Yeesh!

Just one of those days best forgotten...I was there all day, but I don't know what I accomplished for the life of me. Who knows, maybe something will come back someday and surprise me. I'm not really all mad or anything, it just seemed kind of futile all day. I kept swimming upstream all day, but the stream was too strong.

Oh, well, tomorrow is another day. This will not get me down like it did last week, and the week is flying along, and there's chili and guacamole for dinner. Yummy and warm on kind of a raw evening. The weather came over from Russia last night with lots of wind and rain.

Tomorrow starts moose season, and some of my boys will be gone hunting. I hope that they are successful. It is very important for subsistence. A family can live for a long time on a moose.

Now that I think of it, I did get some interesting responses to the project that we have been doing in Ak Studies. Maybe it wasn't a total loss, after all...

Sunday Sunday

Just mostly lesson planning today. Trying to build up an extra bank of lessons in hand. I'm going to Anchorage this weekend for a getaway. Labor Day is coming up, and we have no kids until Wednesday the following week. I want to get ahead so I can spend next weekend looking at pretty scenery and stuff like that. I might want to take another cruise or something.

The sun is sneaking out here. The amount of available daylight is beginning to shrink quickly. In the week from last Wed. to this Wed., sunrise moves about 20 minutes later in the morning. I assume that trend will continue and accelerate through the winter solstice.

I exchanged instant messages with another member of my training cohort today. He seems to be doing well, and it was good to hear from him. The reporter who interviewed me in June wants to do a followup. Maybe when I'm in Anchorage...

Oh, and Another Thing...

For all of you who have asked, the Buddha is quite well, thank you. He likes to go for walks over to the airport, although his little legs sometimes get tired. He got quite excited last week when he saw some sled dogs being trained. They are leashed to four-wheelers when there is no snow. He got right up on his toes, and started trotting himself. I may enter him in a toy sled pulling contest, if there is such a thing...

Busy

Worked on grading and some classroom tweaks yesterday. Today is lesson planning. Some kids will be gone moose hunting this week. Not sure how to adjust for that. hmmmm...

The Weekend Is Mine!!! (sort of)...

MMMMM...Saturday morning.....coffee...breakfast....catching up on the phone w/friends and loved ones...oh, s---, LESSON PLANS???? Oh well, everything is relative, temporary, and fleeting. The sun is out, despite the weather forecast that says mostly cloudy, and it's a nice day for a stroll to the post office. I went to steam with the fellas last night, and that was fun for sure. We had a new visitor (at least to me), and he proved to be an extremely lively conversationalist (a change of pace) and very funny. Post-steam, yummy tacos...a good night's sleep...mmmm..

Now it's morning, and time to deal with the world. We need to have a meeting of the high school language arts department (two people) to discuss the SBA reading and writing scores and how we can address some fundamental shortcomings in student understanding. I need to write lesson plans in the next two days for the upcoming week. At some point this week, I will want to plan for the short week after Labor Day, because I will be in Anchorage over the holiday weekend. My first focus is going to be how to place all of this in some sort of organizational framework. For my first week here, I was doing a lot of reacting. Last week, I started to try to get out ahead of events, with better success as the week went on. My next goal is to sit back and come up with a long range set of targets and goals.

It is a challenge, but it is one that is beginning to interest me, not intimidate me. I see that as a hopeful sign. This might turn out to be fun after all...

Well, well...

It's Thursday night. I am tired and want a short nap. Another good day. Halfday w/kids tomorrow. Now I know why teachers look tired sometimes. Sometime in the next couple of days, I'm sure that I'll have something more substantive to say, but right now, I just want those folks who follow along to know that things are ok...

Mildly Curious...

As to what the rest of the week will bring...the VPO and VPSO (I'll explain later) were out enforcing curfew tonight. There have apparently been a lot of kids out late partying and coming into school late, or hung over, or many other delightful types of altered. Some behavioral pathologies definitely exist...