Dillingham Saturday

Wow, did I sleep late. I slept on the couch in the teachers' lounge
(separate rooms, you know), and I look at the clock with half open eyes
and it read 8:45. I thought it was a mistake. I can't remember the last
time I slept in past 8:00.

The girls lost the volleyball match last night. We ended up playing
Bethel because New Stuyahok, only about 40 miles away from Dillingham,
couldn't make it in because of a storm there. And I thought it was kind
of nice here, but Alaska will do that to you. We didn't quite exact the
vengeance that I thought we would. Our girls played hard, they really
did. We had some bad bounces. This gym here is amazingly small. They
are building a new one that is due to be done in a few months (just
like Nome). This is the small gym--their big gym was apparently
attacked by black algae and it has to be exterminated in a dry
environment with heaters during the summer. (I learned a lot talking to
the head custodian and his son last night. They are from Evansville,
Indiana, the same as my chaperone, Heidi. They also read comic books
and watch Star Trek. They told me stories of the kids taking the tops
of dry deodorant and then stomping on them in the carpeted floors just
to see if they could get away with it. I learned a lot of stuff. But I
digress...) This gym is so small that one of the girls, Kelly, told me
that last year in basketball, one of the girls tried to not go out of
bounds by pushing off the wall that is just like a foot from the
boundary line. She got called out.

Bethel didn't even have that one player, #16, who was tall and always
put in front just to block. Even though she had no real athletic skill
but being tall, she was able to hit it straight down. The Nanooks
played hard, we really did. Sometimes our own mistakes are killing us,
but that's volleyball.

(Being in the teachers' lounge last night, they have a library of
videos and DVDs for educational purposes tucked away in here. I was
able to watch a couple discs of Carl Sagan's Cosmos mini-series that
has been digitally remastered. Pretty cool, even though it is out of
date. It brings back memories of my mom giving me the paper with the
new pictures of Saturn from Voyager in the late 1970s.)

Today we are set to play against Kotzebue and New Stuyahok (if they fly
in--the plane went to go get them now, I have been told, but if
visibility stays low then they won't come), and Dillingham for their
senior night tonight in the marquee matchup.

I am glad we get to play Kotzebue again before regionals. Since they
are in our division it is important to know what we can do against
them. I want to play hard against the other teams too with us going
into a bye weekend for Thanksgiving and then regionals coming up.

The record for Nome right now is officially 2-2 for division play. I
put our record now at 12-7 for all of our games, including exhibition
and non-division.