LOST

All this time-traveling stuff has officially blown my mind. That said, here are my (somewhat muddled) thoughts going into next week's season 5 finale.

1. The Jughead plot is not going to work. Either it won't detonate, or the detonation won't accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish.

2. Sawyer and Juliette aren't gone for good. They were on their way off the island, but I can't believe that they actually make it somewhere else. Those other people on the submarine get back to the "real world," but I can't believe Sawyer and Juliette are completely out of the picture.

3. Locke has gone off his rocker. I think Ben and Richard are going to take care of him, like kill him or something. I've never been a fan of Locke, and now he seems especially menacing and crazy.

4. Richard Alpert has something up his sleeve. Maybe Richard is Jacob?

5. The cataclysmic incident caused by release of large amounts of electromagnetic energy isn't going to kill everybody. The Dharma Initiative and the Others are still around in the 1990's, because that's when Ben kills them all. So, I don't see why Faraday felt the need to evacuate the island. But a hydrogen bomb explosion. . . well, it would at least give a lot of people cancer and radiation poisoning and cause birth defects in the future. None of which we see in the future Others. Maybe the hydrogen bomb explosion is going to happen, and that's what always happened, and the island is "course-correcting" as it goes along. After all, that's what Eloise told Desmond back in some earlier season: "History always course-corrects," and that's why Charlie had to die.

Whatever happens, it's going to be epic. Setting us up for an epic season 6. Or maybe they're heading for the final scene of the series being a massive shoot-out with everybody dead at the end.

Oogrook

Melody and I heard early this afternoon that there was someone butchering a seal down near the store. We went down to see. They were outside the house of the mom of the guy who had killed it. We watched her (Helga) cut off the meat she wanted. The guy who killed it said he would probably give most of it away because it was the first one and they would catch more seals (and belugas, too!).



Just from watching her, I could tell she had been carving up seals and other animals for most of her (long) life. She was so quick to find where the bones where and where to best carve out the slabs of meat.

Helga taught us the Eskimo word for seal: oogrook. There were a couple of garbage bags of blubber sitting on the guy's sled. Helga and Ruth (another elder who was standing there talking with us) told us that they would put the blubber in a bucket and just let it sit. It would render into seal oil. Seal oil is what they used to use to light their lamps, and they still use it in a lot of recipes. We also learned that seal intestines are a delicacy.



Apparently, they scrape the meat part away from the skin of it and boil it up. Talk about using every part of the animal! :-)

Crabs

Hard as it may be to believe, I've never tasted crab before. That being said, I was excited when Melody bought two crabs from a couple here in the village. They had just come back from their crab pot set out on the edge of the ice, and we got fresh, still-alive crabs. Melody had to go back up to the school right away, so we put the crabs in a box to cook later.



The big one in the bottom is upside down, and the other one looks like he's about to make a break for the exit. They were scrambling around a lot for the first hour or so. I thought they were going to get out and terrorize the apartment. At one point, the right-side up one managed to get himself halfway out of the box.

When Melody got back a couple of hours later, we boiled some water. The crabs were still moving a little bit, but were mostly dead. She picked one of the them up and almost got pinched as she dropped it in the water. As the steam from the boiling water hit the crab, he started scrambling and she dropped him to avoid a painful pinch. Good thing he was over the pot of water already.

We did the same thing with the second one while we were eating the first one. Fresh crab dipped in warm butter is good, I've decided. Cracking it open didn't work too well, but scissors worked perfectly. Just thinking about it, I think I need to go eat a couple of crab legs that are chilling in the fridge just waiting to be ingested. :-)

A Strange Sight

Last night, I was sitting in the living room and I heard something that sounded like a plane. Now, planes are not uncommon, and we've had plenty of them lately. The Iditarod Air Force (bush pilots that volunteer their planes and their time to shuttling supplies, people, and dogs to different destinations during the Iditarod) has been flying in and out and around the area for the few days. The sound didn't fade away, though, as planes do. I looked out our living room window and this is what I saw:


A helicopter landed out on the ice. My first thought was, "Iditarod Air Force." I had seen a helicopter fly over a couple of times from my classroom window on Tuesday, although I hadn't remembered it being such an ugly brown-ish/green-ish/gray-ish color. I knew that a couple of teams had scratched (dropped out of the race) in Elim, and maybe a helicopter has more room to haul out dogs and sleds. Of course, I wondered why it was parked out on the ice so far away from the village, airstrip, and/or checkpoint, but whatever. I saw a handful of people climb out and go across the ice towards the village. The helicopter just sat there. After about an hour, I saw two more people climb out and head towards the village.

I called the only other teacher that I knew hadn't taken off for spring break - he always knows what's going on. He told me that it was a National Guard helicopter. One of the mushers is a member of the National Guard. They recruited him to run the Iditarod; he's like their poster boy. The National Guard people were taking pictures and video of him at each checkpoint. That definitely explained the ugly color of the chopper. After about 3 hours, I saw the people come back, load up, start the chopper and turn themselves around:


They headed west. . .


And disappeared around the edge of the cape towards White Mountain, the next checkpoint. . .


See the tiny black dot in the middle of the picture? That's the helicopter as it went for the corner and disappeared. Keep in mind that the beautiful sunset in these pictures is happening after 9:00 at night.

Iditarod

Knowing that the Iditarod front-runners were nearing the coast and the Unalakleet checkpoint, I was keeping a close eye on the current standings through last weekend. Sometime Monday morning, I saw that Lance Mackey had gotten to the Koyuk checkpoint. Koyuk is the checkpoint before Elim. Once a musher leaves Koyuk, it's 6-7 hours to Elim. I kept an eye on the standings all afternoon, but he was still chilling in Koyuk. Melody and I had decided to go and see him come through, but I didn't want it to be too late of a night. Mackey didn't leave Koyuk until almost 9 that night. That would put him in here around 3 in the morning. I decided to go to bed for a few hours. Less than 4 hours later, Melody and I got up and got dressed. It takes a lot of time to get bundled up to go outside into a wind chill of -30. Melody, Anna (next door neighbor and fellow teacher) and I headed down to the fire station (where the checkpoint is located) about 2:30. It was a beautiful, albeit cold, night. Clear sky full of stars. I've never seen so many stars in my entire life. We heard that Mackey was still at Moses Point, 10 miles out, and wasn't moving. He had probably stopped to rest his dogs and take a break from the 20-30 mph winds. We decided that standing around outside sounded like a bad idea, so we headed back. Melody and I sat down to watch the end of Night at the Museum, which we had started over the weekend, but hadn't finished. Just after 4, we bundled back up again. We got to the checkpoint just minutes after Lance Mackey got there. We watched him spread straw to bed down the dogs and take their booties off. (Dogs wear booties to protect their feet and help keep them warm.) He started to heat up dog food as the vets did their jobs checking the dogs. Melody, Anna, and I didn't stay long; it was really cold and really early in the morning. We got back about 5.

I didn't go back to bed. I knew that if I did, I would be more groggy than if I didn't. I just took a shower and got to school at about the normal time: 6:30. I had a lot to get done, but it was hard to stay awake. I was sitting at my desk writing my lesson plans for next week, and I couldn't keep my eyes open. I had to get up and walk around the halls a couple of times just to keep myself awake. I knew it was going to be a long day. The bell rang, school started as normal, and I hoped the morning would go quickly. We started hearing rumors that the whole school was going down to see Mackey and his team. Nobody tells me anything, so I just tried to ignore the noise in the hall and started our calendar time, as usual. Just as we got done, Funny (the secretary) said that the whole elementary end was going down to the checkpoint. We got the kids bundled up, and the whole elementary, along with miscellaneous junior high and high school students headed down to the checkpoint. (I think the older students were the only students there that day, due to the fact that our boys basketball team was at the state tournament in Anchorage, and it was the day before spring break, and an early release day.) Mackey was still there, and our kids got to talk to him. He was eating and drinking coffee and resting, knowing that he had a huge lead and the push to White Mountain was going to be a long one. He is such a nice guy. As we all crowded inside the building, he said, "Wow, you must have brought all the kids from the area. Elim doesn't have this many people!" He joked with the kids and talked with them, and I could tell some of them were really inspired. While they are enamored with TV/movie celebrities like other kids, these guys have a whole different set of celebrities to emulate - and I must say that I would rather they emulate mushers than some of our current TV/movie celebrities.

The rest of the school day passed just like any other day right before a major break. Not a lot of academics, but we got some work done. I managed to get a phonics lesson in, and we did some work with the St. Patrick's Day book that we had read earlier in the week. It was an early release day for the students, but we teachers had to put in a full 7 hour work day. I can't say I got a lot done that afternoon. I was tired! For those of you who know me, I'm an 8-hour-a-night type of girl. I don't function too well on much less than that. I guess now I know that I can survive on less than 4 hours, but my mind was pretty foggy.

Adventures

Melody's (new roommate) idea is have an adventure every day. Saturday's adventure was cross-country skiing and that awesomeness carried over into Sunday. Monday's adventure was getting to school. It had drifted Sunday night pretty bad and we couldn't get the main door open (again). We went out the apartment door and were blazing trail through waist-deep snow, laughing hysterically the whole way. Tuesday's adventure was trying this "Jalapeno Kippered Red Salmon" that Melody had gotten in Nome (as a gift from someone). It looked gross, but tasted like cold salmon. It really wasn't even all that slimy. Today's adventure was crazy. There is a flagpole outside teacher housing and there is a substantial drift between our door and the pole. Not to mention the hazardous steps. First one to touch the flagpole and get back to the door gets. . . um. . . eternal bragging rights? Picture this: I'm in pajama pants and tennis shoes, she's in jeans and tennis shoes, no coats or snow pants, and we're making a break for this drift that's taller than me. I won, but totally biffed it on the steps coming back. She fell in the drift when she lunged for my feet coming back because I was ahead. It was the best thing ever. Pictures will be posted to Facebook soon. I wonder what tomorrow's adventure will be?

More Obama and Education

I read Obama's speech about education today. It's good on paper. Everything he says about where we're falling short is absolutely true. His plans sound good in theory and his "inspired" remarks draw wild applause. They won't work in practice, though.

That's exactly where No Child Left Behind fell short. It was heavy on solid theory, but fell apart on implementation. It's like they're trying to use a business model for school reform. That's not going to work. Schools are different from traditional businesses in so many ways.

My suggestion would be for the president to put together an advisory board of sorts with plain, ordinary teachers from a cross-section of society - urban, rural, inner-city, suburban - and actually listen to their experience. That's where the workable ideas are going to come from.