Barge Orders and Puppies!

Now don't freak out, family...we didn't get a puppy. But our friend Jahana did, and brought it by for us to have a snuggle with. It was the cutest thing ever, as you can see. Sort of looked like a little polar bear.

We also got our barge order in, finally! The skid (which was piled up about six feet high) got dropped off in the middle of the pouring rain. Thankfully some of Jon's students were around and helped us carry it in. We rewarded them with chocolate bars and pop, which they seemed to think was an excellent deal. We had ordered from a place called Hay River, and everything came through as we wanted, except for quite a few boxes of Diet Ginger Ale that we are hoping the CO-OP here will take in exchange for the real stuff. Jon is adamant that he won't be drinking diet. I think next year though we will just buy from Dan's store and ship it up through the shipping company...better selection and we can know exactly what we're getting.

Other funny items: 4 2.5 kg bags of skim milk powder because we didn't think we'd be able to buy milk. It's funny to think back about how little we knew when we were planning on moving up here. though to be fair a jug of milk costs around 15 bucks on a good day. We mixed some of the skim up though, and it's not bad...it will be good for cooking. It sort of tastes like milk at the bottom of a cereal bowl. It's surprisingly sweet. We also got so many cans of flaked tuna, ham and chicken because we weren't sure how easy it would be to buy meat.

Speaking of meat...we got a ton of caribou off a guy so we have been making roasts, and steaks and getting use out of our slow cooker. Caribou is quickly becoming my favourite meat...it is really comparable to beef, except about ten times tastier.

That's all for today...time to get back to our mountain of planning!

Long Awaited House Photos

I am finally getting around to posting some pictures of the new place! It's a pretty sweet little place...with heated floors and wheel chair accessible shower and counters for the elders who are meant to live there. We really wouldn't mind staying here, but we know as soon as we get a house we'll have to head over there. The apartment is really meant for elders, and we're very lucky no one wants it right now and that Housing was generous enough to put us here.

We had snow yesterday. Jon doesn't believe it was snow, but it was white, blowing in my face and below zero. Also the lakes have started to freeze, we have our heat on and I've switched over to my ski jacket. If that isn't winter, I don't know what qualifies. Yikes.

On the school front, things are going reasonably well. We've definitely noticed we are getting into the swing of things where lesson planning is concerned. We can get all our weeks planning done in about fie solid hours of work over the weekend, whereas before it used to take us almost the entire weekend. Having our own place and some time to just breathe occasionally is really making life up here THAT much better. We are supervising a dance this weekend and getting ready for our barge order that should come in soon. I can't even imagine how much food is going to come in on that thing. I'm sure it will fill up our little apartment.

Anyways...on to the pictures.

Living Room

The reading corner with our bookshelf...we're very proud of our books!

The bedroom, which remains pretty undecorated

My Audrey Wall...aka Best Part of the House

I have pictures of the kitchen as well, but the internet is being ridiculously slow, so I will try to upload it later on.

Exciting News =)

Well, we got some very exciting news in the last two days. Tomorrow morning we are moving into an one bedroom, brand new apartment! We toured the place this afternoon and it looks great. There is a great wide open kitchen-living room concept, as well as plenty of places to put our barge order when it comes in the next couple of weeks. We will be staying in the apartment until our house is finished. It is close to being purchased now, and after that it is going to need to be renovated. So when we move in there, whenever that may be, we should have an almost new interior. We're planning to get comfortable in the apartment though. Things don't tend to move very quickly here in the North.

We've had an insanely busy couple of weeks. We were working non-stop on our year plans, which we handed in this afternoon. Now that we have an idea of where we're going, the planning of day to day materials should become a lot easier. We also had Environmental Camp this week. It was a great day with good weather to get out on the land. Elders came along and showed the students how to make traditional sod houses. We also had caribou stew and bannock, and listened to a story in Inuktitut. I had a shocking look at what danger the Inuit culture is in that day. One of my students mid-story plopped down beside me and whispered 'What is she saying?' I was probably the only non-Inuit person for miles, but very few of my students, who have been studying Inuktitut for eight years, could understand the story.

Just a quick little post for now- with a few pictures of my students building our mini-sod house.

Angus cutting sod.

Chris listening to the Elder

Charlene and Alishia in our sod dog house

Long Lake where we stopped for lunch

Chris and Angus being boys