School days
posted in Uncategorized |We got the house! We’re trying to arrange for early occupancy (i.e., renting for a week or two before official closing), because otherwise OmegaMom is likely to be arrested for murder, specifically, murder of OmegaDad, OmegaDotter, and OmegaDawg. The OmegaCats are okay, because they don’t push. Or get under foot. Or bang into me. Or any of those other things that Closeness, Extreme Closeness, brings to a family stuck in two rooms.
The house has an acre of land. It looks like a two-car garage with an apartment on top, but it has been remodeled inside, and the living room/kitchen area is bright and airy, with wood laminate floors. Downstairs is a smallish family room, a third bedroom, the laundry, and a second bathroom.
And there are closets. I am in heaven.
Elementary school, it turns out, is just a few blocks away from the new house. So today OmegaDotter and I trotted off to the new school to register.
Let’s see what’s truly different about school in Alaska:
- One of the hazards your child is to be warned about, if the child is going to walk or bike to school, is moose. There is a line in the parents’ handbook that advises parents to tell their child what to do in case of a moose encounter. Um. I’m kind of clueless there, folks. What does one do in case of a moose encounter???
- Recess every day, unless the wind chill is lower than -10F. Yes, that’s minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Students may not bring sleds or skis to school. The school will, however, provide roll-up sleds for recess…no skis, though.
- PE includes cross-country skiing. Okay, maybe they do provide skis.
- Students bringing ice skates to school must have blade covers for the skates. You will be interested to know that a paper bag is not considered a skate bag by this elementary school. Who’d've thunk it.
- Unlike Arizona, where the alternate language is likely to be Spanish, here it’s Russian. So, the letter for the English-as-a-second-language folks is written in Cyrillic.
- Students must bring snowpants to school.
- The emergency drills include earthquake preparedness. The emergency procedures include a requirement for a local person to pick up your child, since so many Small Alaska Town residents actually work 40-50 miles away in Big City, and there are some bridges that could collapse in case of an earthquake.
Some Alaska observations:
- I didn’t realize just how accustomed I was to multiple state license plates until I got here. I have seen one non-Alaska plate that isn’t on our car; it was from Florida.
- Someone in the know tells me that the reason for all the latte shacks is that 40-60% of the adults in Small Alaska Town work in Big City, and that the wintertime drive requires a jolt of java to wake one up going and keep one awake returning.
- I’ve found Small Alaska Town’s playground: Margaret Pass. Way up Margaret Pass, there’s a glacier that pumps lots of water into the Little Lady River, which rumbles and tumbles downhill over huge boulders next to the road up the pass. This is a gorgeous river, with icy blue water. It’s supposed to have lots of salmon. (This is Good.) The Margaret Pass road is perfect for a nap run for the dotter.
- If you’ve ever heard of the “Bridge to Nowhere”, a classic Alaska boondoggle, I am now here to tell you that the Bridge to Nowhere is not a boondoggle. The lower 48 media portrays it as a bridge that connects two areas that don’t have anything–one side just empty land, the other side a tiny Eskimo village. The lower 48 media needs to do its homework better…Small Alaska Town and its environs is a bedroom community for Big City, and to get to SAT from BC requires a drive up one side of a large ocean arm, crossing the river, and then driving back west along the other side of the ocean arm. It turns out that the “tiny Eskimo village” is a whole slew of suburban subdivisions, and the Bridge to Nowhere would actually provide a shorter commute, save gas, and keep emissions down.
After a few days of chilly rain, we have had a few days of glorious 70s sunshine. With the sunshine comes action similar to Arizona’s monsoon season: the mountains to all sides develop thunderheads atop their peaks, classic cumuli towering up into the sky, with iron-grey undersides. Small Alaska Town valley, though, is drenched in the sunshine.
