Remember Daniel-San, best block, no be there.
Daniel-san, karate do, one side road, you safe. Karate do not, other side road, you safe. Karate guess so, you like grape in middle of road. You squish.
Iiiiiich Daniel-san. Never keep woman waiting.
funny
Why not?
So this one time, a guy barged into a yacht club. Really, I mean, he just sailed into that place.
bah-dum-duh tsshhhhhh.
Bush cake
Do we have an oven? Pots and pans and all ingredients to make a cake from scratch? Yes and yes. Does that make it any less entertaining to apply bush-teacher kitchen-mentality to making cake? Not in the slightest.
Boundaries
I like simple and easy, and it’s fun to do the ‘bush food’ thing. Canned peaches and vienna sausages for breakfast? delish.
Tonight? Tonight I flew too close to the sun. White beans and spam.
Before eating:
After eating: no photo.
12/21/12 12:01am (in Chukotka)
IT IS 3:01AM HERE AND 12:01AM 12/21/12 IN CHUKOTKA, RUSSIA, AND I JUST TOOK A PICTURE FACING EAST, HERE IT IS!!!!
just kidding. lol.
For real, here is a 30s exposure of the view east from the front porch of my duplex apartment, taken a few minutes ago at 3:03am. Too much weather to see big dio, but the dateline is definitely within visibility. The verdict is in, folks, the world is not ending, unless the end of the world is taking the form of complete coverage by sea ice. In which case, for us on diomede the end of the world would be hard to notice :-).
Safety procedure: throw it out the window
i’m a science teacher, i know safety procedure.
if it starts to go bad i’ll pitch it out the window.
wait..don’t the kids slide on the ice out there?
…and how did the epilogue go down?
*see the post below before you read this one
Provisional Teaching Certificate: 200+ hours of study, work, homework up to date, and two more years of study
Moving to the bush: $1000 of food at Costco + $300 shipping
Teaching science: many, many hours of lesson planning
Coil of magnesium ribbon: $27 + $15 s&h
Combustion pre-lab and lab lesson planning: 6 hours
Setting off the school fire alarm with my middle schoolers despite doing our lab right next to an open window: priceless
Milepost
Two things here, in order of importance:
1. Robert G. is a person awesome past words. Kinda like Darla G. Well, when I say ‘kinda,’ I mean ‘exactly.’
2. I did my first stall today, under Robert G’s perfect tutelage.
‘Stall’ is flying jargon for what happens when the plane’s wings stop generating lift. Stalling on purpose is a great training maneuver for tons of reasons, while an unintentional stall is a sign of either a poor pilot or equipment failure (really bad situation: both). So, when the wings stop generating lift, the magic of flying goes away really quickly, but not as quickly as the altitude needle spins around on its dial.
The wings stop generating lift when you don’t have enough airspeed, so to do a training stall you bring the 2000lb plane to a complete stop. Zero airspeed. How do you bring an airplane to a complete and perfect stop in the middle of the air? You pull up..the plane starts to climb, and you pull up a lot more, and next thing you know the plane is pointed straight up and right around when you realize you’re pointed straight up, the plane has run out of speed.
We stopped. In the air. Three thousand five hundred feet in the air. Over the Bering Sea. DEAD STILL..for a moment. This dead stillness lasts for an incredibly short moment*. Then that moment was gone, the plane wheeled over through the sky, the sky and the ocean have switched places and now we’re falling straight down out of the sky at 100mph. Spinning, too. No bad words nor good words nor any words passed though my head, as it was too full of mindblowing dumbfounding stupefying terrifying…umm..well, all those words added up then doubled up, that’s just about right.
Robert had told me to step on the rudder away from the spin direction to straighten the plane, so I mashed the rudder pedal, and we stopped spinning. Although there’s still the falling straight down thing going on, and we’re up to 150mph.
‘So, Dave, now what you do, sometime soon here you’ll want to pull up a bit, get ‘er back to level’ says Robert.
I pulled up a little bit, and Robert repeated himself with the addition of the word ‘more.’ I pull the yoke (airplane steering wheel), the plane levels out, I feel like my body was just squashed then turned upside down and inside out then back outside in then wrung out and plopped back into the seat, and then I realized I was grinning my face off like a one legged man who just won a butt kicking competition.
‘So, Dave, now what you do, is you do that again.’
So I did it again…
*calc buffs, here’s the idea: the moment lasts for about as long as d/dx(x^2) = 0
Immediately
I turned on my computer a few minutes ago to start working on tomorrow’s lesson plan and the first thing I see is this picture my dear little sister sent me. Lesson planning can wait a few minutes, this is important.
No further ado..
Fun
Do the best in the world ever just goof around? Why yes, yes they do. More than all the ‘best’ soccer videos on youtube combined this one left me grinning my face off and wishing I could go play soccer. I hope you enjoy it like I did (fair warning: it’s probably pretty boring to non-soccer-heads).
The best part? Toss up. Pinto’s goal and Valdez’s beautiful solo stuff into the gym floor.
Today
Kids sent to the office: more than I remember (4? 5? something like that)
Kids who threw me completely off by standing up and announcing a decision to voluntarily go to the office: 2
Best thing I had to say: “LUCAS! Put your tooth BACK in your pocket!”
Deepest Apologies to Randall Munroe
A little glimpse of how teaching works.
Thanks to the AKT2 Staff for the great (insert: hard. time consuming. effective learning. grumblegrumble.) assignment and to Randall Munroe for inspiration (insert: plagiary worth comics. flattery!)
PS:
Ready for the meta? Here it is: a second deepest apology to Darby Conley’s apology to Robert Frost. You caught that? You are my hero, I will buy you a cup of coffee :)
One cold night
The night before last night I walked down to the river to look at the stars, and in the beam of my flashlight the trees glittered madly like a million diamonds, and I’m looking at these trees and I’ve never seen trees look like that, I mean I’ve seen ’em sparkle in the winter but never this, and then this thought strikes me out of the blue: hey, that’s funny, it’s sorta like what trees look like when they got tinsel on ’em.
Yeah, right?
Food story one: fishy
(from two weeks ago)
Moving in the landlord showing me around opens up this huge industrial freezer in the shed, opens it up and I see vacuum packed salmon fillets it’s filled with vacuum packed salmon fillets. Feel free to help yourself, I mean don’t eat all of it, but the wife and I definitely won’t go through all of it, we won’t be here much of the winter.
Today I woke up late, nine-thirty, ate breakfast at ten-thirty, early afternoon snack of a few crackers and peanut butter. Weeks of living on ramen and beans and bread, I finally go to the huge industrial freezer in the shed. Realization at this moment: not salmon fillets. These are HUGE salmon fillets. One is like three. This made me pretty happy.
Huge salmon fillet on the counter at noon, thawed out at five. Which was good because at five the hunger came, and it came raging. Burner on high olive oil and garlic and salt in the pan, hot, in with the huge fillet sizzle crackle sizzle, put the glass lid on to keep it moist, potato in the microwave, five minutes later flip the huge fillet other side and bit more oil and garlic and salt and more sizzling and the kitchen smells so good, potato done and steaming and buttered and salmon done and crispy and up out of the pan and onto the plate with the potato.
Epilogue
Woulda been better with a good beer. Dear first paycheck, please come soon. And it woulda been even oh so much better shared, but I’m not sure how to get that done; the paycheck doesn’t help much. Oh wait actually, doesn’t match.com charge money? Hmm.