And it's been frozen in bits. It's probably -- I can't remember the first day that I came -- I should've written down the first day that I came and part of it was frozen. The whole thing obviously hasn't frozen over yet, but there was a good chunk of it frozen. And today, all the ice went away after, you know, the third -- second or third day in the 40s, and it's, it's gone. But this morning, there was still ice and there were several bald eagles that were just sitting on the ice in the middle of, of the, of the lake or bay or whatever you wanna call it. And it was so cool and we tried to get -- we even have like a fancy camera that has a, you know, zoom lens that you can like switch out to get closer and whatever, but it just -- it was -- they were still too far away to really get a good picture to really see, but it was so cool. You could see 'em kinda dotting all over the, all over the ice, right, you know, kind of in the middle so that was, that was pretty cool.

My very first meeting at that school, the principal had every single teacher stand up. And then she informed a few of those teachers to go ahead and sit down, leaving a significant amount of teachers still standing. And then she put a random number on the screen which she said represented the percentage of students at our school who did not qualify as advanced per M-STEP scores. And she said, "Look around at everyone who's still standing up," talking about these teachers, who are being -- who are standing up. And she's like, "That's how many kids you failed this year." Which I don't know if I'm saying it correctly, but essentially it was a public shaming of the teachers who had not, I guess, successfully taught the -- every student to a point where they can then be considered advanced on the M-STEP. I remember thinking it was funny, because it was so preposterous. It was like a tone deaf scene from The Office, shaming teachers. And, you know, then the principal began asking, "How do you think this happened?" You know, she was pointing toward like, you know, "You must have taught poorly."  And stupid me, I'm used to having these conversations at my old school that are real. At my old small school, where we start talking about, like, “Well, let's take a look at demographics," you know, "Has there been a change in the types of students we’re serving? How about support staff? Have we lost support staff over time? Or teacher turnover? Which, the school, one of the big reasons I got the job was because there had been so much turnover, they needed new people coming through, like me. I remember asking these types of questions, like, "Has there been any other big change in the last four years since you've started to notice this downward trend?"  Um, and I had a co-worker, I don't know, months later, when she finally got to know me a little bit, she referenced that moment when I, when I innocently asked like, "Has there been any kind of big change in the last four years? That's something, I'd wonder if that would influence why we're seeing scores trending downward." She's like, "We all thought that was hilarious at the time when you asked that question, because you were being so sincere." But she's like, "That moment…

It was me, my sister, and my mom and we were downstairs watching TV. And then upstairs, we heard a sound. It was really scary and we were like, "Is there someone there?" Because we thought my dad was sleeping. So, is, is there someone there? And we don't know who and there's noise going. And we're all just a, a little confused, a little terrified. My mo- -- so my sister just stood up and went there alone. And then mind you, in a horror movie, you always stay together. The one who goes first dies. So, I did mention to her that this is exactly like in the horror movie where the monster is gonna kill you. Which she was like, "Eh, okay. Whatever." And then yeah, she just like, left. And obviously she was fine. It ended up being my dad, so. Apparently, he was not sleeping.

But I was going to have tea at Rovaniemi, and the food on the train -- this is a very, very, very old train. So the food booth -- it was a, like, it was about less than half the size of an Amtrak snack bar. Small, this is small. So the poor attendant was -- I would hate to be the poor attendant 'cause you're in a cramped space all day riding on that train. Of course, I don't speak Finnish and I don't read Finnish. I'm just a tourist in Finland. And the poor, poor attendant is there to serve Finnish customers. So she doesn't speak English. So I can't read anything that's on the snack bar menu, anything that's on the labels of the food products in that little refrigerator sec- section of the, of the snacks. I'm just, and I'm just having to guess what anything is. So there's a container that looks like a yogurt container, and I point to it and I, I, you know, I ask, "What's, what's that?" And she can't understand English too much. The best she can manage, manage to say is, "Yogurt.” So, I buy it. She gives me a spoon. I take it back to my seat.  And, it looks like yogurt inside, but when you pull out a spoon, instead of just the spoonful of yogurt coming out of the container, what you've pulled out on your spoon, it's, it's like, goo? It's still connected to what was in the container. So you pretty much have to just put it in your mouth and cut it with your teeth, or cut it with your lips to make that band -- a band that's connecting the spoon to inside the container, to cut that. It was very gooey, and visually, if you remember the Ghostbuster- -- the original Ghostbusters movie, there was a toy called Slime. It was like that, that's what it looked like, Slime, ‘cause, because, it -- There was that connection between the spoon, what you held, what you held up on the spoon, and the yo- yogurt that was still in the container, it just didn't separate. It was all connected. I found out later that the English term was curds and whey.