Fun!!...Trauma...Fun!!...Trauma...

Amy here...
Yeah, well, the last few days have been interesting. We'll start on Saturday, when Eros and I got all pissed-off about the apathetic attitudes of the majority of our students, and had a trip planned which only 5 signed up for because - gasp! - walking up a hill was involved. The weather was crapola but we didn't care because we were getting off campus even if there was a freaking blizzard. Lucky for us, the sky cleared wonderfully about 30 minutes out of town, and we started a a hike at a trailhead about an hour away. Our little group was fantastic - we hiked up to some really cool rock formations, and they climbed around and felt like mountain men and women. We stared at the sweet view, ate nuts, and had a grand time.

Oh, and we saw a beaver too. He was working on his dam.

Then we took a little jaunt up the same road to a place called Chena Hot Springs, which was very cool. It's a resort-type area where you can just pay $10 and bask in an amazing rock pool that's like a big fat bath right out there in the mountains. Sweet. We damn near passed out in there.

Nothing much to note on Sunday. I did a lot of shopping errands and Eros and Ken started a big water-balloon war. Hilarious.

Monday, oh, Monday. Independence Day. I was an idiot and volunteered to coordinate holiday festivities with another RM. Great idea, Amy. Hey - way to overachieve. You win a freakin' ribbon. Anyway, we had all this crap planned for the afternoon with a theme of a "Crazy Olympiad" that was supposed to go down after a big BBQ dinner. I got up early to work on stuff, and while a few people were sitting in the office helping we all turned around to a thud on the window. Kamikaze bird. Shit. They all callously went about their business (Eros, I'm talking to you too), so I went out behind the building and, yep, bird was still alive. Taking a lesson from my mother, I wrapped it in my shirt and sat around with it on my lap until it would recover from shock, be miraculously healed, and fly away sending me some good karma. After about 15 minutes he got a little frisky and I was ready to let him go - well, until his neck went limp and he stopped breathing, that is. So I had a little bird kick the bucket in my lap. I convinced three students to go out back and dig a hole. By the time they were done the bird leaked dead bird juice on my shirt, so that went in the hole too. Eh.

About 30 minutes later, and I'm not kidding, I'm told two girls are looking for me and as it turns out they have found a little baby swallow by their classroom building and were instructed to bring it to me. Jesus. I have bird death on my hands and they want me to be responsible for this little creature? Ok, so I make a little box for Chirpy and send more kids out to catch bugs. Chirpy won't eat. Fine, Chirpy. Go ahead and die on me. I have a f*#$%ing Crazy Olympiad to coordinate anyway.

That said, it's now pouring down rain. The plans for the Crazy Olympiad are not looking good. A baby bird's life is in my hands. It's nearing time for some stupid Clan Pride competition that no one gave a shit about....

So 3:30 rolls around and I decide to rip apart some grasshoppers with my eyebrow tweezers and offer the dismembered bug parts to my foundling. He chirped! He opened his wee beak! He choked it down! Yes! Suddenly there's a Pride competition and my clan did fantasic (they took 2nd place, thank you). The BBQ was great, and the Crazy Olympiad starts after some Alaskan Native dancing outside (the rain has stopped too). We played water balloon volleyball, oiled up kids and pushed them down a Spongebob slip n' slide in a brand new picnic gamed called "Slip n' Slide Curling" (I made this up - no kidding), and we performed a host of other ridiculous things that culminated in nailing mile-race runners with water balloons and then having a Napoleon Dynamite Dance-Off. We all bonded. Chirpy ate more grasshoppers. Things were good.

Then...seven students got kicked out of the program. Right after the medals were announced for the Olympiad (Eros's team got the silver!). It was all minor stuff that they were busted for, and none of us really realized the mayhem that would come of it. It was non-stop bawling amongst the kids until about 1 a.m. from the ones getting sent home and their friends, and one of the kids in my clan pretty much had a nervous breakdown and was dry-heaving into his trash can. I can't go into details, but it was very disturbing. Still processing. So, the remaining kids are upset, angry, confused, and a lot want to go home again. YAY! We've come full-circle.

I'll let Eros tell you about today, and whatever else. Thank God it was our day off.

Eros...

Yes, we're all a bunch of mixed emotions here in teenager land. Before I get to today, amy forgot to mention the dog show that we "forced" 6 kids to go to. It was on campus and was an agility course. It was pretty cool seeing the dogs run through all the obstacles.

So today began with both Amy and I being exhausted because we were up all night with crying, puking, scheming, students. I'm amazed at how close these kids got so fast. Maybe it has something to do with their culture, but these kids were really depressed last night that the 7 were going home. Even people that I didn't know hung out with them were sad. It was quite the experience, and since I was 1 of the 2 people that actually busted them, I felt like an asshole all night. Alright, back to today...

We decided that were going to go rafting and do some fishing today. Chelsey (Ken's wife) has a friend that works for one of the rafting companies in Denali and said that we could just come by anytime and they'd take us out (sweet free rafting!!). So we left the beautiful sunny day in Fairbanks and drove 2 hours to Denali where it was cold and rainy. We made arrangements to go rafting at 6:30pm and tried to go fishing for a few hours. In the rain, Ken and I tried unsuccessfully to catch some arctic grayling. To give an idea of how knowledgeable the two of us are about fishing, one of the lures that we used (we borrowed Chelsey's dad's stuff) was about 3 inches long and shiny...grayling are about 12 inches long. We were later told that the lure was meant for king salmon which can be about 3 feet long. But even though we proved our fishing experiences didn't mean didley squat, we still had a nice time because the place we were fishing was very scenic. It was up in the mountains above the tree line and was very beautiful. Amy saw some sort of mammal that she thinks is a marmot, but it may just be a ground squirrel. We have a picture that we will put up. Maybe we'll have a contest to see who can identify it.

After fishing, we headed back to the rafting place were we donned out dry suits. We totally looked like the astronauts in Armageddon (I was Bruce Willis of course) walking down the hill to where the rafts were. So the river we went on was the Nenana. It is fed by a glacier so the water is pretty freakin' cold, hence the dry suits. Our guide was a grizzled man from Georgia who comes up to Alaska in the summer to run the river. So the first big rapid where we got splashed was a little shocking because the water was so cold, plus it was overcast and raining, but overall the trip was a blast! We went through some class 2s,3s, and 4s and nobody fell out or anything. When we finished the rapids and were just floating along, I even jumped in the river and floated along side the boat. It was a bit chilly even through the dry suit, but when am I ever going to swim in a glacial river? The only bad thing is that I also discovered that my drysuit had a leak in it. Not fun to be wet and col inside a dry suit.

So we ended today on a good note. Hopefully tomorrow will be fun as well and the students will not be so bummed out. I hope everyone is doing well.

Oh yeah, I also wanted to give a shout out to Mama Mach who gets to hear how her son is doing through this blog. By the way Mrs. Mach, Ken wasn't really feeling up to the rafting, so he didn't go.

Hope everyone has a wonderful day, sorry this is such a long post.