No Draining

Hmmm, What Toy Should I Play With Now?

For almost the past month here the "downtown" part of Noatak has been on limited or no draining. The power went out for a couple days and the pump at the lift station froze up. Then when the pump wasn't pumping the line from the lift station to the sewage lagoon froze up. They have been working on the line for the whole time it has been down, they just keep running into problems. First people kept draining to fast for the lift station to get drained out to work on the pump. We went almost that whole week with no draining. Finally they got the the lift station emptied and the pump fixed. Then the line to the sewage lagoon froze. We had limited draining for that week and a half. The sewage got pumped from the lift station into big totes and then hauled by snowmachine and sled to the lagoon. We were back to no draining for a couple more days and now it is limited draining again. Rumor has it there's some more guys coming tomorrow to help finally finish the job. Our fingers our crossed.

Thankfully we still have water. Some of the ways we improvise to provide a drain like atmosphere. I took the plumbing out from under the sink and replaced it with a five gallon bucket.
Under Sink

I bailed out the toilet water and replaced it with a garbage bag and some diapers for absorbancy. Pulled the washing machine out and put the drain into a tote.
Toilet

The washing machine didn't work so well. As it turns out the washer uses somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty gallons of water, which is a real pain. We have been taking showers at the school, and at one of the other teachers house who lives uptown. They still have drain capabilities in uptown. When the buckets fill up I go dump them outside.

Washing machine

I went out fishing and check traps on Saturday. All my traps were empty. I am starting to fill in the line a little bit with more traps now. Hopefully just a matter of time. I caught exactly 10 trout. 5 in shallow water and 5 in deep water. It was another good day to be out.

Kayla showed Oren where the dishes are

Oren is really crawling around now. He's been going on his hands and knees for a while. Finally he just decided to take off and crawl. Now he can go everywhere. It was funny today when Kayla was calling for him in his room. He saw her go into the room so he started crawling over there, but instead of crawling over to and through the door he thought he might be able to take a shortcut through the wall. He bumped his head and then tried pushing at the wall. No brains no headaches. We got a good laugh.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Girls Head to Anchorage

Image
The week before Easter, Anya had some appointments scheduled in Anchorage. Around that time gas went up to 15.99 in town. Yep. That's not a typo. $15.99/gallon. Gas is still $5.50/gal in Kotzebue, so we decided we could drive to Kotz and the girls would hop on the jet while the boys filled drums of gas and drove back to town. Our friend is a trooper in Kotzebue so we were able to stop in there to warm up and regroup. Brett went out to get gas and NONE of the pumps were working! It was such a bummer. He didn't even have enough gas to get home, but thankfully we have such kind generous friends that had some jerry jugs he used to fill the machines. Of course Oren ended up driving my machine back and was an absolute champ. It took us about 3 1/2 hours to get down there and about that for them to get home too. The Borough was working on making an ice road from Kotz to Noatak. We heard they didn't make it past this tricky spot and stopped to check it out. (The oper...
Read more

Uvlalautaq!

 "Good Morning."  Not really appropriate, considering its 800 pm, but its the only greeting I know :) Guess what I get to (have to) do this weekend?  REFEREE volleyball games!!!  Only here would I even be thought of for that.  In no way do I qualify, for I hardly know the rules!  Apparently, last year Timm, the volleyball coach, had to ref because no one else knew how to.  I guess better me than him... It's been around 10 degrees for the last week, but we still don't have snow!  The frost on the tundra sure looks like snow, but its just thick frost. With the time change, the sun is setting at about 5 now, so it's quite dark by the time I walk home. One of the girls in my class hurt her knee last week and was on crutches for a while.  Finally, today she came in without crutches, so I was talking with her about it and how excited I was to see her walking on her own.  She replied, "I sure pray last night for my knee to get better and I wake up this morning and w...
Read more

A new respect

I have a new respect for all officials.   I think that every coach should have to officiate a game, just to realize how difficult it is.  I had to referee volleyball games this weekend.  That's just one clue to how laid back everything is up here :)  The opposing coach was very loud and outspoken... she definitely made her complaints heard!  It did get a little bit easier with the more games that went on.   This was the only home weekend for the volleyball team, and on Friday the gym was packed.  Everyone was early, just waiting for the game to start.  Saturday was another story.  The games began at 12:30 and at 12:15 the gym was still EMPTY.  Everyone here really likes their sleep.  Community members and students trickled in through out the first match, but there was still only about 1/5 the number of fans as the day before.  They played two matches and a few more people came in for the 2nd.   Another funny story about being laid back:  with two minutes left of warm-ups, we still ...
Read more