EZMart

I've covered Kotzebue restaurants recently, but to be fair I should throw in the convenience food. Believe it or not, this tiny, frozen town has a 24-hr convenience store.


If you get a craving for an expensive soda (or "pop"as it's called here), this is where you can go. There are two walls lined with drink coolers. As with everything here they're expensive, but sometimes there are products I've never seen before. Since when did sodas come in hybrid can/bottle containers?


For other priorities here such as keeping vehicles running or entertaining yourself in the middle of winter, just visit this shelf. There was actually a Smallville DVD, just a few episodes from season 5, but for $13! I noticed they were all a little dusty....


The convenience food includes the only sushi in town.


Sushi's not even close to a regular in my diet, but I've heard from some connoisseurs that it will do if you're desperate.


I have to say, this was only my 2nd brief visit to EZMart. On warm days it seems to be kind of a hangout for the younger crowd, and it's right across the street from the grocery store anyway.


Granted the grocery store isn't open in the middle of the night, but that would have to be some craving for a "pop" to get me into boots, quilted overalls, gloves, hat and scarf to walk several blocks to get to it!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Bush Brawl 2010

Perhaps one of the most foreign concepts to me here in Arctic AK, is that kids don't play football in school. It was bad enough in Miami, where middle schools don't have teams and kids wait until they're in high school to play, but NO football...! I don't follow pro or college teams (of any sport for that matter), but having grown up in Central Texas with a dad who refereed a brother who played, and participating myself through band, it's an inherent part of childhood from my perspective.

Well, maybe that's what kids from this area would say about wrestling. It's a big deal here, and they start them early. I'm not sure of the dates that mark wrestling season, but I'm guessing we're well into it. Each fall Kotzebue school hosts the Bush Brawl, a tournament for schools in the whole area including Bethel, Nome, and Barrow. It's a big deal. The gym fills up and everyone goes to watch.


I don't have a clue about wrestling. I just cheered when everyone else did but probably groaned more so as I watched what seemed to me an unforgivable invasion of personal space and impossible movements of appendages and their joints. There aren't many other options for community interaction outside of work, though. The atmosphere is fun.


This tournament included elementary on up. The kids fly in from local villages and other towns - for this and other sporting events - and spend their nights like I do when I go to the villages, on the floor in a sleeping bag.


From what I could tell, Kotzebue kids did well last night. I was hoping to do so well with the raffle! They raffle off a snow machine each year as a fundraiser for wrestling. I've bought a few tickets the last two years from coworkers who have wrestlers, but no such luck. I missed the drawing last night, but I hear it went to a 7th grader.


Let it be known that wrestling is not just for boys here. In this picture, the blue suit is a girl. There were quite a few girl wrestlers involved. I think this was the only one in high school, and she lost quickly, but good for her for trying. I remember being little and telling my parents I was going to find a way to play football...see how that worked out.

I felt bad for some of the kids who left the mat crying. You don't have a whole team to lose with you, and it's not like a race where even if you don't win you might not be last (sorry last person); you're just out there for everyone to watch you lose. I think that could be daunting for a kid. Then again, what do I know about wrestling!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Uutuku

Here it is, my guilty pleasure & restaurant 4 of 4 -- Uutuku. It means "tiny" in the Iñupiaq language.


It might have started off tiny, but I'm fairly certain it keeps a solid flow of business today. I say it's a guilty pleasure because I do more business with them than the waistline or the wallet should. They know me by name. Actually, they know me by name at Empress too. I like them both for slightly different dishes and different times of day.


Notice the hours? Uutuku's niche is the late night crowd. I think I got started with them during the summer when I work much later hours. Then, their French fries hooked me. Everyone has their favorite style of fries, and for me, Uutuku's is the best in town. Another hit with me is their chicken fried rice.


Since it's delivery or pick-up only, there's the styrofoam waste that always makes you feel guilty - especially here where there is no community recycling of any kind. It's also on the pricy end, and you might have noticed my two favorite items were fried, so I try to limit myself. Try.

I mentioned that they know me by name, but that's not such a telling thing necessarily. It is, after all, a small place. Also, the Koreans who run these restaurants are extremely hard working and customer service oriented - something you don't find in many other places here!


This is the inside of Uutuku, which as you can see is a little store that sells convenience foods and odds and ends.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Snow Here to Stay

After a couple of days of steady snowfall, today was clear and just plain beautiful. There was some evidence of snow melt around town, but I think what's on the ground is here to stay. It looks like there are a few sunny days ahead, but temperatures are cool and more snow is forecast for next week.

The snow makes such a difference. Just throw on a layer of snow and even a pile of junk can look pretty! The whole town looks a little softer and cleaner.



Kids have been enjoying the snow, and it was just in time for their time off for inservice the last two days. I came home to this almost snowman outside my apartment building yesterday. I'm assuming it was made by the kids that often play in our parking lot.

Today after work I went down to the beach and got a few pictures.


This spot overlooks the beach and is where we had our "Camp Willow" just over two months ago.


The beach is covered by a layer of snow.


The beach on the south end of town faces a deeper, less protected body of water, so you don't see sheets of ice yet, but parts of the beach build up a berm of ice chunks that float up at high tide.



Ice with a layer of snow. The snow that was coming down yesterday afternoon had huge flakes. I tried taking a picture on my way home from work, but you can't really see how big they are.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Bison Street

Featuring restaurant 3 of 4 available in Kotzebue...

Yes, it is located on Bison Street at the intersection with 3rd Avenue. This place is pick-up or delivery only. I have to say I haven't bought food from here very often. It has a similar menu to Empress with prices a little cheaper on some dishes, but I haven't been impressed with the quality.


One thing about these places is they have a postman's ethic for food delivery (actually much better than the post office here in town!). They'll deliver in some gnarly weather...you get to know the cars and see them when it's snowing and blowing outside.

Bison Street's niche is with pizza. It's the only place in town to order pizza. Your only other option is frozen pizza from the store which, considering price and quality, may be the way to go.

There is, reportedly, another way to order pizza, but not here in town. In Nome there's a place called Airport Pizza, and they'll take a phone order and send it to you on a flight coming to Kotz. I've never tried it out but may have to one day for 2 reasons, the novelty of it and because they have very good pizza.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Smoky

This is my 10 year old cat, Smoky. She's a native of a South Florida trailer park and has travelled 3 states with me.


Unfortunately for her, Kotzebue is a dog's world. Many people here have dogs. In fact, of all the people I work with, there's only one other person with no dog.



Smoky used to have a dog, a dobie named Canela, but she tolerated her at best. Although Smoky has all of her defenses, there's no good place for her to take shelter here, so she stays inside.

I don't see many cats around, but there are some. Earlier this year, during the summer, I think, I saw this flyer at the post office.


What a coincidence! My neighbor noticed it first, and having seen my Smoky as well, did a double-take. Some time later, another colleague noticed and contacted me to see if it was my Smoky. Shortly thereafter, another one did the same. Smoky may be outnumbered by dogs, but she has folks looking out for her!

I don't think this cat was ever found, kinda sad. My Smoky has used a few of her own lives and caused me some grief along the way. I've told her, though, that she'd better mind her Ps and Qs because there is no vet here in town! From time to time a vet from the Anchorage area comes to town and sets up shop for a few days. You can find out about it the same place the lost cat flyer was posted and where most news is announced...bulletin boards outside the post office.



The other main bulletin board is at the grocery store. Otherwise, news is announced on the radio -- KOTZ.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Bayside

The other sit-down restaurant in Kotzebue is Bayside.


It's considered the fancier one. It's bigger and has real wooden tables and padded booths. It has Wi-Fi, potted plants all around and huge paintings on the walls. Of course, the paintings are a mixture of nature/wildlife and some half covered Greco-Roman type scenes.


The nice diggs have a price. About everything on the menu (which is similar to all the others except that no one else has Thai like Empress) is a few dollars more expensive. Oh, and Bayside covers breakfast, which none of the others do. They offer breakfast all day long too. Today I had a Mexican burger, which I had never tried before.


Apparently Mexicans add a fried egg and the requisite jalapeños to their burgers!

I took a picture of the inside of the place, but with the low light and my trying to be discreet, it turned out blurry.


However, you can see the seating which is classic...office chairs!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Empress

There are 4 restaurants in town: Empress, Bayside, Uutuku, and Bison Street. They all do carryout and delivery, but only the first two have a place to sit down and eat. They all are owned and run by Koreans. They all have similar menus with some specialties.

Empress is the more casual looking sit down joint with about 7 or 8 old Dairy Queen type bench booths. They have a big screen TV, and they may have the largest selection of ice-cream treats. They recently brought a Thai cook up from Los Angeles and have added some good Thai food to the menu. Empress is open for the noon to night crowd every day of the week. One of their delivery vehicles is a hummer!



Here's the Empress. I'll add the others later.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Front Street

On the map it's labeled Shore Avenue, but everyone here calls the street that runs along the sound Front Street. There's even a big book called Front Street Kotzebue that sells for $50 in our bookstore that's full of black and white photographs of the street in different seasons over the years. (I would really like the book, but the only two page spread in the whole thing is a picture of the dump. What kind of statement is that?)

I wish I had taken some pictures along the street myself when I first got here or even early this last summer before the construction began. Right now the street's about halfway through a facelift. I believe the reconstruction project is scheduled to be completed next summer.




This is looking southwest down the street. Over the years, Front Street had eroded, and what was the functional (dirt) road was creeping into the yards of the houses and businesses along it. The project includes widening it and building a seawall to avoid further erosion.



This picture is looking northeast. Earlier this summer there would have been no street where you see the trucks. The project also includes some pull-out observation spots (since this is such a heavily traveled & toured spot?!) The lights are of course new. I'm not sure what else will be done.


Here you can see the seawall. Where I'm standing there used to be a dirt ramp down to the ice that people used to get to the snow machine trails and that I used to get out on the ice to ski. I'm hoping they still leave a spot because you can see there's a big drop from the wall to the water.

Speaking of the water, can you see the ice in it? This time of year is called freeze-up. Here's a little video I put together (in about 5 minutes so don't expect much) about it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Glitchy Indeed!

Regarding technology, Selawik was not the smoothest trip. I already wrote about how I lost a whole blog post (of course maybe that was best being that it was at the beginning of my trip when things were a little more bleak...maybe it wasn't a very positive post).

Then, Thursday afternoon, my new iPod seemingly died on me (read "panic")! So, I had often run the battery on my old iPod all the way down. When it gets low, the battery symbol turns red and gives a low battery notice starting at about 20% battery power I think. If you ignore it, at some point it just shuts off and won't do anything. However, when you put it on the charger, it acknowledges that it has been plugged in and is receiving power.

Wednesday night I had fully charged my new iPod because I use it in some programs to play a song or sounds. I didn't use it much, so it should have had plenty of power. I turned it on to check email at the end of the day. I didn't notice how much of the battery indicator was showing, but it was definitely still green. I set it down for 5 - 10 minutes, and when I picked it back up, it wouldn't turn on, no sign of life. I plugged it in to the charger for a while, no sign that it was charging. I fiddled with it for a while that evening and nothing. I concluded that for some freakish reason my iPod died. Disappointed and bored (all of my entertainment - books, music, podcasts, social media...were on it), I texted my brother about it. He mentioned charging, but that didn't seem to be the problem. A school district employee who was staying there also mentioned that hers had discharged so much as to be nonresponsive before also. I charged for a while but later gave up and went to bed.

On Friday I punched the power button a few more times - nothing. Then, strangest thing, as I'm back at the office moving my things from my work computer bag to my backpack, I touch the iPod and it's showing the low battery-need-to-charge symbol. Now, with just a little bit of charging here at home, it seems to be working normally - *sigh*

I'll investigate more this weekend but am relieved and happy to have it back for the moment. I'm disappointed, though, because I missed some photo ops in Selawik and on my flight back. The best was of our copilot - the pilot's 4-year-old son. He was the best in-flight entertainment around!

I'll throw in some of just a few pictures I took in Selawik on Wednesday evening. Keep in mind that Selawik is situated in a wetland. They have an elaborate system of boardwalks all around the village that they use for walking and driving Hondas. They're all wood (in a place with no trees), and some parts of it are in better repair than others. My pictures don't do it justice - it's really a pretty big system of boardwalks.



There are 2 rivers between the airport and school. This is the boardwalk over the bigger one.







Like I said, some parts are in better repair than others.




In the next one I was on the bridge trying to get a picture of the smoke coming from the dump. Tuesday evening someone set fire to their trash in the dump. It spread around the whole dump and was still smoking when I left on Friday.




I think there are some firebugs in Selawik. My first summer here they were building a new building for the Friends Church. They finished and dedicated it some time in March, I think. I'm not sure if it was even a month later that someone burned the new building down.



The back of the school.



They have windmills too.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Selawik Summarized

I'm back in Kotz, and it's always a good feeling to look back on a village trip and all the work you accomplished. On that note, I recently got to tally program numbers for a whole fiscal year which reflects my work. The year starts October 1, so all the reports to summarize and justify work done during the last year are being compiled this month. This is my first full fiscal year showing all of my program work. After I entered everything a week or so ago, I took a shot of the summary or tally.



These are just school visits and don't include classes going to the visitor center or all of the summer programs. The first number is the number of participants. The second is a count of how many programs were given. I think I can say I've been working hard!

Back to Selawik, I gave 19 programs across 4 days, 2 of those being travel days. Each program is about an hour long. I haven't tallied the number of students, but I believe Selawik is second only to Kotz in size. Most grades in Kotz have 3 classes per grade level where Selawik only has 1, so the class sizes are actually larger. Here are a couple of pictures I was able to take. I get caught up in the program and don't tend to take many pictures, so it's not much. The 1st grade teacher did give me a cd of pics he took, but I haven't seen them yet. PreK, K, and 7th grade teachers also took pictures. Maybe they'll send me some.



These are highschoolers chopping up plants to make medicinal oils. The best thing was to hear one of the girls say it was more fun than she thought it would be...words not often heard from a teen!




After they followed the recipes and cut up a mixture of plants and added some oil (like olive oil), I heated them for several hours in a water bath. The next day they strained out the plants, put their medicinal oil in a little plastic bottle I had for each one of them and made a label with cool stickers I had made with magazines and a label maker.



Here I was getting GPS units ready to use with a large class of challenging 7th graders. It's a feat to teach a large group how to use a GPS in an hour, let alone this one, but we did it. I had already done a program with them, so I went in like a drill sargent barking orders and taking no nonsense, but it allowed us to stay on task, finish the activities, and get all of the units turned back in without incident. I had gone out the evening before and stashed several marked rocks all around the school. Then I entered the coordinates of one of the rocks in each of the units. Their last activity was to locate the rock and give it to me in exchange for a prize. They did well and liked it. The funniest thing to me, though, is how much they complain about the cold. You can't give in to their whining or you'd never get them to really learn the GPS. I just give them a hard time about my being able to take the cold better and I'm not even from the Arctic. (It's not even really cold yet, no snow on the ground even.)

Selawik presented some challenges, and I'm glad it's behind me for this year, but I think it turned out well, and I have some helpful notes to self for next year.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Glitchy Selawik

Ok, last night I spent a good chunk of time writing a blog entry, and it didn't work. I'm planning to be more brief before I try it out tonight. The summary... I'm in Selawik, day 2 of 4. I have my new iPod with me and was actually fortunate to run into the district's IT tech out here because he was able to get my new device logged on the school's wireless network, and I'll be able to use it at all the schools. I knew some of the apps don't work on the school's network, but it looked like my blogging app was working last night. So I wrote up an entry, added some pictures (because I can do that now with my iPod camera!). However, when I hit "publish," my entry disappeared. Disappointing! I tried to go to "manage blog" to find it, but that just shut the whole app down. So, now I'm on the blogger site through Safari; we'll see how it goes.

Well, I can only post 1 picture at a time, grr. Here goes, hopefully it will post.

Test Drive

Ok, this is what I've been waiting for...iPod with camera for instantaneous blogging (at least when I have wi fi)

To date, if I wanted to include photos in the blog post - and let's face it, that's what everyone wants - I had to have my camera with me, transfer photos to computer (which meant I had to wait 'till I was home if I wasn't), and wait for my slow processor and website to upload the photos to blogger. There have been numerous times that i just gave up or ditched the blog because the news was old by the time i git to it.

Now, with the iPod 4, I can take pictures, start writing my post, and publish as soon as I have wi fi -- all from the same, super portable device. So you see, it's a sacrifice that I'm making for you, my host of readers!

I read the reviews before, and I know that substantial camera quality was sacrificed for device size (it's very slim), but I think the quality will be good enough to get the idea across and will be a worthwhile tradeoff.

This post is my test drive. I got my device all set up today while I stayed inside and read. It was the perfect day for it being cold, drizzly & gray. So, while it was syncing away, I curled up next to Smoky to read some more of Cold by Bill Streever (appropriate title, no?). It's a very good book that discusses the phenomenon of cold through science, history, literature, and personal anecdotes. Friends & family, let me know if you'd like to read it; I'll send it to you when I'm done. Anyway, here's a picture of the book...taken on this iPod late in the evening, not with the best lighting, but that's what I had to work with at the moment. I'll try to find something better soon, although tomorrow promises to be just as miserable.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

Noorvik - Take 3

I'm feeling like a regular in Noorvik, AK.  I just came back from 3 enjoyable days in the school.  Programs went well -- a relief since I'm overextended right now -- and people were friendly.  It's always fun when there's also something extra going on while I'm visiting a school.  Noorvik was where the 2010 Census was kicked off.  Census dignitaries came out and were hauled around in dogsled.  The town shared meals of caribou stew, muktuk, and other traditional foods.  Media personalities put their gloves on.... 

Mike Burns, Principal Doyle Horton, Asst. Principal Sherrie McKenzie

It just so happened that while I was there, Mike Burns, the Deputy Regional Director of the Census, was there to present awards to the city of Noorvik and the school for their help in raising interest and kicking off the census.  Now that Noorvik is back in the business of Eskimo dancing any event will, of course, include a sample.  There are more kids involved since last November, and many of the kids look like they've been doing it forever.  Here's a little snippet.

(Just a note on the video, it's taking HOURS to upload.  I had it going last night and woke up to a message that the server timed out, so we'll see how it goes today.  I also have it uploading to my Flickr account, so if it doesn't upload directly through this site, I'll link to Flickr.)

The assembly took place after my last program; I was just waiting for the plane to arrive.  The principal let the kids keep practicing for the half hour between the end of the assembly and the end of the school day, so I stayed to watch them practice.  By this time, I had been to all the classes, and the kids were very friendly (most remembered my having been there last year).  One girl saw me taking pictures and wanted to do some photography of her own, so I let her take the camera.  Here's some of what she took.

Noorvik Aqqaluk School - Eskimo Dancing

Girl wearing traditional "atikluk"