Building an igloo at school

[pne]

Last night, I also talked with Mrs. Barrett, who taught fourth grade when I was in fourth grade.

My teacher that year was Mr. Armitage. He was from California, and regularly made us practice earthquake drills (because there are so many earthquakes in northern Germany...).

She remembered that he did many of the zany things others only thought about, and recalled the time we build the igloo.

Apparently, he had been planning that for a while, waiting for the right day with the right snow; he also arranged with the teachers to have them essentially give us the day off and he'd take care of us.

I didn't notice any of that at the time, except that I remember wondering at one point whether the bell for the end of recess shouldn't have rung by then.

A number of teachers and older students started building an igloo out of snow blocks they had rolled together out of the snow. Anyone who wanted to watch them had to "pay" with a snow block they made themself; that kept the number of gawkers down and made the igloo progress more quickly.

When it was done, we took turns going inside. I remember a teacher got a thermometer and measured the temperature outside and inside; when it was my turn to go in, I remember it was rather hot in there. They ended up making a hole or two in the wall for some ventilation and air cooling.

We stayed out there for hours, first watching the igloo being built and then taking turns inside.

Ah, good times, good times.

---

When I left yesterday, I bought an ISH-branded USB stick and a blue polo shirt with a yellow ISH logo. Stella said, "But you never wear polo shirts!" We shall see.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

One of my fonder childhood memories was building an igloo with my brothers and our neighbors. We didn't build a proper one... we put the entrance/exit hole on the top, which made it easier to build. But even with that obvious design flaw, it got ~warm~ inside. It was big enough for us to go in, and it did get warm. It was very neat.

On a side note, I didn't build snow men as a child. We built the igloo and we sometimes made snow angels, but we didn't build snow men. I think I eventually built a snowman in my early teens or just before my teens when visiting my sister, simply because I had never done so. I might have only built a minature one.

[arthur-sc-king.livejournal.com]

That's cool! I never built an igloo — you really need wind-packed sea ice snow to do the best job, and Yellowknife isn't exactly where you need to be for that.

However, my dad took a survival course when he was called to the bench in 1976 and realised that he'd now be flying all over the NWT (including what is now Nunavut) to hold court in various communities.

Part of the course was building an igloo. And, apparently, the true test of an igloo is whether you can stand on top of the dome without having it cave in under you. Dad had a "Molson muscle (http://www.canadianaconnection.com/cca/canadianisms.htm#molson_muscle)" at the time that put his weight up around 250 lb./115 kg, so he had to learn to make a pretty good igloo.

In 13 years as a judge, we figured he put on about half a million miles (almost a million km), but he never had a plane crash, thank heavens.

BTW, in Inuktitut, "iglu" just means "house". For "snow house", a better word would be "igluvijaq" (see here (http://www.livingdictionary.com/term/viewTerm.jsp?term=49132637940)). The "gl" is kind of at the back of the throat (almost like trying to say the letters "hkl" in a row, but lightly voiced), the "j" is like the European /j/ (English "y"), and the "q" is a "k" back on the uvula.

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

Building an igloo is on my list of things to do (in life)!

That sounds like an amazing day. Wish I had had one like it (I wish I had lived somewhere where there was snow when I was a kid! :)).