Another Week in Alaska

Here we go--another weekly summary, since I can't be relied upon to blog every day.

This was a somewhat exciting week. Our friends Erin and Anthony were out of town, so we were cat sitting. Their cat Atticus was very affectionate when we went over to visit him. It made us miss our own cats.

On Tuesday, the alternative school had its graduation. Let me say that this was a pretty long graduation for just 10 students. I went, and I was proud of these students, some of who I knew, for graduating from high school. A lot of them had very difficult circumstances, and the alternative school gave them a chance to graduate despite difficult family situations or newborn children. It's a great program. Graduations around here, though, are long affairs. Each graduate had a slide show of pictures accompanied by a song. They also had a lot of award certificates to hand out. It took forever! Also, our pictures didn't come out so great. Here's a decent one of the graduates.

You can't see her in this picture, but we were really proud of Samara's boss's foster daughter, who graduated. The young man in the front row holding the certificate is Shane--we were also very proud of him for graduating.

In fact, Samara had to do some work late at SAFE this week, and she arrived home one evening with Shane in tow. He needed a ride out to his mother's house at the end of Aleknagik (Lake) Road. She lives in a subdivision out by the lake. We like Shane, so we didn't mind making the drive. Since we were out there, we stopped by the dock at Lake Aleknagik afterwards. It was around 9:30, so the sun was starting to go down.

Here's Samara at the boat ramp.

Yes, there's still ice in the lake. And she's standing on some.

In her flipflops.

And if you dip a toe in that water, it ain't warm.

What's really neat is that some of the ice is really clear.

Like this large chunk, which I'm gonna toss into the water.

And, as promised, a sunset.

After one of the visits to Erin and Anthony's cat, we pulled into the boat harbor and caught sight of a boat in the bay.

It's getting close to fishing season, and our barges can now get into the bay because the ice is mostly gone, so there will be a lot more boats in the bay these days.

At work at the courthouse, the phone system stopped working one day. When people dialed in, they got looped around in the initial message, and couldn't hit zero to get the operator. (Apparently dialing a direct extension worked, but no one knew to do that.) We were scrambling around trying to get people on the phones for various hearings. The Clerk of Court, Tonya, talked to someone at Nushagak that said the phone system ought to work if we just shut it off and restarted it. So we did--Tonya and I went into the server closet and she switched off the phone system and then turned it back on. Turns out it wasn't the phone system we rebooted.

When we went out into the front office, the alarm system was going crazy. Tonya tried to reset it, but the red alarm light started flashing. She knew that meant that the police were getting our silent alarm. We just stood around and timed the police to see how long it would take them to respond. What we didn't realize is that police dispatch was trying to call the courthouse to see if everything was okay, and wasn't getting through because the phone system still wasn't
working.

I go into the courtroom to mention the alarm to Theresa, and she makes some comment about the troopers showing up with guns drawn. I walk back out and the people in the front office are looking out the window saying that Police Chief Thompson is here. Tonya comes running out, and we both go outside. Chief Thompson has his vehicle parked sideways in the lot, and he's behind it with his gun unholstered. Misty, Lori and Grant are waving to him from the window, and he is motioning for them to come outside. He assumed there was a real emergency, especially after we didn't answer the phone. So Tonya and I tell him that it's a false alarm and that our phone system is broken. He radios dispatch and tells them to stand down the troopers.

We very nearly had all the police in town in our parking lot with their guns drawn. Thankfully, Chief Thompson understood and wasn't mad about it. But it was a pretty interesting situation. The upside is that there's a good police response time when our alarm goes off.

That wasn't the only thing going on at the courthouse this week, though. We also had a belated Law Day/Juror Appreciation Week celebration. We did a carwash for anyone who had ever served on a jury. Including our own cars, we probably only washed about a dozen cars. So there was a lot of standing around, talking.

That's (left to right) the judge, his assistant Theresa, Lori's son Brett, Tonya, a tiny bit of Misty's head, and Lori. It was pretty warm, but the wind was blowing pretty hard from the north as well. Our hoses and buckets stood dormant quite a bit.

But we did wash a few cars as well!

It was an interesting way to celebrate Law Day.

Today, Samara had training for new advocates at SAFE. I was supposed to be on call as a deputy magistrate this weekend, but because the training judge didn't get the certification over to the presiding judge to sign off on the order appointing me, I had to have the judge cover my weekend instead. Samara planned to take the new advocates to the courthouse to watch arraignments, but the judge got lucky and there weren't any arraignments this morning. Samara got me out of bed instead and I gave a little tour of the courthouse to the trainees. We discussed protective orders and what each courtroom was used for, and I think it was good for getting them familiar with the court system. I'm sure I'll be doing arraignments soon enough.