Long time, no blog

Hey there everybody.  Sorry I haven't blogged in over a week. My blogger account was disabled for some funky reason, but I got it all figured out.  Some of you may have noticed a change in the look of this blog.  Blogger just informed me of anew "design" option, so I've been playing with background pictures for the past hour.  You may be asking, "Why pretzels?"  Well, you see, I love pretzels and I figure I will be more likely to blog if I get to see pretzels every time I make an entry.

So you probably want to know about what I've been doing up here for the past two weeks.  Many things things deserve their own blog post, so I'll leave the out for now (sneak peak: running sled dogs on a scooter!).  For this post, I will focus on my job, because I'm sure many of you are curious what it is I'm actually doing up here, because I'm just starting to figure that out also.

First, I must say that summer has finally hit this week.  Leaves are sprouting.  Flowers are blossoming.  Mosquitoes are buzzing.  On Monday, the wind finally switched directions and started coming from the land instead of the ocean, so the temps have been in the upper 50s, not mid-30s like for the past weeks.  The sea ice has all migrated away.  Actually, I saw a seal swimming near shore last week.  The tundra is also starting to pop with color.

So... my job.  I teach kids about the natural and cultural resources of the area.  We provide 3 different free programs for kids:

1. Story & a movie: For younger kids, I'll read  few story books and show a couple movie clips for an hour.  The stories and videos all relate to a selected topic and it can be difficult and time consuming to find enough media related to one theme.  But I do get to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy.
2. Art class: For all ages of kids (and I was quick to find out that the given age ranges don't necessarily determine who is actually going to show up to your programs).  It is what it is, an art class focusing on a local natural or cultural topic.
3. Jr. Rangers: For school-age kids, this is a two hour program that offers a lot of freedom.  One can set up a game outside and do a science experiment inside or show a movie clip all in the same program.

Our park is unlike many in the national park system.  It is remote (there are no roads, trails, or designated campsites within our parks), so we do not have a lot of families coming through on their vacations.  Back country permits are not required, so we often don't see many of our visitors.  In most national parks, educational programs are intended for the one-or-two-week vacationer, but since our headquarters isn't based in any of the parks, we have lots of regular kids from the community coming to our programs.  This means that we need to keep our topics fresh every week.

The kids here run around unattended.  It is a small town, after all.  Some of them have cell phones, which might be used to keep track of them, but more often they are used for playing the latest Lady Gaga songs (such lewd lyrics).  The kids will jump up in your lap if the feel like it, which is a lot like the daycare and not like a national park, but like I said, our park is different.  Really awesome, funny kids.

And for this blog post's photos, I will tell you about my latest art project I dd with the kids.  Remember that time I bought the cool knife made out of mastodon ivory.  Well, the guy that sold me that knife told me it was a storytelling knife.  Little girls wood use knifes made out of wood, ivory, bone or whatever to illustrate stories to their friends in the sand.

I thought it would be cool to have kids make storytelling knives out of popsicle sticks and create their own symbols and stories to for an art project.  However, all my research (from books and personal contacts) told me that storyknifing was a Yu'pik tradition, from people who don't live in this area of Alaska. I decided to switch projects, but I was encouraged by my boss to do this project later, despite my concerns.

I chose to make baleen scrimshaw.  When the Eskimos go whaling, they use all parts of the whale, and that includes the baleen, the filtering structures analogous to teeth on a bowhead whale.  Etching drawings into pieces of baleen is a common art for around here.  I included a photo of actual baleen (weird-looking stuff).  We made rainbow baleen scrimshaw for my art project, by coloring baleen-shaped pieces of paper with crayons and then coloring a layer of black crayon on top of that.  Taking a toothpick, the kids etched heir own drawings.  Afterwords, they taped segments of yarn to the back of the paper to mimic the dangling baleen hairs (though musk ox hair would have been ideal for this part). 

Whoops, the photo is tilted sideways.  Okay, tired of typing.  More blogging later.