The Meat Tragedy

Recently, a teacher friend, Josh, got his first moose and gave us a slab of ribs and back to cut up. Leah and I spent about 4 hours one afternoon cutting and packaging moose meat. Stocked with moose roast for the winter, we felt we were pretty set, and were just waiting on our SPAN food order to come in.

Howie and Josh work on dividing the moose.

It's Yup'ik tradition that when a boy gets his first moose, he doesn't eat any of it, but instead distributes it to the community as a way of thanking the animal for giving its life so that we poor hairless and defenseless little humans may survive in the winter conditions. It also shows that he knows the honorable way to handle a hunt, and is growing into a man who can help provide for his people. Josh gave the grand majority of Mortimer here to the community as well.

To the left: The moose ribs before the packaging session. Our refrigerator-freezer does not have the space for such a cut, so I brushed up on my dissecting skills to make it more manageable.











We cleaned them to the best of our ability. I don't have a shot of the amount of meat we took off of there, but it was a good 25 pounds or so. To give you an idea of the size of these things, if I laid my elbow next to the spine there, the ribs would be longer than my whole forearm, hand included.









Imagine my dismay when, during lunch one day, I went into our back room and noticed a funny smell. I opened the freezer door, noticing with a nagging feeling that the door was pretty easy to open. Normally, I about have to throw my shoulder out in order to open the thing. As the door opened, a wave of freshly thawed fish and blood odor smacked me in the face. I looked down and apparently the packaging job we did on the moose meat wasn't so stellar, because there was a nice little pool of moose blood laying in the bottom of the freezer. A king salmon, gutted and gifted to us by our principal, was nicely thawed and luckily laying on top, away from the blood pool.

The saddest part? The $20 gallon of ice cream was completely melted. Leah and I took it as a sign that maybe we should limit the sweets. Bummer. That's one of our only vices here!

My lunch period quickly dwindling, I had no idea what to do. I checked the temperature setting, which was fine, and felt for blowing air. Hmm. I felt cold air blowing, but not cold enough air. I checked in with Josh's wife Shelly, who stays at home with her three boys, and she looked into it for me while I was at school. Three hours later, she told me that cold air was blowing but everything was still completely melted, even with the temperature cranked as low as it could go.

Well, luckily our SPAN food order hadn't come in yet. Otherwise, that would be close to $700 melted down the drain. Or, more correctly, it did come in that day but due to our situation, it's living in the school's freezer for now.

Thanks to my parents and grandparents, I know not to waste anything, so I started about 3 moose roasts and cooked the fish Monday night. We held a huge teacher dinner to attempt to use up all that food. Some of the meat was still frozen, and some had been prepackaged, so since some of it was still cool, I waited until this weekend to cook it all up into soups, other roasts, and casseroles. The upside to the (near) meat tragedy is that I now have all sorts of meals precooked and frozen to last at least until Thanksgiving. Woo-hoo!

As for the freezer, it's working for now, but I'm hesitant to put our whole food order in there until the maintenance guy has time to look at it. Interestingly, the water main break occurred just days after the year warranty walk-through of our buildings, and the freezer fiasco took place just about a week later. Something fishy is certainly going on. Hopefully no more issues arise as we approach winter.

Speaking of winter, no snow yet! I'll let ya know when the snow finally sticks.

Happy Sunday!

Water Main Break!

I woke up Tuesday morning this week and went to the bathroom to get ready for the day. I turned on the faucet to brush my teeth, but, alas, the faucet just shuddered and no water was to be had.

Bummer. I usually shower at night, moreso out of morning laziness than anything else, but in the back of my mind I guess there is always the nagging possibility of waking to no water. Of course, the one night that I decided to wait until morning, a water main breaks. I'm pretty sure this would only happen to me! Such is my luck.

So...fantastic! "This will be interesting, but will surely make a great blog post," I thought. I really was more bothered by a lack of working toilets than the lack of a shower or faucets. The break caused a pressure drop in the system, so water was also out at school until about 10:30 am, when some of the city workers engineered a patch to get us through the day. That certainly wasn't the most fun morning, because no water = grumpy kids. Thank goodness water was restored to the school, because it would still be a while before it would return to the teacher housing.

Now, this had happened once last year, but it only lasted about 8 hours. We now live in brand new teacher housing, so I really hadn't thought of this as a likely problem. Turns out there are some structural issues with the new housing; my building is literally floating on the east side. Building on tundra is tricky business, and my whole 4-plex unit needs to be re-leveled, lest the building snap in two (or two hundred) pieces. The water main under the other unit is where it busted, likely due to the sinking and settling of that building.

We got word that at least three days would pass before it could be fixed. My new roommate, Leah, and I had just started the Insanity workout program and were only 3 days into it. This little problem has paused it for us for a while for obvious reasons. (Between you and me? I'm not sad about having to pause that program. It truly is insane.)

Adding to our stress? In another moment of insanity, we decided to take in a little puppy for a while, as its owner informed us that her mother would "rip its head off if she didn't find a home for it." This comment did not sit well with Leah, and so, puppy parents we became! It really is no fun to manage puppy poo without flushing toilets or water to clean up messes.

Here is a shot of the lil lady. We are sending her to Anchorage
as soon as she is big enough. A few of her names include
Pooh Bear, Bessie, and Jackie. About 6 weeks old, we think she's
 part husky, mutt, and possibly wolf. Most village dogs are
mixes. If being a teacher hasn't already inspired me to put
 off having kids, then caring for her may have pushed that
ordeal even further into the future. I just really enjoy sleeping
through the night, and with her, I don't get to do that. 

My biggest fear, however, was none of the above, but the potential of having to go without my morning coffee. That scared me. I just don't have the gusto to face my students without my morning cup o' joe. I didn't know if I would have enough water to get me through Wednesday. Luckily, I wouldn't have to do such a thing.

To deal in the meantime, I showered at the school and we hauled totes of water from the school. Leah kept saying, "This isn't real life. But this is our life right now. It's like we're camping in our houses." I had only one response as I drove the huge school truck over to fill our totes:

"Just think of all the bar stories you can tell already! You've been dumped into the Yukon River while camping with kids, visited three other villages, rescued a puppy, and now we get to haul our own water! And this is only the first month of school!"

Thank goodness we have just a few 18-gal
totes lying around collecting dust! We
filled two and also had a gatorade cooler
to use in the kitchen.

Leah is a trooper. She's from Pittsburgh and does a great job with her students. She reminds me a lot of myself at her age, so we have fun!

Thankfully, the water got turned back on Thursday night. I really was settling in for a longer haul; I've heard that other villages have been without water for as long as three months. YIKES. I don't know how I'd be coping at that point.

Well, we survived and the good news is that the water is on for now. From what I hear, it's a temporary fix, so I expect outages in the future, but hopefully we will be forewarned. If not, oh well...

Here is a shot of the morning sky from my front door. This was a couple weeks ago, and I no longer enjoy such perks, as the sunrise is already pushed back to about 9:10 am. Some of you have wondered about the cold, and it's still in the low 40s, getting to about 35 degrees at night. Last year at this point, I'm pretty sure we had snow, but maybe not. It's set to snow next week. 6-month long winter, here we come!