Dad, baller, gramps, land planner, pilot
other
Mom, teacher, nanna, runner, superstar
Ninja-style rabbit, chicken, and kale farmers
Baller, emt, coder, engineer, daddy
The best day
Well, no, make that ‘2nd best.’ The best will be when that logbook is good and full and the most recent entry is a passed checkride.
Ice
Goodbye sea ice
The panorama stitch is shoddy, but it was the best I could do from my classroom’s window. The best part is that it’s very windy and the big waves come in under the broken up sea ice, and it makes the whole mass undulate unbelievably.
Win
One toaster, one space heater, one lamp, and one back-up power supply, all dismembered, lots of help from my roommate, and many hours later…
Mission accepted
Last week of school? It’s wild. Straight up hairy and wild. There’s no open gym, so the kids have next to nothing to earn by doing well in school. The sun is out 24/7. So I came up with this idea a while back: rocket week. Yes, rocket week. I told the kids to be ready, and excited, because we’re going to blast rockets into the sky on the last day of school, the last week we’ll watch movies about rockets and make our own.
What could be better?
I tested the supplies yesterday. Critical error. The ignitors don’t fire. I should not have trusted old supplies we had here at the school. PANIC. So I call up the man the myth the legend Mr. White in Nome–yes, he’s willing to pick up supplies from his PO box and get them on the chopper out here on wednesday. Then I call the hobby shop in Anchorage. But there’s more bad news: motors and ignitors are considered haz-mat. Air shipping is a no-go. There’s no way to get them here in time, it’s doubtful that I could even get them here by next year…they have to come by barge from Seattle to Nome, then another barge from Nome to Dio.
&%$@
What do?
I’m going to make some damn rocket ignitors.
Ballin
Nothing like a night of basketball to remind me just how much I love my life. God really is in the little things.
Welcome to the world, Jonna
Dear Jonna,
Your mother and father are two great people (you’re a lucky child!) and to them I give my utmost congratulations and pride.
But really the big deal here is you, kiddo. Welcome to this big beautiful crazy world. I’ll see ya ’round :).
Love,
Uncle Dave
The fleet
Visitors
They are pricey and lack the mind blowing practicality of a 172. but my oh my super cubs are unbelievably cool.
A case of the willies
I had this conversation with one of the other teachers here at 9 o’clock last night:
“Dave, did you hear about the chopper?”
“no, what about it?”
“they didn’t make it back to Nome.”
…
Spine chilling. Simply put, in these parts, “they didn’t make it” means that they are dead.
Thankfully that wasn’t the case this time. Much later last night the local who does seat booking for the chopper heard from Captain Mike–him and Simon are o.k., they set the bird down outside Nome for weather reasons. But holy cow, that was a case of the willies like I haven’t felt in a while. Mike (pilot) and Simon (flight mechanic) are two of the greatest flying guys I’ve met. They bust their asses to get passengers and mail out here to dio, and they’re just nice people. They’ve picked us up on their way into the airport (“hey, why take a taxi? we’re headed there too, we’ll just pick you up!”), hauled silly amounts of cargo jammed tetris-style into the tiny helicopter for a bunch of teachers all traveling at once, given us hot tea and coffee while waiting in a freezing cold shipping container.
There is an important moral here: it is an unfortunate fact that sometimes it takes a god-awful thought wrenching your gut around for a while to realize just how much you appreciate people.
So this one’s for you, Mike and Simon. Best damn chopper crew in the 907. Keep it up.
