Happy New Year 2010!

Happy New Year to all of you! Another fresh new year is here, another year to live! To banish worry, doubt, and fear, to love and laugh and give! This bright new year is given me to live each day with zest, to daily grow and be, my highest and my best!!!

I hope you had a wonderful holidays with your family and friends. It is now time for 2010 to get back into routine. I had a wonderful time in Memphis. I was so blessed to get together with all of my friends, eat some delicious meals, and spend quality time with my family. It was delightful to have my nephew, Logan (5) with us during the holidays. It was refreshing having a child's enthusiasm and energy to keep the adults moving and laughing. I am back to school and the kids were terrific this week. I hope it continues. I am busy taking two more classes. One on technology because I can't figure out Macs. I am not computer savvy anyway so this will help me a lot - I hope. I am taking another graduate class - Project Ki'l. I will be learning about the background and strategies to use for Native boys to encourage higher literacy and math skills. This class will have several field trips and I like those kind of classes. Get this, Anchorage School district will pay for me to take this 3 credit course and give me a stipend. I have never worked in a district where they pay for graduate school and give stipends. This is good. I have decided to start saving all my stipends for my great adventure next year. More about that later. I have become very involved in the Delta Gamma Kappa sorority. This is the international society for women educators to promote excellence in education. Our Eagle River chapter, NU, focuses on early childhood literacy. We have a monthly fund raiser called "feet and fannies" where we collect socks and underwear for children of all ages. Many of ASD children live in shelters or the families can't afford the simple necessities. ASD also has an entire department of teachers (45) that go to shelters and Head Start programs and local Native programs and centers to teacher the parents how to help their children become familiar with books, games and coloring. They have to teach parents how to hold their child and how to read a book to their child. They just don't know who. Doesn't this amaze you? I never thought about this - I just assumed all parents sit and read to their children, look at a picture and ask the child to make up a story, color pictures for each season. After my fund raising efforts I headed over to Wasilla to make Iditarod dog foot ointment. That is a statue of Joe Reddington who founded the Iditarod. My job was to the the official "stir person". I guess my experience laying tile in our bathroom gave the necessary job requirement to use the electric stir. I had a blast. The handsome gentleman in the green is Dr. Stewart. He is the Official Iditarod Veterinarian. Ladies, he is single. He said he hasn't found the women who is willing to live on the move with him. He splits his time between Montana, Idaho, Canada and Alaska with rescue animals and serve as Iditarod Vet. The ointment is pink like pepto bizmo. It is a combination of Thuja-Zinc Oxide, mineral oil, antibiotic, lanolin and one other ingredient (I forgot). Talk about soothing for your hands. Each musher will get 20 tubes of this stuff for the dogs. The dogs get about 2 TBS placed on their feet before they put on their feet booties at each check point. The Iditarod goes through about 2000 booties for 100 sleds. Each bootie cost about $2 a piece. That is a lot of bootie!!!! You can see how pretty pink it is (which is also stained on my sweatshirt as a memento)and the next group of people filled the tubes. Filling was easy but putting the clamp on the end was extremely tricky. Remember I said the stuff is very soothing aka slippery. Many of the workers had whole tubes of pink on their bodies. I got off easy being the stirrer. Another group filled packages of dog worm pills. Each musher will receive these pills 10 days before the race for each dog. My reward for today's work was an official Iditarod Volunteer hat. I have signed up to help on two other committees before race day. I am just a busy bee!!! By the way, my great adventure I will start saving for is to bid to ride with one of the Iditarod mushers next year. People bid to ride from Anchorage to Wasilla on day one. The most anyone can bid is $7500. I better sign up for a lot of courses that pay stipends to get my bid money before Feb 2011!!!! One of the ladies today is bidding for her favorite musher. She was one of his dog-handlers last year and hopes to get to ride with him. She and her husband are moving back to Alabama next summer. Isn't this a small world? Alabama. By the way, she didn't gloat about the BCS bowl game. I thanked her for that.

The next group of pictures are from our Thanksgiving family flight around Mt McKinley. Mt McKinley is 20,230 feet. The day we flew our flight it was sunny but a cloud hung over the last 2000 feet of Mt McKinley. The flat area in the front right-hand corner is base camp during the summer. I think that Mount McKinley looks like a bear in the picture. Just below the cloud is two brown eyes and a nose. We flew over the Kahiltna Glacier on our tour. This glacier is 45 miles long and 3 miles wide. Our guide told us the national geologist measured the glacier at the end of the summer and they measured the depth of this glacier around 4500 feet deep. That is very deep! The four brown mounts are called the Moose Tooth. They look just like a moose tooth. The last picture is the beautiful sunset (from the airplane window) over the Alaskan mountain range. I love the all the beautiful colors that shine in the skies up here.

The last three pictures are of my little kids. They are so cute. During our recess periods the kids get to go ice skating. Isn't that great. Ice skating and sledding for recess. I love this. If you look closely you will see several of our Native boys dressed in their regular winter clothes. Short sleeve shirt! They have switched to long pants since winter break. Up until then they still wore shorts to school. These boys and girls walk to school. If they live within one mile they walk. I have tried to get them to wear coats but they don't think it is cold. The counselor said some Natives just wear shorts and short sleeve shirts all year round. Brrrr. The three on the play gym are just sweeties. Don't you love their smiles. I must admit I am jealous that the lower 48 is getting cold weather and snow and we are not. We have sun and temps in the mid 30's but no snow. We need some more snow for the Iditarod. There is however, enough snow in the interior of Alaska. Fairbanks was minus 45 air temp during the holidays. I can't believe how much colder Fairbanks is than Anchorage. Fairbanks is about a 4 - 5 hour drive or 12 hour train ride. Prudhoe Bay is consistently below zero since Thanksgiving.

Well, that is all for this week. I hope to have some more great pictures and learning experiences for my next blog. Have a wonderful week. Aspeekahah. Sheryl the Nanuq