out, and then chiseled our way through the next bit and used the hand saw.  I found that if we attached a rope to the middle of the hand saw (which by the way is like 6 feet long) and had one person pulling the blades into the ice while the other person moved the saw up and down, it made the process not only faster, but also a little easier.  So we cut all the way around the square, and the huge piece of ice floated up to the surface.  We used the tongs to get it started coming out of the hole.  Then we hooked onto it with a rope and the snowmachine.  A combination of the snowmachine pulling and me on the tongs we were able to get it out of the hole.  C.O. estimates its weight at about a half a ton.  So it wasn’t easy.  We then baited our pot with some frozen fox meat, dropped the pot, and headed home.  By the time we got home, it was around 7:00 P.M., which made it a pretty long day.  I am now sitting here with fatigued muscles, and ready for bed.  Hopefully all of this work will pay off next weekend.  I’ll keep you posted.

Mystery Powders

I’m so happy it’s the weekend.  Friday’s always seem to go well, and we have a couple days off which is always nice.  Yesterday we shot some video for the news broadcast.  We are doing a mystery powder unit in the afternoon to address some science standards.  We decided to show the scientific process for the broadcast.  So we had a “crazy scientist” (one of our students in a wig and lab coat) doing an experiment with a few other kids.  It was all shot in front of the green screen.  We shoot each kid by himself or herself, and then digitally put them together in the computer.  I do have to show you a short clip of one of our in front of the camera.  He was putting the microphone on, and must have forgot the camera was on.   It’s pretty funny if you know him.  I’ll try to post some more video of him when he is in his prime.

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2008/01/chris.mp4 240 210]

Stebbins Native Dance Festival

I can’t believe it’s been a week since my last post.  Time does go fast.  As I left you I was flying to Stebbins to aid in broadcasting the native dance festival.  Stebbins has a very nice school, and a great gym for broadcasting from.  They have a massena kind of like a balcony that goes around 3/4 of the gym.  We set up our equipment up there.  It was a perfect vantage point.  We were unfortunately running into some compression problems with live channel (the software we broadcast with) so we decided not to use it at all.  We had two cameras set up.  A Canon GL2, and an s-video camera that John Concilus let us borrow.  Randy brought a 50 foot s-video cable, so we positioned the s-video camera on one end of the gym, and had the GL2 at half court.  All up in the massena.  We had both cameras plugged into a switch allowing us to switch between the video feeds.  The kids ran the cameras and the switch, broadcasting the signal to the rest of the schools in the district.  Since the signal was being sent through the video conferencing system, we were able to see one other site on our TV.  On Thursday it happened to be Shaktoolik.  While we were broadcasting the dancing.  I noticed there was a lady in Shaktoolik dancing along with the music and video she was getting from us in Stebbins. As we were getting settled in on Wednesday, I noticed that I forgot my sleeping pad.  We were sleeping in a classroom at the school, and the floor is really hard.  I started getting a headache that evening, and wasn’t able to sleep until sometime after 3:30 A.M.  So I was pretty tired the next day.  Thursday night I pulled out my parka and snow pants, and slept on top of those. With my parka, it’s like sleeping on a down feather bed.  Pretty comfy compared to the night before.  So I slept a lot better.  During the day the kids were practicing Native Youth Olympics.  They have some pretty cool competitions.  One of them they have a wiffle ball hanging from the basketball hoop.  You have to jump up and kick it with your foot.  The hard part is you have to land on the same foot you kicked it with.  The amazing thing is there are kids that can kick really high.  The world record is over 10 feet high, that’s above the rim.  One of the kids in Stebbins was kicking about a foot below the rim.  I wish I had some video to post on here.  Another one is set up the same way, but they have to jump up and kick the ball with both feet at the same time.  There is the wrist carry.  To people hold a stick between them, and a third hooks their wrist over the bar.  The two people pick the person up and carry them around the gym until they fall off.  There are many others.  I’ll see if I can find some video to show it off.I got my PHP and MySQL books in.  They are pretty big.  I am still in the very beginning right now, learning about the origins of PHP.  Apparently it was created by a Canadian who wanted a counter on his website to see how many people viewed his resume.  It is now the most widely used web-scripting program in the world.  I am hoping that it won’t be to far above my head. The exciting news for the week is the crab pot.  Erin, C.O. and myself went out last Sunday and cut a hole in the ocean ice to drop a crab pot down.  We borrowed a chainsaw from Henry, one of the elders in Brevig.  When we started cutting through the ice we didn’t hit water on our fist cut.  We cut out a big square, and cut it into a grid.  Then we used a chisel that C.O. made, and popped out the ice blocks.  On the second level we broke through.  Unfortunately the hole filled up with water, and we couldn’t use the chainsaw anymore.  It would have been under water.  So we had to use the chisel and there was still about 8 – 10 inches to go.  It was tough work. We chipped away a hole big enough to slide the pot in sideways and called it quits.  We were tired.  We went back out Monday and about 3 -4 inches had formed over the night.  We chiseled through that since it was at the surface.  There was still the layer of ice under water that we had left the day before.  So we chiseled that a little bigger and pulled up the pot to see.  One day isn’t near enough time, but we had caught a couple of starfish.  We are going to pull it again on Saturday.  If we don’t have anything again, I think we’ll move it further down the coast.  Rumor has it that people used to do some crabbing, but they would go a long ways down the coast towards Nome.  I’m hoping that we can do it closer.  One thing we have on our side now, is a little knowledge of how to get a hole cut in the ice.  It should go a little fast next time.

Heading to Stebbins

I am currently on my second flight for the day.  Sharosha, Swenson and myself are flying to Stebbins to broadcast the Eskimo dance festival, which is held there every year.  I am pretty excited.  It sounds like a great time to enjoy the local culture.  Sharosh and Swenson will be broadcasting the opening ceremony out to all the other schools in our district using “Live Channel” on an Apple Powerbook through a “Pollycom” unit over a videoconferencing stream.  All 14 other sites in our district will be able to watch.  We were planning to do a webcast allowing anyone in the world to watch.  The event kind of snuck up on us, and that just didn’t work out.  I’m kind of bummed.  That would have been really exciting to have that kind of coverage. It is a beautiful day out.  Not a cloud in the sky, the sun is shining down on white sparkling surroundings.  The sun is just off the horizon to the south, skimming the surface before it falls out of sight around 4:30 in the evening.  There are few places on this earth that are more spectacular (on the nice days).  We are flying in a Beechcraft B200, one of Bering Air’s newer airplanes.  They just flew it up to Nome after Christmas.  They have some pretty nice instruments in the dash of this one.  They say “Chelton” on them.  I have never heard of the company before, but the displays are in color, and show you what is in front of you.  For example, when we were taxing down the runway, it showed a digital runway in front of us, and sure enough when we got to the end, it showed the end of the runway on the display.  Once we were in flight, it showed a series of green boxes going off into the distance.  I assume to show the plot where to fly.  We ended up flying through all of them.  We are currently flying at about 190 Knots, and at 15,500 ft elevation.  We are flying to Unalakleet first, picking up a couple of people, and then heading to Stebbins. We were supposed to be leaving Brevig at 12:40 P.M. today, but the plane that was picking us up decided to head to Tin City, and then Wales before stopping off to get us.  So we didn’t make it into Nome until 3:00 P.M.  I didn’t eat lunch today planning on getting some Chinese food in Nome.  Since we had such a late departure, I had just enough time to run to the Wells Fargo in Nome and deposit a check.   Banking is few and far between in the bush. I was talking to Sharon (our SFA consultant from Washington) who was staying at our house the last couple of nights.   She has been to Tin City before.  It is located between Wales and Brevig on the Seward Peninsula.  It used to be a military station (I assume back in the cold war days) but now only two people man just a weather station.  There is a “road” between it and Wales.  While Sharon was doing an SFA site visit in Wales, she took a ride out there with a couple of the local teachers.  It is basically a deserted city.  There is a hotel, buildings all over the place.  They have a pretty big runway as I understand, and only two people live there. Sharon said she had a little tour from one of the guys that works there, and said that the hotel rooms look really nice with TV’s and the whole nine yards.  I think it would be pretty cool to take a look around.  It’s just amazing to me that they would just up and leave everything like that. C.O. got my snowmachine up and running again.  We pulled it into his shop a couple of days ago, and he worked it over a bit.  Charged the battery up and worked on the chain case.  It is now running like a dream.  We are hoping to cut a hole in the ice this weekend and drop a crab pot down.  If we are lucky in a week, we’ll have fresh king crab for dinner.  Well, we are starting our decent, so I had better get going.  I’ll post a little more after the day is over, hopefully with some pictures.

Who are these kids?

Lets see how today has gone…. Well there was kind of a shortage of students in class today.  We are only missing about 5 today, which is pretty normal for a Monday.  The curious thing is that a couple of the kids that are missing are ones that show up on a regular basis.  To counteract that we have a couple here to day that usually don’t show up.  Now I don’t know if this is happening because we are starting to apply some legal pressure to the families of students that aren’t showing up, or if they are finally getting bored with being at home and watching TV for the last 5 months, and have decided to try something new.  Regardless we have a couple of squirrels here to keep us on our toes today.  One of them is literally like flubber.  He is always bouncing around the room.  His eyes are darting around all the time.  He never seems to be paying attention, but when you ask the class a question, he seems to always have the perfect answer.  So whatever he is doing he is doing right.  He has been to school maybe 20 times all year.  Another student on the other hand has been here maybe 3 times all year.  He does however show up to all of the home basketball games.  I don’t know how he manages to make his way into the crowd, but he shows up anyway. The kids just got back from P.E.  They are always difficult to quiet down.  They supposed to read for 20 minutes.  A very difficult task.  Anything that involves quiet is pretty much impossible in their eyes.  After 10 minutes of continues reminding I have finally succeeded in producing a quiet reading environment. It is pretty stormy out today.  When the wind picks up the blowing snow causes visibility to decrease quite a bit.  At times you are not able to see farther then 10 – 15 feet.  Nonetheless, I just saw the kindergarten class walk out side with buckets.  Not sure what they are after, but I hope they don’t loose any of them.  Over Christmas break a guy in Wales was walking from one house to another in the village.  It was so stormy out that he lost his way, and was never found again.  It wasn’t like he had a long way to go either.  It was a matter of a hundred yards or so, in a very densely housed village. Pretty sad, but a serious warning for others to be careful when they are out in bad weather.It sounds like I will be heading to Stebbins this week for the Eskimo Dance Festival.  I am really excited.  I understand that it is a great learning opportunity.  There is not only dancing, but also classes teaching about the culture.  I will be taking a couple of students, and we will be broadcasting the events.  I’m not sure yet if we will be doing a webcast, or just a broadcast over the videoconferencing system.  If it is a webcast I will be sure to provide a link on my blog for anyone who would like to watch it.  I’ll know more in a couple of days.  I hope everyone’s week goes by quickly.

Storms outside so Im inside

The weekend has been very relaxing.  I have slept a lot and watched a little TV.   It has been storming out the last day or so.  The planes didn’t get in today.  It’s not too cold out, but the snow is blowing pretty hard, which makes visibility too bad for landing a plane.  Nothing too exciting this weekend to talk about.  I hope the week goes by quickly.  Monday always comes so quickly.  I’ll write more tomorrow.

Weekend Visitor

One of my students, Paul, is over visiting right now. He went and took a look at Erin’s treadmill. His face lit up when he saw Erin running on it. He then wanted to see me run on it as fast as it would go. So I put away my computer and went and showed him how fast the thing could go. He’s a pretty good kid most of the time. Weekends are nice 🙂

TGIF

I am looking forward to the afternoon.  We are watching the broadcast at 1:30 so the kids should really enjoy that.  After that we have early out.  We dismiss at 2:00.  After school we have some collaboration time.  I think we are having a broadcast meeting, so we can make the important decisions that make our broadcast go well.  WE have the basketball games tonight at 7:00.  Shishmaref girls are coming to play our girls.  I have a couple of kids videotaping the game.  I called Shishmaref and asked them if they wanted us to broadcast to them, but they said no.  So that was a bummer.  It would be a good experience for our kids.  I am looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

Eggs = Cornbread

I took a nap after school today.  Which turned out to be a terrible mistake.  Ask you can see by the time of this blog entry.  I also hadn’t eaten really anything after school, so when I was laying in bed trying to sleep, my stomach started to growl.  I tried to ignore it, but had a hankering for some corn bread.  I had some at the school a couple of days ago, and it was mighty tasty.  So I decided to get up and make some.  Oh by the way.  I was able to make the corn bread because we finally got some eggs in at the store.  You’d be surprised at how many recipes require eggs.  Anyway…  I got up, mixed up the corn bread and threw it in the oven.  Set the timer and went to read up on PHP and MYSQL.  Sounds fun doesn’t it??  Well that got sidetracked by some television.  Until the corn bread was finally finished.  I ate three large pieces while watching TV and washed it down with some cold water.  Quite satisfying.  I was still wide a wake (as I am now) and decided I should just buy the book I was reading on PHP.  You see I found a book that allowed you to download the first 4 chapters.  So I hopped onto Amazon and searched for the book.  They of course had it.  Price was about 35 dollars.  I started to read the reviews of the book and one of them said that the book was not worth the money.  It was very small, had spelling errors, and wasn’t too in-depth.  They said for a cheaper price it would have been perfect for beginners, but not in-depth enough for the price listed.  So I looked around a little more on Amazon and ended up spending 50 dollars on two books.  I am a little worried that this might be categorized under impulse buying late at night, but maybe I’ll learn something from this in the end. After throwing away some money I decided to check out Fark.  Always good for a story.  This is what prompted the blog entry this early morning.  I read this article, which made me feel really sad for the people involved.  Apparently some professor had been working on an instrument for 18 years that was put into the unmanned space shuttle that just recently reached Saturn.  The shuttle left in 1997 and the instrument was designed to collect data from the wind over there.  Well unfortunately the crew that put the instrument onto the shuttle back in 97 forgot to turn it on.  So the poor guy that worked on this thing kind of wasted 18 years of his life.  🙁  There’s a little more to the story if you want to read up on it, but can you imagine?  He seemed in pretty good spirits about the whole thing, which is good.  I can’t imagine the frustration he must be going through.  Well I just wanted to pass that story on.  I had better get to bed.

School and Alias

Another beautiful day out today.  The sunset was comparable to the sunrise of yesterday.  The kids are getting more unruly everyday it seems.  The morning started out alright, but we had had a couple students show up after first hour that usually don’t attend.  So not only do they not know the routine, but they are also the ones that are discipline problems.  So that changes the dynamic of the classroom tremendously.  I think I’ll try to shoot a little video tomorrow and get it posted on here.  I’ll see if I can get it compressed enough to fit on the server. Erin and I stayed at school for lunch, so we could have three of our kids serve detention.  After lunch went pretty well.  I worked with a couple of the high school students to prepare them for the broadcast tomorrow.  We wrote up the segways, and they are now tasked with rehearsing them for the live show.Lesa Meath is here visiting again.  She is the Alaska teacher mentor from Fairbanks that comes up every month or so, to help out first and second year teachers with whatever she can to hopefully retain more teachers in the state.  She was kind enough to take Erin and my class for the last hour of the day.  We were able to spend some much needed time assessing what we need to accomplish for the rest of the year.  So the last part of the day was great. After school Lesa and I sat down to discuss things that I wanted to work on for the rest of the year as well as things she could do to help to help me out with my goals.  After we finished our meeting, Erin and I headed home.  After some dinner, C.O. and AnnMaire came over to watch Alias.  I got an IM from Katie asking if I was going to watch it, and a call from Lyndi for the same reason.  So the Alias fever is breaking out.  Gotta go watch.  🙂