Friday

Almost a week is gone by already...it's really very sad. :( We've just finished up with maths for the day, so I'm taking a moment to give you an update. We've covered a lot of ground in the past week, 20 lessons so far, ratios, Pythagoras, simultaneous equations etc. It's good to refresh your memory, and it's doing my mental arithmetic a world of good. :) Ian works really hard and is really easy to get on with, so teaching him is fun and rewarding. But none of you care about maths anyway, so I better shut up about it.
Despite a ten day forecast of rain, the sun was blazing yesterday, and such good weather was too good to be wasted. Mrs Marble had bought 'a whole bunch of plants' so we went to Mr Petersons farm to get some fertiliser, affectionately termed 'cow poop'. Emily is working for this guy on his farm, and she is totally in her element there. She took us to see some kittens in the barn which were very sweet, and then Priscilla and I went after her on the quad and watched her spray a field with dung. I got to drive too, which was so fun. I tried in Canada with very little success, but I managed much better this time.
We went over to Talkeetna after that and had ice cream for lunch...yum yum! It's such a cool little place. Then we went to the Susitna river to get rocks for the garden. Isaac drove some of the way, and it was pretty scary seeing a 13 year old behind the wheel of this massive truck, but he was actually really good, a lot better than i would be, but that's not hard.
We did maths all afternoon, and then we had pasta with moose for dinner. It was very very yummy, killed by Ian, cooked by Abi. :) There's black bear in the freezer, can't wait to try it!!
We started on Maths pretty much straight after worship today. Priscilla had a friend over today, so they went out riding. Her parents are still in right now, lets just say they are quite stereotypical Americans, 'not real Alaskans'. Folks here don't seem to think of themselves as Americans at all. There was apparently a referendum to leave the US a couple of years ago, and it almost passed.
The twins have just gone off fishing. They're not allowed to start until midnight, but they have gone now to 'save their spot'.
That's all for now, thinking of you all at home, but can't say I'm homesick.

Wednesday

I'm here!! Believe it or not, I'm not so sure that I do. Here is photographic proof.
Everyone who is even slightly interested will have read the email I sent out, so I'm not going to bother writing out everything again here. It suffices to say that I love it here, and I actually couldn't be with a nicer family, except my own of course(!) I don't have all that long right now. Ian and I are just taking a 15 minute break from our aggressive teaching regime...or not. We got up around 8 today, and I wrote a bit in my diary before going upstairs. We keep such odd hours here because it's always light so the darkness doesn't make you go to bed. That means sometimes it's midnight before you know it, and then the next day you're tired so you go to bed at nine! The sun was shining, despite a 10 day forecast of rain, so Mrs Marble reckoned we should make the most of it. Abigail took me out riding, and boy did I have fun. I've been riding a couple of times before but this was way better, out in bear country crossing rivers etc, and I even got to canter on my horse. That totally beats the safety conscious riding round a field you get to do in the UK. It felt like a Little House on the Prairie set...!
Just went away there to do some more maths, and now we've just had dinner, and very good it was. (Salmon with potato wedge things and salad, mum, you'd love it here). We were later starting our maths today so we were busy with it till around 6. All the females of the household had left to go to piano lessons, so Ian and Nathan tried (not very successfully) to teach me to throw a frisbee. There's hope though, it's a little easier than skipping stones. :)
This is a bit of a topsy turvy post. Tuesday was fun as well. I've been here like 3 days and we've had an adventure each time. We went into Talkeetna, which is a little town with a lot of character. They get a lot of tourists there in the summer, as it's the closest place to Mt. McKinley. We went into a couple of touristy shops, and then we went to Mountain high Pizza pie for dinner, which was as good as it sounds. They have a lot more exciting flavours than at home i reckon. After we'd eaten enough, and a little bit more, we went down to a river which was very pretty, and we tried skipping stones there. I got one to skip, but I think it's going to take me a while. We went to a little old cafe thing for a cream cheese brownie for dessert, and then headed home. That's all for now.
This is Nathan

This is us all (Nathan, Isaac, Ian, Priscilla and Mrs Marble)

And finally, just a pic of the ice from the plane. You just can't capture it on camera though.

hi.

I'm new to this kind of thing, so this post is a bit of an experiment...
I leave for Alaska on Friday, which is tomorrow, I have to keep reminding myself! There is so much to do before then, and I don't much like travelling on my own, so I'm not really looking forward to staying the night in Frankfurt all on my own, and then flying for 9.5 hours out to Anchorage, but it'll be worth it when I get there.
Hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting to say...