Training for the Race

Hello Everyone.  I hope all of you are starting to thaw out.  I just can't believe how much snow you all are getting.  Non-stop snow dumping!  We are finally getting 2 days of light snow fall. I think we are about 3-5 inches so far.  It has gotten very cold up here.  Today is minus 25 so I am inside cooking, baking and completing a long over due blog.  I have been so busy I just can't get on the computer to get the blog done on a weekly basis.  Today I am uploading two blogs so I have not excuses.
Here are some of my darling students.  This is Sarah and she dug a hole and called it her snow chair. You can see that we have snow on the ground and that doesn't stop the children from having a "regular" recess. See them playing soccer.  Can you imagine playing a 30 minute running game in complete snow gear?  We make snow angels a lot.  Sometimes the girls put tiaras on their angel with twigs and paper.  In addition to the ice skating rink, used for recess and gym classes, we have a very busy sledding hill.  Some of the kids don't even use sleds - they just slide on their snowsuits.  There is a pretty good bump about 1/2 way down and the little ones fly off the sleds.

Aren't they cute?????  They love to have their pictures taken.

This is a friendly game of touch football.

We try to ski 3 - 4 nights a week at our lit trails.  The high school has 25 miles of lit and groomed trails.  This is the best cardio workout.  I love it.  Beth, room mate is the brunette, and Niki is another teacher who is loving this free and excellent activity.  Niki is a triplet from Chicago area.  She is a lot of fun.

Training for Ski for Women's Race we joined our meet-up group and hiked 5 miles on Saturday. The race was on Sunday.  It is tough to hike in snow but the scenery is beautiful.  You can see most all trails in Anchorage are dog-friendly.  You can see that this Pug was NOT into walking in the snow. His mom carried him for about 1/2 hour and then she returned to the lodge.

Niki and I took goofy pictures at the lodge waiting for the hike to start.  Those are big bears. They are pettable rugs at the lodge.  This picture of me on skis is from one of our night time ski adventures (out of order). 

Isn't it a beautiful trail.  We took a few minutes to take in some of the beautiful sites on the trail.  This is Niki hibernating for the winter. She climbed in the log without looking first. There could have been a fox or other small critters in there. She is still new and will learn to Look before moving.  You might recall this is the same log I convinced Bob-o climbed into in the fall. Same log, different season.

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The rental cabin has a wonderful outhouse.  You have to walk about 30 yards to get to it from the cabin door. I guess you wouldn't make too many night trips in the winter.  This is one of our friends, Frank, who hike and ski with the meet up group. He was so nice to let me take a photo of his "frosty" beard. This is what happens when you have facial hair and play outside.  Girls get "frosty" hair when skiing or hiking outside in the winter.  Niki and I take a photo in the big hollow tree.

I love the picture of the mountains and lake.  We are standing at one of the observation areas. If you look closely you can see the reflection of the mountains in the water.Then we stopped at the salmon area where we saw a large moose in the background as we walked to the safe side of the river. 

So tomorrow is the Ski for Women's Race. It raises money for the Battered Women's Shelter.  We thought we would take a day off of skiing and hike for some other kind of workout.  My next blog will have the Ski for Women's pictures.  Then, we had a girls night out and went to the Roller Derby, pretty big in Alaska, and then poker night at our house.  I guess you can see how busy we are. Tonight I made homemade crab cakes, spinach/strawberry salad, roasted asparagus and peanut butter pie.  Our friend, Tim, brought us a huge load of Alaskan king crab and he wanted some crab cakes.  He also brought me 3 deer hearts for my classes. We dissect them during our circulatory system unit.  So making crab cakes guarantees more shipments of fresh crab.

Have a wonderful evening and week.  We have parent conferences and 1/2 day of in-service this week. Our rewards is Monday off!!! we will probably go skiing at Hatcher Pass (about 2 hours and fresh snow on the mountain tops).  I will take many pictures.

Have a wonderful day. Sheryl the Nanuq of the North.

Jan 29

 Hello everyone.  Anchorage is gearing up for the 39 running of the Iditarod.  We are volunteering for many activities.  Saturday, Beth and I went to the Iditarod headquarter to make foot ointment for the sled dogs. It was fun. I really enjoyed mixing the ointment because it has so much lanolin, anti-inflammatory and mineral oil I spread more on my hands than putting the ointment in the tubes.  The first picture is the heart worm tablets that are packaged and sent to each musher two weeks prior the race.  The 39 Iditarod starts Saturday, March 5.  This year there are 63 mushers at this point and a friend of mine, Annie Taggert, is a rookie musher.  She is a teacher and she will be running Jeff King's dogs because he will be in
 Sweden during the Iditarod. We will miss him a lot but I wish Annie the best of luck with her race.  The plastic tubes are to be filled with the ointment. Each dog receives 2 tubes for the race. Each sled starts with 16 dogs so we had to fill a lot of tubes.  The pink tubes in the box are what they look like when the are ready to ship. The musher will receive a dozen at a time to carry on the sled. At different check points they will receive the next dozen tubes.  Then Beth and I went on an adventure down the Kinick Goose Point road to see where it ended. It is the opposite side of the peninsula and it was very pristine.  We ended up at Point McKenzie and had a fabulous view of Anchorage from the other side of the inlet

 The mud flats were frozen slabs of ground but in the foreground you can see the river flowing quickly. Then we went towards the boat dock. We saw 9 moose during our day.  This one thought he was well hidden.  As you can see, moose do not camouflage very well in snow. He didn't like us being too close so he got up and moseyed over towards us and we hustled back to the car quickly.   On our way we saw "Jake, his wife, and their dog, Buddy, bringing fuel oil to their homestead.  You can see how a snow machine (that is Alaskan for snow mobiles) are used in so many ways.  Beth took the picture of Jack and Buddy from the car window.  Do you see Buddy's bed on top of the oil drums?  That is

one spoiled dog. We had to stop at the General Store because there was nothing around for 30 miles.  They had good burgers and fries and of course nice cold Alaskan Amber beers.  The locals pulled up chairs and talked to us about the changes in their little community of 300 people.  A new prison is going in about a mile and half down the road.  This will bring about 600 jobs to the area.  We inquired about the kind of security, it is medium - two electric fences.  Apparently, AK doesn't have enough prisons so AK ships their prisoners to Arizona.  The State of AK has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly the prisoners down to the lower 48, pay for their room and board and any treatment they are

directed to have by the court. So AK is building 4 new prisons to bring the prisoners home where it will cost less.  Apparently, we have a maximum prison on the most beautiful point of AK - in Seward.  Imagine that.  The water is so cold and Seward has many seal lions and bears they figure the prisoners won't try to escape.  Gosh, what you learn by talking to the locals.  There is a famous serial killer in the Seward prison.  His story is the Baker. My friend is lending me the book that talks about his case.

Beth and I are attending the Bear class in June. We will be on Admiral T Island for a week as we kayak and hike and observe bears in their natural habitat.  So to get into the spirit of hiking in the woods, I purchased my first pair of camouflage pants.  My friends call me - GI Sheryl.  That is pepper spray in my hand.
There is a phrase - we do things up BIG in Alaska.  Have you ever seen a snowman as big as this one?  His nose is a construction cone!!!



I am 5 foot 1 and I look so small next to this

 snowman.  There are a handful of these big guys around town.  The last picture is one of my students, Bridger.  We placed stickers on a worksheet and he took the outline of the stickers and placed it over his mouth.  I thought he looked like Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.  He thought he looked silly and had me take his picture. 

 I am cross country skiing 5 nights a week.  Our big Ski for Women's race is this Sunday.  We ski at 11 am and will be home in time for the Super Bowl.  Because of the time difference we watch the Super Bowl at 2:30 pm and still have an evening afterwards.  Aren't you all jealous?  Go Pittsburgh!!!  The advantage of living in so many states is that we can cheer for just about any sports team.  We lived in Pittsburgh once.  Go Pittsburgh.  It was one of our shortest stays in a state.  I think we lived their 18 months.  But we can claim the Pittsburgh Steelers!!

Tuesday after skiing we will go and participate in the Trivia night again.  Last week they asked such difficult categories. You would think with 8 people we could have aced the category of "alcohol" . Nope! we didn't know most of the questions.  We did well with anatomy, science fiction and bombed on Professional team mascots.  Do you know what the Titan's mascot is named? How about the Bears mascot? Look into it and I bet you didn't do any better than we did.

 Well, that is my news for the week.  Hope you all are staying warm with all the cold weather and snow.  Hopefully we will get some snow in the next few days. The forecast is for 4 days of snow. That would be wonderful.
  If you feel the need to take an adventure, come on up and visit.  there are so many things to up here.
Until then,  Sheryl the Nanuq of the North

Brrrrrr It's Cold Ice Fishing

It is January 2011 and Anchorage has no snow.  The lower 48 has all the snow.  This isn't fair.Well, I knew if I waited long enough, it would snow.  It did!!!  I had a wonderful winter break in Memphis. I went home a week early and it was fabulous.  We celebrated our family Christmas in Chicago this year rather than everyone coming to Memphis.  The Warmbold picture was taken in Chicago with Tyler, Cara, and Jensina.  We had 20 of us for three days staying at my brother Chip's house. It was such a blast of family fun. We were thrilled that 4 of my siblings and Mom were able to be together this past holiday.  David's sister, Nancy, and family came to join us for the day and the traditional "Pictionary" game was once again won by the GIRLS!!!!! If you only saw what the boys drew.  That strange picture above was David's drawing of  "a strap".  Go figure? No wonder the women won. Since I returned to Anchorage, it has been a very hectic pace. I was fortunate enough to have another "moose encounter" a couple of days after returning.  That is my white Volvo in the background.  This moose was a grown teen but not quite an adult.  That is according to the hunters at my school.  I got very close to the hungry moose with one of my pictures.  So close I thought he was going to climb over the 6 foot fence to discuss his photo fee.  I got the message - please leave! So I did.  The trees outside my classroom  show the beautiful hoar frost against the gorgeous blue Alaskan sky.  School has been so exciting since I returned.  We have been learning about the different body systems and building paper models of the different systems.  Aren't they the cutest students.  I love teaching them and they soak up any information I provide.  If the students complete each lesson with a few minutes left over, we play "Minute to Win It" activities.  This young darling, Teleahlofonti, demonstrates how important it is to keep our muscles in good shape.  You never know when a cookie will land on your forehead and need to travel to your mouth using only your facial muscles.  The older classes had to tell me which muscles they used to participate in the MITWI.  My next MITWI will be fun to watch as well.  In early January, we celebrated all of our friends January birthdays by having an "Ice Fishing BDay Party"!!!!! And as luck would have it, it was minus 14 degrees this particular day on Fire Lake (one of Eagle River's float/ice plane landing strips).  Standing on ice was too cold for most of my friends, but I wore my Bunny Boots (US Air Force approved) and my tootsies were very warm.  Andrew agreed to give us fishing instructions and he brought all the fishing equipment.  The rest of us had to bring the chili dogs, brownies, Frito's, hot chocolate and the cold adult beverages.  The red Eskimo house was big enough to hold three adults while fishing.  We only had one fishing pole in there so we could keep the heater and food a bit warmer.  The auger drills the hole, then you attach the bait (salmon eggs froze so we used shrimp) and set the pole.  Andrew had fancy "pop up" pole indicator so we could attend to the hand held poles.  We had 12 fishing holes surrounding the tent.  The red thing is a skimmer used to skim off the top layer of ice so the fishing pole line doesn't freeze.  Andrew said the ice was 8 inches thick where we were fishing.  Andrew and Beth (room mate) shared a brew after about 5 hours and no fish!!  We saw a wonderfully big Pike swim beneath the hole but didn't take the bait.  The last few minutes we were fishing a float plane landed use beyond where we were fishing. That was so cool.  Each of us had an opportunity to drill our own fishing hole and then a group picture of the three of us with the "big auger". This week we have been busy hosting lots of activities. Last night our small apartment held 30 people for a Silpada jewelry party and then today I hosted the DKG chapter for breakfast and workshop to prepare for our April State Convention.  Lots of things are happening. I am getting so excited about the Iditarod this year (March 5). I am working the start of the race, as a dog handler (someone who gets the mushers dogs in line to race) and then I fly to Nome to help with the finish of the race.  I will be staying with a local family and work many different jobs.  More details to come.  My other big news is I will be taking a Bear trip in June.  It will be on Admiral Ty Island by float plane, kayaking and hiking to observe bears in different habitats. It will be mating season at that time.  More about this trip later.
I hope all of you will have a wonderfully warm January.  Memphis has had more school days off due to snow.  We finally got a few inches of snow last night and we went cross country skiing today. It was fantastic.  We work just a sweater, hat and no gloves because it was so warm (27) compared to the last few weeks when we have been below zero every day.
Take care. I will try to be more consistent with my blog. Hugs from Sheryl the Nanuq of the North!