Moon over old Ipalook

This is the old Ipalook elementary school, converted now into offices of the North Slope Borough School District. It is a few hundred yards long and I have temporary office space towards one end of the building and I'm staying in Itinerant quarters towards the other. There is a labyrinth of hallway connecting the two, but there are a few doors to pass through and one of them was locked, so I had to go outside to finish the journey to quarters. I didn't mind at all, because I got to see the moon. Suji Niece, this moon is for you.

Text added at 8:13 AM. Even though the Squarespace nightmare may be technically over, until I can get home and find the time to switch to the new format, I still must live with the consequences of the old Squarespace malfunctions. This means I must add the text from my computer, not my phone. I had left the computer in the offices last night when I walked back to quarters about midnight and have now just returned to them. Hence, the big delay between the posting of the picture and the insertion of text.

The Daily School Bus: The school day is over; maybe the Squarespace nightmare is over, too...

The school day is over. I stop and wait as students get off the bus and head for home. About 3:30 PM. The sun may be down for good for a couple of months, but arctic twilight lingers.

This may be my only post today. Busy. A bit behind.

Text added at 5:01 PM. After 59 days, the Squarespace nightmare may be over. I got an email from Squarespace today. If it is over, its effects will continue to follow me at least until I return to Wasilla and find some time to figure out both how to upgrade to the new Squarespace platform and to decide if I want to. They are not fixing their defective app, but rather are introducing new apps compatible with their new platform, Squarespace 6, and will be dropping Squarespace 5, which this blog is built on, along with the iPhone app that went with it, that created this gigantic nightmare for me.

In the meantime, I will keep photographing The Daily School Bus, but no longer as a protest against Squarespace. I have always enjoyed getting a snap of the occassional school bus, but now, as irritated as I have been with Squarespace, I have enjoyed the challenge and fun of photographing a school bus every day, so I will keep doing it - at least to the Christmas holiday season. In three weeks, Margie and I plan to go to Arizona - first to Phoenix, where the airplane will drop us off and then on to her and my children's White Mountain Apache Reservation.

We will make a quick trip to Salt Lake City to see my brother, sister and some other relatives and then back to Arizona and into the Navajo Nation, where Lavina's family will host a traditional blessing ceremony for Jacob, Lavina and children and we will all participate. So I can't stop this project until I get school buses in all these places. It just won't be a protest anymore, but a project.

Maybe I'll make an iBook on Instagrams of The Daily School Bus. Even a real paper book would be fun, but what publisher would ever publish it for me? And where would I find the time?

Tonight, I stayed put to visit the likes of the late elders Arctic John Italook and wife Allaq-Esther, Elijah Kakinya, Laurie Kingik, Bessie Ericklook…

My time in Barrow is flying. As noted earlier, I made this trip not to shoot photos but to do research. Even so, I did hope to visit many people. Now I find my two weeks here is rapidly coming to an end. Friday, I leave for Nuiqsut, where I will stay through Thanksgiving. The Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture Commission has provided me an iPad loaded with almost 900 oral histories and 16,000 historical photographs. I must make a selection of which ones to have them copy for me to take home for further research. I should just skim, but I skim one sentence and then I want to read the second sentence and after that the third... Then I just keep reading.

This evening, I thought I would read and skim until about seven and then go out and visit, but here it is after 11 PM and I am just now forcing myself to stop. Given the way the histories appear in the iPad library, there is no way to tell what history is what. They all look the same. So I just dropped in at random. The very first history that came up was of Bessie Ericklook, late of Nuiqsut. I then found myself in the middle of variety of Nuiqsut related interviews. Given the three trips I have made to the village in recent months, I was fascinated.

In the morning, I plan to stop all this reading and to just skim. My goal is to make my selections from all 900 histories and all 16,000 photographs by the end of the day. Then, I can spend Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning visiting, talking and eating – and that can be every bit as informative as the research. The bears, by the way, were among the first to greet us when we arrived at Cross Island from Nuiqsut at the end of August. They seemed the appropriate backdrop to photograph Arctic John's interview about Cross Island.

Text added at 11:38 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 58 and counting.

The Daily School Bus: A most perplexing situation

It was 4 PM, afternoon coffee break time for me and I had just stepped out of the coffee shop to the right of the screen. I had a hot Americano in one hand and in the other my gloves and ear band. My iPhone was in my right back pocket. And there was my daily school bus, parked right there at the corner and a kid had just stepped off of it! But my hands were full and there was no place to set anything down!

Somehow, I managed to stuff my gloves and ear protector into the crook of my left arm and kept my coffee in my left hand, yanked my phone out of my hip pocket, turned it on and activated the camera with one hand and thumb and then managed to get off three snaps before the bus disappeared. This is the third. The first two show the bus better, but I prefer this because of the chilled smoke curling up behind the stop sign. Plus, you can see the ASRC building – home of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the most financially successful of all The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act regional corporations.

Text added at 5:41 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 58 and counting.

Bye-bye, Barrow sun… I expect to see you again someday…

I had hoped the sky would be clear down by the horizon so I could see and photograph the Barrow sun for the last time this year. Today, the sun rose at 12:45 PM and set at 1:38 PM. It will not rise again until 1:29 PM, January 22, 2014, when it will stay up for 20 minutes and go right back down again. The sun was setting behind those low clouds just as I took this picture of Randy Duncan, doing his part to bring light to Barrow through the dark months ahead.

Text added at 3:09 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 58 and counting.