(no longer) The Northernmost Jew

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Greetings from the major city of Kotzebue, population ~3,300. I came here so I could get fingerprinted, so the Alaska's Board of Ed can check into my past of molesting kids and other such activities.
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I am staying with a HAM radio operator here. He is teaching me some stuff. We are discussing the possibility of my setting up a node IRLP (internet relay linking project) node in Deering. I am also learning about some of the stuff on the radio. Right now we are on the "Weather and Traffic Net", where everyone in Alaska gets on and shares the local weather. (We seem to be the coldest.) I went on the "Insomniac's Net" last night at 10 pm. (Remember, that is 11 pm, midnight, 1 am, 2 am in the contigous 48. I'm not sure what time it is in England where one guy was.) The net-control asks trivia questions, and everyone takes turns going on and giving their answers. This goes on 365.25 days a year, with a different net-control each day of the week.

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Vaughn Ververs is the new editor of “Public Eye” a CBS news e-zine. His autobiographical introduction includes the following paragraph:
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But my real Alaska adventure occurred in Deering, another Eskimo village located on the southern rim of the Kotzebue Sound and about 50 miles south of the artic circle. We spent three winters there when my father accepted a job as principal of the small school (in 2003, the population of Deering was 138). Since we returned to Colorado during the summers, we missed out on the constant daylight, but the bitter cold winter nights spent staring at the dazzling Northern Lights remain strongly embedded in my memory. As do the kind and loving Inupaik people who lived there.
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On the negative side, he worked for the Buchanan campaign.
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If you want to read the article, it is at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/30/publiceye/main806218.shtml

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Ever since I was little I have wanted to see the northern lights. I have only seen a few here, and nothing like you see in the photos. A few times I have seen what looks like a hard-to-see greenish arch across the sky. The best auroras I have seen were years ago from an airplane while over Minnesota. This may be a bad winter for them; winters vary in an 11 year cycle, based on sunspots. 2 years ago was the best year in the cycle.
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If anyone from Deering reads this - If you see northern lights, please call me to let me know. I don't care what time of the night it is. Really. Thanks!!
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A few astronauts “visited” several schools in the area via teleconference and talked about their careers. They all had space experience. One was in a space station traveling at 5 miles per second around the earth. One game they had in zero gravity – they would open a bag of M&Ms and let them float around the cabin, while the astronauts raced to eat their assigned color. They tended by taking questions from the different schools. I got to ask the question I always wanted to know – how do bathrooms work in zero gravity? I don’t remember all the details, but mainly by suction, and they have restraints to hold the user in place. (If any of my students are reading this – notice how they stressed the importance of learning math and science!)

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Question from a posted comment: So, How do you keep all the skin on your face covered and still see where you are going?
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It is a bit of a problem. I have clothing that covers everything except my eyes. (The Taliban would like it here!) The problem is that when I breathe, the coverings deflect my breath to my glasses where it instantly freezes into a whitish translucent layer of frost. Then I can barely see through my glasses and kind of guess where I am going. I have ended up walking into and falling into a lot of snowbanks this way.
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I will have to find out what other people do. I don’t see everyone else wandering into the snowbanks. Of course, that might just be because my glasses are to fogged up to see them. Actually, other people can see, because sometimes someone says hello to me and I look around trying to figure out where (and who) they are.

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It is currently -44 F / -42 C.
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We are under an official US 'severe weather advisory': "A Wind Chill Advisory means that low wind chills to 55 below zero are expected. If going outdoors... be prepared. Be careful to cover all exposed skin."
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The skin on my legs got chapped THROUGH MY CLOTHES!

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Our school has two basketball teams, one for middle school and one for high school. We were looking forward to having a big tournament here this weekend. Teams were going to fly in from several neighboring villages. They were going to fly in Friday afternoon and stay for two days. (They would sleep in the classrooms. The school cook was going to work the weekend.) We had a pep rally in school Friday morning. Our students spent a lot of time making posters, some cheering on our teams, some welcoming the other teams. Everyone was psyched.
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At the last minute, the powers-that-be decided it was too cold for them to fly. –30 F (~ -35 C) is the official cutoff.
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:-(

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Since we in Deering are pretty surrounded by Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) I figured I would call attention to the dangers. At the moment, Portland and Seattle are a lot more exposed to it than we are here. DHMO killed thousands of people in Asia about a year ago, and did a lot of damage in the South in the past year. The website gives a lot more details. Go to the FAQ page:
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http://www.dhmo.org/
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To be fair, here is a pro-DHMO page:
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http://www.armory.com/~crisper/DHMO/

Here is a bit of a puzzle. Bering Airlines flies here twice a day. Their main office for this route is in Kotzebue. They fly a circle: sometimes they go Kotzebue – Buckland – Deering - Kotzebue, sometimes they go Kotzebue – Deering – Buckland – Kotzebue. They decide about half an hour before each flight which of these routes they will fly. If you are flying in or out of Kotzebue, that is fine. But what do you do if you want to go between Deering and Buckland (or vise vera)? You can’t be sure the plane will fly that way. You could take the morning flight from Deering to Kotzebue and then the afternoon flight from Kotzebue to Buckland, but then you have to pay the airfare from Deering to Kotzebue (about $100) and then the airfare from Kotzebue from Buckland (about $100) instead of just paying the airfare from Deering to Buckland (about $50). So you have to pay four times as much, in addition to dedicating the whole day to get to a village about 45 miles away. I have no immediate plans to fly to Buckland. School administrators sometimes have to when making rounds of the schools.

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I am now teaching 10 classes in a 6 period day.
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The school board for the Northwest Arctic Borough School District decided to change the way that students are put into classes. A while back they decided that instead of grouping students by age, they would move a student ahead when they passed tests on standards. As a result I had some students who were in the middle school and high school who were older than students mostly are at that point. The one problem was, some students were progressing slowly and were feeling discouraged, that they would not graduate and they were thinking of dropping out. Well they just decided to change back to a more traditional approach. They said that high school aged students who were still in middle school must be moved into high school this semester. So we moved more than half the middle school students into the high school. We also moved a few students up to the middle school.
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First period I teach “Workplace Basics”. I have about 10 high school kids looking into what they want to do with the rest of their lives. There is some internet service we subscribe to that gives a lot of information on different occupations and gives the students different types of questionnaires to assess their skills and interests.
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Second period is middle school math. I actually have three classes. Middle school math III is the 2 students who were in middle school last semester and they are continuing where we left off. Middle school math II has 2 students – one who was in middle school in the beginning of last semester but was then moved back down, as well as one student who was in middle school but fell behind, and we started a bit into the material. Middle school math I is the 1 student who was in just moved up into middle school and we started in the beginning of the material. (She has a test tomorrow.)
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Third period is high school math. One group is second semester geometry, consisting of the about 14 high school students who were in my geometry class last semester. Another group is first semester algebra, consisting of the about 10 students who were just moved up into high school. A third group, advanced algebra, is the 1 student (who is also in my geometry class) who is scheduled to go into the army after he graduates in May and needs the extra math credit.
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Fourth period is the math elective, with about 9 students. We do math and logic related stuff. Today we did a cross-sums together. The day before that we played with soma cubes.
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Then comes lunch.
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Fifth period is middle school science, with 5 students. We are currently learning astronomy.
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Sixth period is earth science, with about 25 students. We are currently learning astronomy, but the lessons do not match up with what we are doing in middle school, since the classes are learning out of different books.
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Lesson plans are a pain

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רפואה שלמה
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אנחנו מתפללים למענך

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While on this short vacation, I feel like I have to cram in everything I can’t do at home. I went to Shobbos dinner and lunch at Chabad of Anchorage. My friend Nechama had a Chanukah party. I went to the Mensa weekly dinner here, and their New Year’s Eve party. Unfortunately, Mensa did not have a games party this week, and the women’s Tfillah Group did not meet (both occur approximately monthly). I have had pizza and cheesecake with cherry topping and a graham-cracker crust. (I wish I remember which restaurant had this great fettuccini alfredo with smoked salmon.) I can’t watch Desperate Housewives, since I am not up-to-date.
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I am also trying to get what I need to take back. Top on the list is a clock radio with battery backup, so I don’t have to reset the clock every time we lose power, which is approximately once a day. And socks, and a compact-flash so I can return Scott’s to Scott. I got some classical music since falling asleep to classical music is good for my insomnia.
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And I saw a doctor!! I have been coughing up gook for a while. The doctor gave me a prescription.
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Believe it or not, life here went on without me. The mall I used to frequent expanded. My daughter’s kittens grew bigger. Movies went up to $9.25. Dark chocolate M&Ms came and went.
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I spent the first weekend in Anchorage. I went to Chabad for Shobbos meals. They have a very nice couple there who set up a small shul in their basement. A lot of guests show up there in the summer months. On Monday they had a Chanukah party. It was large, with about 500 people. Thy lit an ice menorah (see picture) and had a giant dreidel piñata (se picture). They had a play “The Runaway Latke” (see picture) which bore an amazing similarity to some story I remember about a runaway gingerbread man.
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In Portland, I got to spend time with my daughter. She’s a really good kid. I miss her.
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Nechama had a Chanukah party, so I got to meet up with a lot of friends from Portland.
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John had a New-Year’s-Eve party for Mensa. I miss them. He set of fireworks at midnight. (They are not allowed where he lives, but he invites the fire marshal.) They had dark chocolate M&Ms. I did pretty well in a game of double-elimination-hearts, and a game of Quiddler (a cross between gin rummy and scrabble). I figured I should have some alcohol, since I’m not allowed to have it at home, but I still don’t like most of it. I did have a tiny chocolate bottle of raspberry vodka (the bottle is made of chocolate).
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Max stayed in Anchorage with Stephen while I went to Portland. I had called Alaska Airlines to find out what paperwork Max needed to travel instate, and had that paperwork with me. When I got to the airport to fly back with Max, they said he needed proof of some other vaccine, that is just needed for dogs flying to Nome or Kotzebue. (I have to change airlines in Kotzebue.) Max did have that shot and I had paperwork for it from Schnauzer Rescue when I got him this summer, but I did not have it with me. I figured I could have S.R. fax his paperwork to the airlne, but we couldn’t reach anyone. Finally an Airline supervisor drove me to a vet’s office where Max got a shot, drove me back, and had someone escort me to the front of the security line so I could make my flight.
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Now I am back home and back at work. Vacations are always too short, aren’t they?

Today was the day that the earth is closest to the sun. Maybe that is why it is +4 F (-16 C) here. BTW, a survey found that the majority of people thought that the seasons are caused by the earth's changing distance from the sun.

If I win Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, will Ed McMahon fly to Deering to present me with that huge cardboard check? He'd have hard time flying with that, especially on the little puddle-hopper that flies into Deering.

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The letter "Occupation of Palestine started 30 years before suicide bombings" (Dec. 4) argues that the suicide bombings are a result of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Khaled Zayed wrote that the Palestinian violence is the result of the checkpoints Israel has set up. This confuses cause and effect. The Palestinian violence against Israel began with the establishment of Israel. The suicide bombings are the latest form of continuing violence against Israel that has taken many forms since 1948. The Israeli checkpoints are a response to that violence.
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Zayed claims that if only Israel would leave the areas it occupied in the wake of the 1967 war, a defensive war on Israel's part, all would be well and then "both sides can live in peace." Omitted is the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964 with the stated goal being the destruction of Israel. At that time, the West Bank was part of Jordan and the Gaza Strip was part of Egypt.
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Israel is obligated to protect itself and its citizens. When terror stops, there will be no checkpoints, because they will not be needed. This will happen only when the Palestinians finally accept the permanence of Israel. Only then will both peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, be able to "live in peace."
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(Printed in today's Anchorage Daily News. My father helped me write it.)