Sixty-something, partly cloudy, with a light breeze. While this phrase could arguably be used to describe me, this time it is, in fact, a description of recent weather here in Craig, on the outskirts of the Southeast Alaskan rainforest. I am fond of saying that there are two kinds of weather in Craig: straight-down rain […]
Category: Mostly Alaska: Life as an educator and citizen
Stories about teaching and living in Alaska
Armed and maybe dangerous
Alaska has a regulation that says a student who brings a gun to school must be suspended for a minimum of one year. While I was principal in Kake, Alaska ,there was at least one school board member who had missed that memo. I know this because one day he drove up to the elementary […]
Teeter totter
Stop tipping your chair. You’re going to fall. If you fall, you will disrupt class. If you’re going to tip your chair, could you at least keep it on two legs? One leg looks really dangerous. How do you keep it balanced like that? I’ve really never seen a kid keep a chair balanced on […]
Golf, Southeast Alaska style
These two pictures represent Craig, Alaska’s answer to a driving range. We are crammed onto two tiny islands joined by man-made causeways (see the picture in my right-hand widget column), and there is no flat ground anywhere to be had. There was a time when I laughed at golf, declaring smugly that it couldn’t possibly […]
A-gardening we will go
Recently I started growing lettuce in window boxes. Now, of course I could put together a garden box or a greenhouse, or both, and grow my lettuce that way. But here’s the thing. I am too lazy to go outside to pick my lettuce. Actually, I am trying to set things up so that I […]
“I gave you the grouse!”
Soon after my husband and I met, he brought me a feisty calico kitten, who grew up to be a feisty calico cat. One summer, we worked at a tree nursery/landscaping business, and we stayed on site in a small pickup bed camper. More than once I found birds in various stages of disassembly. One […]
In which I cut my own hair
So, here I sit on the stoop of my little apartment in Aniak, sipping my coffee and looking cool. Check out the hair. Before I left Craig for my two-month stint as a fifth-grade teacher, I forgot to get a haircut. For most of the past ten or so years, I kept my hair cut […]
Catch me if you can
I have heard it said that there are no atheists in foxholes; I think the same could be said for the experience of flying over an Alaskan mountain range on a clear spring day, albeit for a very different reason. As I look out the airplane window, I succumb to the ever-present temptation to take […]
In which I set out to learn a new skill
I think one of the secrets of life must be to keep learning new things, no matter how great or how small. Some will learn how to build a new and better space rocket, while I have a more modest goal: to learn how to confidently pilot a four-wheeler. A lot of communities in rural […]
You can’t get there from here
Take a look at a map, and ask yourself, “How does a trip from Togiak to Craig, Alaska come to involve a hotel room in Renton, Washington?” It went down like this: I left Togiak on a Friday morning in time to catch my flight out of Dillingham. From there I stayed overnight in Anchorage […]