Magnetic North: Excessive Ignoring of the Blog

Good day to all,

Cole's Notes:
- Air Canada baggage is expensive, Canadian North is nice and cheap.
- It's been quite cold up here, but comparatively mild looking at past years. Average is around -35 day to day. As long as you wear a parka it's all good.
- We no longer live in the elders complex
- carvings and other such things around town are nice to buy
- life is good and we're living well

Muskox in Cambridge Bay

So we have totally ignored this blog for sometime, but new circumstances are allowing us to get back into the kick of things. I'm not sure if that's a turn of phrase or not, but you get the idea. So we got back to Taloyoak from Christmas break just fine. Not too much to report on those goings ons. I suppose something pertinent would be that if you're planning on travelling North, Air Canada are jerks for bags. Well, not jerks, but they make you pay a lot of money if you want to being heavy things. I suppose that's fair. In any case, we got dinged pretty hard in Toronto on our way out due to our fantastic Christmas presents and purchases. Things looked up after we paid the overages because in Yellowknife and beyond they don't really pay much attention to overages, they just push it along.

Yellowknife Airport

We arrived back into town on a blistering afternoon of -40 or so, balmy. When we arrived into town the sun had still not broken the horizon. Within our first week back or so - second week of January, the sun came up for the first time. Just sort of poked over the horizon. It was about 10:50am - I know this because I was on recess duty. Since then we have been gaining about 15 minutes of sunlight per day. Sun usually comes up around 7:00am, and by now the sun goes down by about 3:00pm.

We've been told by locals and such that this winter has been mild. That is not to say it's been warm, however. We've scored some pretty intense days, I think the coldest has been somewhere around the -55 point. Your standard day this year I'd say is between -25 to -35 -- any colder or warmer and you can say, "Wow, it's warm", or "Wow, it's cold". I just double checked with Shawna on that last sentence, and she seconds it.

To the reason why I'm updating this blog. We've got a new house! Exciting stuff for sure. On account of having a home we also got a new router for internet. We can use this router inside our quarters so there is much less chance of it getting stolen by hooligans. The place is very nice. It's actually a three bedroom house, but apparently the government decided they wanted to buy it so here we are. Housing up here is split between a few different options. You could buy a house, pfft. That would be called private. If you're purchasing a house you are usually planning on being a lifer. There's not much for 'flipping' houses up here. You can apply for Public Housing through the local housing authority - which is what the majority of people in town have. That is a government run and subsidized operation. You go on a list and get a house when availability allows for it. You can rent from a Real Estate company, like NPRIET (Northern Properties something something). Finally, if you are a Government of Nunavut employee - GN is the lingo - then you can be placed in a location of their choosing based on I'm not too sure. That is what we are now living in. It's managed by the local housing authority but rented out by the Government of Nunavut.

In regards to things that might be interesting to one that has never been in the north: around Taloyoak there are a ton of Arctic Hares milling around. They are the size of a small dog and can run like the dickens. They seem plump when they are sitting, but when they get moving - in the words of one of my students - they run "full blast". Foxes can be spotted around town. If the fox is rabid, it will be hunted. One of Shawna's students tried to seek out one fox that bit a few dogs around town with a shovel. He did not find it. The foxes are quite cool to see. They are very sly looking, and look like a fox from the south. Of course, the major difference is that they are entirely white - as are the hares.

The snow up here is still piling up. The base that we're dealing with in some areas is easily over 12 feet. The area that I'm thinking of is beside the power plant. The high wires around it aren't so high. It's probably dangerous, but I think the real scary wires are out of reach - it's just the telephone stuff that's at eye level.

We have also been buying some nice carvings and other nic nacs lately. A fellow in town named Simon makes very nice stuff, so we often buy his things. He is really talented at making dancing things. We have a dancing seal hunter, a dancing polar bear, and I got Dan a drum dancer for Christmas. The polar bear is at school, I'll post a picture of it later on. Shawna has been making out like a bandit getting mittens. The ladies around town often make very beautiful mitts for women. Not so much for men. I'm told this is because a man's mitts need to be made specifically for their hands. The mitts for women don't have to be so warm, they can just be pretty. The white and black ones are Arctic Hare (we are operating under the assumption that hare is now mittens because he was black and white - not very effective for camouflage). My mitts are made out of seal, and they are the big ones. The beige mitts are some sort of regular material and then fox fur around the outside. The purple ones are a regular material with stiching and are died black fox fur. If my Mom is reading this, we are sending those ones down to you. Go ahead and keep your white ones on display. The boots are called kamiks. They are indoor kamiks, made out of caribou leather and some other random stuff. Everything was made here in town.