Amy's Weekend in Brief

I will start with today and work backwards:
Sunday (thus far):
Today I took a group for a walk off campus to an awesome outdoors store, for ice cream, and to a new/used bookstore/coffee shop. It was neat to kind of talk some kids into going to the bookstore, since they're pretty opposed to reading and all, and seeing them find stuff they were interested in (one quiet hip-hop boy is totally into Garfield comics, for example).
Earlier this morning, at 1 a.m. to be exact, I earned my new "hard-ass" reputation by busting two girls that were sneaking around to the boy's floor. I sternly told them, "WHAT were you doing? Oh, 'messing around', eh? No, no. You can forget about your stipend this week. Now go to bed, ladies. NOW." They scattered in fear.

Saturday: Took students to Chena Lakes, an Army Corp of Engineers project (Jake - wanna come up here and work?). They had a good time swimming in the glacial-cold lake and playing gravel volleyball (the "sand" isn't exactly sand here...). It was a totally unorganized mess trying to plan it, which was our fault, and the staff got a good talking to at 1 a.m. Tears were shed, angry comments were made, but alas, all is well.
After the lake we had another poker game where one of the girls in my group totally schooled the kid that won at Friday night's game (a little guy also in my group), so she was shaking with excitement and did some quality gloating. So far my clan has had the ace poker players. Cool.
After that we watched "Boogeyman", which was one of the worst and most pointless movies I've ever had to sit through. The students loved it.

Friday: I won't recap Eros's poker tutorial, but I will talk about the amazing storm afterwards. Thunder and lightning are an uncommon event in Fairbanks, so the heavens put on quite a show for everyone. A storm rolled in around 10:30 p.m., and all of the kids and mentors alike crowded around to watch and ooh and ahhh at the lightning, much like at a 4th of July fireworks show. The grand finale was the sweet double rainbow you can see pictured below, which ended in the trees at the bottom of the hill across from the campus. Keep in mind this rainbow was created by the sunshine at 11:00 p.m. How cool is that?

Aside from that, this group of kids is really growing on me. I thought that they would irritate me a lot more than my peers, but it's the complete opposite. In just the first week with them I've learned an incredible amount about how Alaskan life in the villages is more foreign than I could have imagined, and working with teenagers is much more amusing than I thought it would be. They make me laugh.

Ok, time for a store run. Gotta get supplies because we're dying everyone's hair tonight. Yay Wal-Mart!