The Daily School Bus: Working on the ice roads

Here's that little school bus again. It just might be the last time you see it or another on this blog for awhile, for a few different reasons. The most important reason is because my internet connection here is very slow and, couple this with Squarespace problems,* my posts take more time to put up than I can afford to give them. So, for the remainder of my time here in Nuiqsut, my goal will be to put up just one post a day, at the end of the day. I can't have the rest of my posts all on one little school bus. Second, while this is a school bus, it is not being used as a school bus. For the moment, there are no roads that reach beyond the village but every winter a series of ice roads are built to link the Alpine oil field and its satellites to Prudhoe Bay and the haul road and Nuiqsut gets linked into the network. That process is under way right now but is behind schedule due to the prolonged period of unusually warm weather. That, I am sure, is why the fellow yesterday was complaining about how "too damned hot" the -1F temperature was. They want cold weather to build the ice roads. This little bus carries workers staying in the hotel to the places where ice road construction is under way from here. There is a separate school bus to serve the school but it is not being used right now.

*Well, you can see one of the Squarespace problems I refer to - all that gray. This has been happening to almost every post I have put up since I arrived in Nuiqsut and to several in Barrow, occassionally in Wasilla. To correct it, I must email a picture from my iPhone to my computer and then upload and place it in the old-fashioned way. I just don't have the time for this. I'm going to leave it now as an example of the kind of headache Squarespace has been for so long. Hopefully, their new platform will be as good as it is touted to be and these problems will disappear. If not, then I will disappear from Squarespace.