Community Craziness

It comes in the form of all things. The sun for one.

When the sun comes back from its hiding place at the other side of the earth, us Eskimo's try to cram in as much time outside to make up for all that SAD that we have in the months of December, January and February when the weather makes us all depressed, and fat.

So, springtime brings the sun, the shiifish, and the pounds shed off. It also brings craziness like the END OF SCHOOL. Our kids get out of school on MAY 7th. Seriously. (Ok, you can pout now!)



The school district recognized that a high percentage of students weren't attending school during the month of May (spring hunting season, and getting ready for summer hunting) so they did what they could to condense the school year (like removing three days of spring break) so that we could get out early. Yay, sort of.



The school system here is flawed though, don't get me wrong. Just this past week the following has happened: Academic Awards Banquet, Middle School Basketball Banquet, High School Graduation, Kindergarten Graduation, 8th Grade Promotion, and, the best of all...the Spring Carnival, where you can go spend twenty bucks on a single layer cake frosted in the tin pan it was made in! (Don't knock it, cause I made 18 of them!) And, probably catch Strep Throat cause its going around and you KNOW people aren't gonna stay home from the spring carnival!



I mean, where else could you get semi-permanent neon hair extensions for almost twenty bucks? Inflation, man...inflation!

So, hopefully the powers that be who read this will realize that when you're a parent of more than one child, in more than one sport/academic/activity/has-a-booth-at-the-carnival, that maybe, just maybe they should stretch out the days between the banquets and graduations and promotions.



IN closing, if you lived here, in three weeks time you could do the following: Catch 100 shiifish, go to the middle school basketball banquet to hear how great your kid is, go to the lions club basketball to hear how wild your kid is, go fishing and catch nothing but sunburn, watch the sun rise at 4:30 a.m., cut up 100 shiifish, go to BOTH academic banquets (middle school and elementary), go to the Kindergarten Graduation (GO GAGE and Quintin!), the 8th Grade Promotion (GO Koy and Toby!), the High School Graduation (GO Shy and Denali!), go to Junior Achievement, introduce a baby Noodle to her great-grandmother, listen to elders speak Inupiaq for three days straight, get some pink hair extensions, get a McDonald's cheeseburger for five bucks (we don't have McDonald's here), win a cake that you made with your 1$ tickets after playing seventeen times, slip on the ice, cause it melts during the day and freezes at night, eat a fresh goose for dinner, listen to the flies come alive once again, get your fingers looked at by a professional army-man, pull out a tooth, learn that Martha Stewart is a thief, get eight boxes of groceries in the mail, make a bunch of sourdough to give away and...have a few birthday parties!



Man...I LOVE the end of April! The end.