It was a quiet Sunday of the weekend before testing week. Not much was going on. I was thinking about making a few lesson plans, mostly for Monday and Friday. The testing tends to take up a good deal of the rest of the week. My bride had wandered in the direction of the school, ostensibly to get some wrapping paper for Michelle's birthday present. She had been gone kind of a long time for a trip for wrapping paper, but I am used to that. She tends to get stuck over there.
I heard quick steps on the stairs, and the door opened, and she said that I needed to get outside and see what I had done this time. She was laughing, which was a good thing, but I was a little curious about what I might have stepped into now, and how I might have stepped into it. I looked out of the window, and saw a pickup truck with a couple of young guys standing outside of it. They did not look much like locals, or the visitors that we might expect to get around here.
They turned out to be documentary filmmakers. From France. From French TV. A channel called France 3 has been running a show called Thalassa since 1975. The show documents the lives of people who live by and from the sea, or the water. One of them was the camera man and the other was the on-air reporter. The cameraman was named Laurent and the reporter was named Clement. The two of them have been working around the state of Alaska and the Northern Pacific in general, looking for material.
They had been out dog mushing, and had also been out on the river checking nets. They had been set up with a contact that had to drop out of whatever it was that was planned, and they ended up driving down the river from Bethel to see what was going on here. They recognized Chelsea from her picture. On my blog. The one that they had been reading. They thought that she wrote it, but she told them that I was the guilty party. We met and chatted for a while. The weather had warmed up a lot overnight, and it was a pleasant day for a visit. My wife the village dynamo set about to getting them connected with people and events that they could record. They set off to check out the village in more detail, and promised to return and visit the school on Monday. They did, and the kids seemed to find them very interesting. They did some more activities, and set off for other adventures on the evening jet from Bethel.
We also went over to Michelle's house for her birthday, and got invited over to Joe's later on for moose soup and a steam. We both had moose soup. I stayed around for the steam, which was a very pleasant one.
Today was the first day of testing, and my group was actually pretty good about the whole thing. Some of my friends out on the coast actually got work done, but my kids seem to require a little more watching. Maybe tomorrow. There are two more days of school-wide assessments, and then on Friday, a more limited group gets tested on science. Writing and math are next up in line. By Thursday, we will be down to six weeks of school left.
Tonight we bought our tickets to return to Michigan. We need to start packing up the house a little at a time so that we can get ready to move into the new housing in August. Summer is getting closer...
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