Powerflex training-DONE!

Yesterday 5 A Balanced Approach instructors and myself got a full day training of how to teach Powerflex Classes. Powerflex is a type of group fitness that is a full body weight workout class in 1 hour. Only 1 of us had participated in a Powerflex class prior to the training. We started the day with some light book work, then did a sample class with our trainer, Janet, leading. Then we broke the class down into components such as music, counting, and how to cue the specific moves. And then the fun part. Us teaching to the class.

We called it the "hot seat". You're up in front and count through the moves and guide the class. This was nervous and scary, but really good for all of us. Everyone had their own great strengths with it...counting, form, enthusiasm, etc.

At the end of the day, we were tired, but satisfied. And ready to start teaching this week! I'm sore this morning. And probably will be for a while.

Some cool things I learned (or re-learned since college) about benefits of weight training...
-If you do nothing about it, past the age of 30, you lose 1/2 pound of muscle per year--just due to aging. This translates into a 5 pound body weight gain per year if all other factors stay the same.
-Weight training improves your body's metabolism, because muscle takes energy to feed and grow, and fat doesn't.
-a Pound of fat takes up a LOT more space than a pound of muscle.
-The notion of women BUlKING up from weight training is a myth. Our trainer said women would have to spend hours and hours in the weight room to increase bulk significantly. And she said the only muscles we would see increase in size would be biceps and calfs. Weight training tones, not bulks.

My first class is Monday and I'm going to teach the first half o the class and Brooke is going to teach the second half. I"m EXCITED!!!! Its fun to be bringing Powerflex to Kodiak!

Zoya

One BIG Pile of Rock, Rain, and Bayonets

It is week two of Community Archaeology and all continues to go well. We have not found lots and lots of artifacts, but the ones we have found support our interpretation of the site as a temporary hunting camp. I am very happy that we have found a different 'type' of site. If we had wanted to find lots and lots of cool artifacts we could have always excavated an Alutiiq winter village. But the artifacts we are finding are telling a cool story about a whole different aspect of the Alutiiq seasonal round that had hereto not been known about - the Alutiiq Hunting camp. And if we had excavated another Alutiiq winter village while we would be finding cool artifacts we really would not be learning anything new.

All the artifacts we have found continue to be mostly hunting tools - Very few flakes or tool manufacturing debris and no ulus or netsinkers (tools associated with fishing). It does not look like the people at the site were making tools or fishing much. And this is surprising given the proximity of the site to the mouth of a productive salmon stream at nearby Salonie Creek. My best guess is that they were visiting the site to hunt seals, and that they did not spend a lot of time at the site. Basically I think they brought finished tools to the site, sharpened and refurbished tools while they waited for seals to show up, and then killed seals that they took them back to a base camp - perhaps to the nearby Salonie Mound site that we excavated a few years ago.

One of the big mysteries that we still have not figured out is a HUGE pile of rocks associated with the 5000 year old occupation. It obviously took a lot of work to create, those are some huge rocks, but what is it? My best guess at the moment is a meat cache. I remember when I worked in Baffin Island in the Canadian East Arctic that the local Inuit would create enormous piles of rock over cached walrus meat to keep Polar Bears from stealing the meat (I also remember seeing the polar bears still getting to the meat). Perhaps this is what we have found?

Photos: Tamara with a ground slate bayonet base used for hunting sea mammals that she found on the floor of a temporary structure. Second photo is of Carmin with a red chert flake - her first artifact. Third photo is of Tamara digging in the rain. Finally the last 2 photos are of the mysterious rock pile.

More Anchorage & Homer

Our trip to the Mainland was several weeks ago, and it always takes me several posts to get all the favorite pictures up!

Other highlights was seeing family, (Cathy and Mike in top picture, and my nephew Ben serving food at Bear Tooth and nephew Kellen holding the kids hands), and going to the H2Oasis water park in Anchorage with friends. WHat a great time was had there!! 2.5 hours of splish splash fun.

Zoya

Sheep Hunt Preparations

Pretty soon Gregg and I plan to head off on a Dall Sheep hunt in the Brooks Range in Northern Alaska. We do not know much about Dall Sheep hunting so I doubt we'll bring back a sheep but hopefully we'll learn something and maybe we will bring back a caribou. I'm really looking forward to just hiking and exploring a part of Alaska I have never experienced before. I first came to Alaska in 1985 but I still have never gone hiking in the Interior. The only parts of the state I have ever explored are the Aleutians, the Alaska Peninsula, and Kodiak. So this will be completely new. Heck I've never even been north of the Arctic Circle - even when I worked on Baffin Island in the East Arctic.

Today I checked out the new stove and mosquito netting we'll be using in the small tent we hope to live in. The stove and tent weigh about 4 pounds total combined weight. And I am very happy with how roomy it is inside there. The stove cranked and Stuey and I even boiled a pot of water on top of the stove. Gregg and I plan on saving weight by taking along very little in the way of fossil fuels and relying on the wood stove to cook our meals. I was worried about the mosquito netting but it is quite simple to use and ought to keep us sane if the bugs are really bad.

Anyhow, the kids REALLY liked the tent and want to sleep in it. Stuey like planning out where Gregg and I would sleep and where we would have our 'kitchen'. Patrick

Kids' First Dig

The first week of our Community Archaeology 2011 excavation at the Amak site is complete. And things have been going pretty darn well. We have already moved so much dirt that it is clear we will have to open up another excavation block. I already have another area of the site where there is a depression that might represent an old house pit picked out. We also plan on doing some test pitting in the immediate vicinity to find other sites and get a handle on the local geomorphology (where the beaches were and how all the local land forms were created).

It appears that the site was a temporary camp 3 to 4000 years ago, and we found a simple structure associated with this level. In the older levels around 5000 years old we are uncovering a huge pile of rocks whose function has us all a bit miffed at the moment. Next week we hope to get into the really old stuff at the bottom of the site.

But the highlight of the week for me was when Stuey and Nora visited the site with Jenny F last Thursday. They got to help daddy with the dig, and even do a little bit of their first ever excavation. Now they now exactly what daddy does all day during the summer. Their favorite job was returning everybody's buckets from the screen. Either Molly or I screen all the dirt from the excavation and after each bucket of dirt is screened it needs to be returned to the particular excavator to be filled again.

Photos: The landscape in front of the site is flat with bushes here and there and sort of reminds me of the planes of Africa - so I joked with Molly that the top photo is of her with Mount Kilimanjaro in the background (complete with snow). The second and third photos are of Stuey and Nora experiencing their very first archaeological excavation. The fourth photo is of Leslie W taking notes, and the bottom photo is the excavation in progress late in the day on Friday. Patrick

How the Amak Site got its name

Back in 2005 when we first found the Amak site I caught all the student interns giggling. 'What's so funny?' I asked. More giggling - and then Tristan K an Alutiiq intern informed me that the 2 mounds on the site looked just like Amak. Amak is the Alutiiq word for breasts. And yes the 2 mounds at the North end of the site do look remarkably like the breasts of a woman sleeping on her back amidst the willow and alder. And when I mapped the site there was no getting around it - the site topography does indeed look like a headless and legless woman lying on her back (bottom photo). And so the name stuck. I don't know of a more aptly named site.

Renovation nearing completion....

I"m nearing completion on the new birth class location--there was a major renovation in progress (see before and after pics!). About a month ago I showed a picture of a garage which needed some serious love to host birth classes. Its almost totally ready! Tonight I held the second session in it and am loving the space. It is warm, small and seems to be the perfect fit for my classes. The only final touches will be a couch and loveseat to make it complete. 6 moms were in attendance tonight and they were able to make themselves comfy on the mat and floor.
There is an electric heater which looks like a fireplace and kicks out some serious heat. In the winter, it will be quite cozy with the faux burning wood....

Zoya

Community Archaeology Underway

After 3 days of digging Community Archaeology 2011 is well underway. This year we are excavating at the Amak Site near the Salonie Creek Rifle Range. The site is almost a mile from the current shoreline, but 3,000 years ago Womens Bay extended a lot further inland and the site was situated right above the beach. During the last 14 years of Community Archaeology the Alutiiq Museum has been examining the Alutiiq Seasonal round in the Womens Bay area through time. Among other types, we have excavated late Fall fish camps up on Buskin Lake, Spring Cod camps on the outer coast, Winter villages, and Summer camps at the head of Womens Bay. We have excavated sites as old as from the 6th millennium BC and as recent as the 19th century AD. This year we hoped to learn what the Alutiiq were doing at the extreme head of Womens Bay 3-7000 years ago. We also hope to find one of the oldest sites on the archipelago (knock on wood here).

And so far so good. We know from a test pit and our excavation so far that the site has been occupied at least 3 times - once in the Early Kachemak period between about 3-4,000 years ago, in Ocean Bay II times around 5,000 years ago, and finally there appears to have been a super early occupation around 7,000 or so years ago. For the last 3 days we have been excavating the Early Kachemak component. What's cool is that unlike the contemporary and nearby site at Bruhn Point the Alutiiq do not appear to have used the Amak Site as a fish camp at that time. We have found none of ulus for cutting up fish or the netsinkers used to catch fish - both of which we found so many of at the Bruhn Point Site.

3,000 years ago the Amak Site appears to have been used sparingly as a temporary camp, and the occupants did not leave much behind for us to find. But we have found a surprising number of complete hunting tools - a sideblade, a chipped stone endblade, a pumice abrader and whetstone, a couple of scrapers - and very little in the way of flakes and other chipped stone debris that would have been created if people were making tools at the site. My initial thought is that the Alutiiq people at the site were bringing completed tools to the site from somewhere else and hunting seals. Perhaps they sharpened their tools as they waited for a seal to appear. The seals would have been up there in late summer chasing salmon up Salonie Creek.

Photos: Top photo - the team removes the last of the 1912 Katmai ash. The ash rested on 3000 years of grey silt tsunami deposits left behind by repeated tsunami inundations up the bay. Second photo is of Drew with a complete sideblade that he found. A sideblade would have been inset into the side of a bone lance and would have acted much like a modern broadhead on an arrow to create an extensive wound channel on a hunted animal. Third photo is of a red chert endblade that would have been set into the tip of a spear. Fourth and fifth photos are of the team digging down into the top layer of the site. The top layer represents all of the soil accumulation between the last major volcanic eruption and ash fall circa 3800 years ago and the 1912 Katmai eruption and deposition the thick layer of white ash seen in profile.

Ferry Adventures--And the kindness of people

PAPER AIRPLANE MANIA
Travelling with kids brings on challenges of many sorts, one of which is how to help keep little ones entertained for hours on end. I am always amazed by the goodness of strangers, friends, acquaintances who come out of the woodworks to help and this trip was no exception.

The ferry ride home was a memorable one for two reasons--Stuey's airplane frenzy as well as our tour of the wheelhouse.

As of late, Stuey has learned how to fold and fly paper airplanes. Our friend Mark R. who visits frequently from California to hunt and dig with Patrick, gave stuey hours of instruction on his last trip. Since that time, Stueys airplane making skills have really "taken off"- no pun intended.

In Homer, Stuey created 12 or so airplanes, which he flew and insisted we pack for the ferry. When we got on the Kennicott mid morning, we sat in the kid section. There was one other family there with two kids as well as a childhood acquaintance, who was returning from living in Australia for a several month visit-Aaron.

It didn't take long before Stuey's airplanes started flying and and landing all over the place. Stuey got Aaron's attention, and before long, Aaron started helping modify the wings of Stuey's planes to help improve the flying dynamics. Aaron is a civil engineer and added things like flaps to the wings, and ensured that the wings were of equal width so the plane wouldn't steer to one side.

The whole scene became quite comical, as it turned into literally 5 hours of Stuey flying paper airplanes. There were several people who were repeatedly "hit" by Stuey's airplane, and they were so nice about it. Stuey would have to offer occasional "Sorry" to people, which he was ok with and people appreciated that Stuey cared enough to apologize. And Aaron was so nice about continuing to fix Stuey's airplane every time STuey asked him, "You fly airplanes with me?"...which was about 6 times an hour, at least!!
After several hours, Stuey's wrist became tired from flying airplanes and he would shake his wrist in a funny ritualistic manner after each throw, which brought some laughs out of us.

Towards the end of the trip, we pulled out a bag of unused balloons i had and all the kids ran around blowing up balloons. Stuey would blow his up 1/2 or 3/4 way, then let go of it and it would go whizzing around the room. Amazing how much joy a few balloons can bring kids!

I am so appreciative for the family that was near us as well as Aaron as we all worked so well keeping the little ones entertained. There was a lot of laughter and all of us adults had a good sense of humor about things. There is nothing better than travelling around other people who are understanding and empathic with kids. And everyone around sure seemed to be. It isn't an easy task at times.

WHEELHOUSE TOUR---MY DREAM!!!!!
In the cafeteria at dinner, Nora asked a gentleman who was in a ferry shirt if he was the captain of the boat. The gentleman, Matt, very casually said, "yeah, I am. Do you want to see the wheelhouse where we steer the boat?". I was surprised and thrilled at the prospect of seeing the wheelhouse, as this has always been a secret dream of mine. Matt asked us to meet him 1 hour later outside the cafeteria, which we did. He took us through secret passcode locked doors, up a red-lit stairwell and into the Kennicott wheelhouse. I was in awe. The view was amazing. It was much larger than I imagined.

There was a gentleman, Shane, who was steering the boat and both he and Matt were so nice and let the kids sit on the captain chair and steer the wheel. I was thinking that Matt was somehow directly involved with the navigation of the boat, but wasn't necessarily the captain, as the chances of him being the captain were just too coincidental!! As we prepared to leave the wheelhouse, I said, "Thank you captain, Shane!". Shane replied, "I'm first mate, Matt is the captain." I felt so silly and had to explain to Matt that I didn't think it could be that Matt really was the captain of the boat...I thought he was pulling Nora's leg by telling her he was the captain. Matt was so kind to the kids and it was great of him to offer the tour to us. I felt like a kid on the tour!!

It was a ferry trip with so many high points. And Nora didn't get sick, which she was elated about. She has a tendency towards sea sickness, so it was nice for her to not get sick on either ferry trip.

Zoya

To the Mainland and Back

Last night the kids and I made it home from a 1 week trip to Anchorage and Homer. I've had the ferry ticket booked since April and I have been looking forward to going on a mainland road trip. We left on the Tusty ferry and slept all night on it. Nora was so thrilled to not get sea sick, as she often does. The crossing was almost completely flat--very little swell. When we arrived in homer we stopped for breakfast at my parents place then drove on to Anchorage to see friends and family and do fun kid stuff.

More pics and details to come later, just wanted to share some of the highlights...

The deck of the Tustemena as we pulled away from Kodiak. It was a gorgeous evening with temps in the high 60's.

The kids and I on deck the following morning in the Solarium as we pulled into Homer.

My friends Meghan (left) and Julie (right)-we went out for dinner at Sacks, a fun restaurant downtown.

Doulas of Anchorage! My friend Elke coordinated a doula hour so I could meet 2 other Anchorage doulas. These are women whose websites I've seen so it was so great to meet them!! What wonderful women they are. It was lovely to talk shop with other doulas!

Ice creams at the park. The ice cream truck accepted credit or debit card! Isn't that wild! I can't quite wrap my mind around the concept of using credit card for ice cream truck, so I paid the $3 in cash.

Zoya

Garden Doing Better

It has been a slow garden year, but I am happy to report that the garden is finally getting productive. Usually we are eating a lot of stuff out of the garden by the end of June - Just not this year! Still better late than never or not at all. And at least it is not a jungle of weeds either.

The snowpeas are about to bloom and the lettuce is prime. Since the potatoes are blooming I think I can dig up up some 'new ' potatoes too. I have even eaten a few carrots. The radishes have already all been eaten. I think we will eat beets on Monday night when Zoya, Stuey and Nora are back. Finally! Fresh veggies. Patrick