Well, we have had a very interesting last couple of weeks weather wise. A couple of weeks ago the tundra started turning a beautiful rustic orange with hits of brown, meaning our short "fall" was here. I also saw that our fire weed that blooms from the bottom up was all bloomed out. The tale says that once the flowers reach the top, summer if over. Well, summer is definitely over here. Last weekend we had some thunderstorms and hail. Yep, you heard me...thunderstorm. Well, let me say there was only a couple of rumbles, but I will have you know that EVERYONE was surprised by the sound of thunder. I've never heard thunder in Alaska and the natives were saying that it usually doesn't thunder in September. I was pretty excited to witness it though. And then there was snow....
This last Wednesday I got on a bush plane with the other elementary teachers in Mountain Village to attend an all district inservice in Hooper Bay. The elementary teachers were in Hooper and all the middle school and high school teachers from the district were in Mountain Village. So, Ben stayed here with the dog and I went to a village I had never been to before. Hooper Bay is a coastal village, so I got to see and fly over the Bering Sea. I had heard that it is always windy in Hooper Bay, but man oh man is it ever windy. We had a pretty smooth flight over to Hooper, but when we got closer and closer it started to get really windy. You can pretty much feel every wind gust from the plane. Anyway, as we were about to land we were making a turn to head towards the run way and at one point I could see the ground on one side and the sky on the other. Not because of the wind, but that's just how we were turning to land. We arrived and some of the newbies faces were looking a little green. There were times where they were holding on to their seats. I was probably the same way when I first came out, but you eventually get used to bush flying. In fact, I would much rather fly on a bush plane than a big commercial plane. I get nervous on those planes now every time the seat belt sign comes on and it always takes FOREVER to land. On Bush planes you can always see the ground, you are never too far up and it's just fun. :)
Poor Ben had inservice on Thursday and Friday for high school teachers and then he also had a tech inservice on Saturday and Sunday. Ben is the lead tech guy at our school if y'all didn't know. I'm glad Ben is the tech guy because I"m probably the least techy person out there. One of these days I will learn how to use a smartboard, but as for now, I will continue to use my doc-cam. My inservice went pretty well. I didn't learn a lot of new things as a lot of what they were teaching us was way too hard for our Kindergartners. So, all of the Kinder teachers just kind of collaborated our own ideas. It was a lot of fun to see some of the teachers I hadn't seen since Ben and I first got to Mountain Village.
On Friday, the day that we were supposed to fly home, Hooper Bay was going through what seemed to be blizzards every couple of hours and would only last about 5-10 minutes. One minute we would look outside and the sun would be shining and the next minute we would look out and see whiteout conditions. Well, guess what....we flew right through it. :) The teachers who were nervous on the way to Hooper were definitely a lot more nervous on the way home. Like the weather in Hooper, we flew through white out conditions, bumped around a little, flew through rain, sleet, and sunshine. It was like flying through all four seasons in one 30 minute flight.
No comments:
Post a Comment