Misadventures of a Midlife Married Couple

April 10, 24

To say our lives have been wild recently is an understatement!! We cruised out of the darkness of winter where we thought we were busy, into a new year, a new season, and seemingly never-ending activity. I started writing this blog in late March… lol

Since I’ve last posted we have been beyond busy. February came and went in a blur, lots of basketball… LOTS of basketball AND we had our first guest from home. Meredith, my forever friend, flew up to spend two weeks working with our students to create art! I don’t know who learned more from who… the kids or Meredith. It is safe to say she fell in love with the people and the beauty in the village.

February saw our school hosting not one but TWO regional basketball tournaments and both boys and girls teams headed to the regional championship games while Meredith was here. She actually flew into the “big” village for the weekend to watch games with me. That was a whole adventure for her. It looked like she was going to get stuck in the big village due to weather. She managed to get out in an extra seat on a charter to get back to Noatak.

While I was working at the regional tournament and getting to spend some time with Meredith, Marty was being invaded. Sorta… not really. There was a group of special forces members doing their Arctic training in the area. When multiple Chinook helicopters take off and land from a small airport and fly over snow covered lakes… it creates a sight. Lots of our Noatakians were actually in Kotzebue at the tournament and it was definitely created a stir the entire community was talking about. Marty said it was very “Red Dawn”.

March flew in on the heels of the regional tournament with our boys winning out and headed to state and the girls headed to state with a second place finish. Meredith got to enjoy a Noatak potluck for the teams, and got to experience some of our more local cuisine! The teams making it to state meant I spent Spring Break in Anchorage. That was good and bad, I had some down time from work but it was limited. I got to be a fan and one day I got to sleep in! Unfortunately, Marty wasn’t able to come with me. Bless him, he has not left the village at all since we arrived. We are working on planning a weekend getaway for him though!

So much has happened since I last blogged that there seems to be almost too much information to put in! Honestly so much has happened and there are so many amazing things to mention that it is hard to remember what to write about and what I need to share.

Recently Marty and I were able to go out TOGETHER to go try to do some ice fishing. Well, he wanted to fish, I wanted to get out explore with him.

Cleaning the ice from the hole using his bare hands…. 🙂

While I can safely say I doubt ice fishing is going to become my favorite new hobby I can say that the quiet and scenery was spectacular.

The last couple of weekends have been punctuated by actual mini blizzards. Lots and lots of snow has dumped on us. It is, frankly, beautiful.

We wound up with snow for several days and it was WAIST deep leaving the house… after ONE night! The snow drifts were crazy but they were fluffy and moved fairly easily. By the end of the week most of the snow had dissipated, but not before it postponed a flight of ski instructors and a week of taking our students ice fishing. More about that in the next post! This one took me about 7 weeks to complete, I promise not to take that long next time.