Finally, some pics

I promised I'd send you guys some pics--here are some to get you started. It's only been four months, so I'm not *that* far behind.

I'm not allowed to put pictures of the students on the internet, so you get "people-less" pictures. I'm hoping to get a chance on a weekend to get some other pictures of the island, and hopefully you can see my smiling face in some of those. By the time school is over at this time of year, it's dark already--so no pictures. Weekends, I usually choose to cut wood and do University work over picture taking, but if I get a day like today......(nice and sunny!)

With the internet connection out here, it took about an hour to upload all these, so Enjoy!

Here's a picture of the school:


Here's one including the "parking lot."

The building on the uphill side is the teacher housing. Notice all the vent pipes out the top. The funny part is, only *one* of those is actually being used anymore. That's Alaska for you.

Here's the generator shed and the water tank. The gutters from the school fill up the tank, and that's where all the "running" water in the school comes from.


Here's a shot of the teacher housing. This are the South and East sides -- could use some more windows, eh? The West side has more windows, but it's in the shade of the trees. With the short days up here, light turns into a bit of a commodity. I took this picture at 1 in the afternoon, and you can still see frost on the grass. It got dark 2 hours later. The sunlight doesn't really fade in the afternoon, it just "goes out." It's quick.



Here's a picture of the boardwalk system between the house and the school and the community "library." Need boardwalks around here because any trail on the ground turns into a mud pit about the third time you walk across it.


A couple of pics of the inside of the school. I only needed to take two, because, well, there are only two rooms. I teach the middle school/high school on one side, and the little kids on the other. Actually, I have a lot of help with the little kids, 'cause there's no way I could bifurcate myself enough to cover everything.

Here's the big kid side. I took this picture during lunch--hence the ping pong table. We don't have a gym, and it rains a lot, so PE turns into ping pong a lot of the time. And yes, that's an Apple laptop on the cart--no XP or Vista for me!


Here's the little kid side.

Here's a picture out the window of the school. Notice how close the bay is. When it gets stormy, it looks like the water is going to come right up into the school.


And now, the pictures that will make you all horribly jealous--the school beach. If you walked straight out into the picture above, in about 30 steps, this is the beach you'd end up on.

There you have it! My internet finger can't stand much more uploading at the moment. Don't be fooled, I had to wait about 3 weeks for a full-on sunny day like today to get you these pictures. It rains here probably about the same amount as down there, perhaps a little more, but it's a *different* kind of raining. Being this close to the ocean, the weather just blows through and changes every 15 minutes a lot of days. Hope you all have wonderful Holidays!