So you think we're a circus now, just wait until March

Richard has created this great title and so I am adding to the blog to let everyone know that I am pregnant. The March part is that baby is due in March two days before Lily’s birthday.  We found out during the summer and have been trying to figure things out ever since.  Now we know where babies come from but we are not sure where they arrive in Nunavut.  I saw my family doctor while down south so got the preliminary tests done and he sent me for an early ultrasound so we got to see the baby nice and early!  Still trying to figure out how things are going to work here.  There is a prenatal nurse in town and she has been great but she is also new so is learning the system too.  So we are working on learning and I figure either way the baby will come so we better be ready.  Tomorrow I am being sent to Iqaluit for a regularly scheduled ultrasound.  I am pretty excited.  I will be there two nights and so far I have barely been out of the airport so am looking forward to seeing the town!  I also get to see an obstetrician and have a nice long list of questions to ask.  So we will keep updating the blog with details as we get them (and no we are not going to find out the sex of the baby).  Thanks for reading!

- Margot

Hello all, other news (from Richard):  


I have recovered from my zombie energy zone. I had a few good nights sleep and now with Margot finding out more information about our baby that seems to have helped.

Our "new" Honda atv is giving me frustration. Skip this if you don't care about broken atv's. This is a post I put on a Honda atv forum looking for some suggestions. 

Hello all! I have recently bought a used 2003 trx350fm. It was rode hard and the electrical system was in need of repair when I bought it. Oh, side note, I live in Nunavut (the high arctic in Canada) and there is no Honda dealer here to take my machine to. So, I removed the engine, put in a new starter, regulator, alternator, battery, oil filter, spark plug, oil (10w30), a used cooling fan that worked when bench tested, and tires. It started and ran like a charm for a few weeks. It is starting to get cold and it snowed the other day. I took it for a drive to the store and it did fine. The next morning when I choked it to start it (because it needs it) it ran for a bit then died. It did this a few times then it would not fire. So I left it a couple of days thinking maybe the float needle got stuck after having some bad gas go through it, or the carb had gotten gummed up after sitting for a while (although I doubt it as it has run fine for 2 full fuel fill-ups). I tried starting it tonight before I took out the carb and away it went. Sounded just fine so I thought I will go get some fresh gas and drive it around a bit just to make sure it has sorted itself out. Well, after driving hard for 20 minutes the engine was noticeably warm/hot (ticking after shutdown) the engine sounded like it was missing and not firing on every stroke and promptly quit again. I walked home, had a friend tow me home and then I tried it again and it fired up and idled fine for the five minutes I let it run. Oh, and the fan never kicked on. It was about -3 Celsius outside.

So, I am wondering if maybe there is a blockage in the oil passageway that is causing a restriction, carb problem or some other mystery. I really could use all the suggestions anyone has as this is my family car up here and it's not snowmobile weather yet!

Stupid atv's!

We had an interesting thing happen. We often get emails asking specific questions about moving and living up here. Last year, a couple with a little boy asked us a lot (!) of questions about coming up here and what life was like. Well, they ended up moving to Cape Dorset and now live two doors down from us! So now we have new friends and our kids love playing together. It was a funny thing though, because they got to know us through the blog, it was like we fast forwarded our relationship and bypassed much of the friendship foreplay that is required when getting to know new people. It has turned out to be a really nice byproduct of this blog. Yay technology!

A sad bit of news.  A couple with whom I work with adopted a puppy last year, had their dog shot by our bylaw officer after it escaped from it's leash to which it was tied in front of their townhouse. It is my understanding the dog took off two nights ago and they could not find it.  The dog was shot yesterday because the bylaw officer thought it was a loose dog instead of checking it's collar for tags. I feel very bad for them, I know I would be devastated if something to our dogs. Sorry about your dog guys, we really do feel for you!!!!!

Thanks for dropping by, drop us a line.

-Richard

 

My energy is fading, just like the sunlight

It must be this time of year up here for me, but I have no energy, patience or internal drive. All I want to do is nothing. The more (or less) I can do the happier I am, seriously. I don't think I am ill, I get a normal (for a parent of a toddler who wakes up too much at night) amount of sleep and my work is busy but not overwhelming, but I just want to crawl in a hole and sleep for a week. Yuck. I am wiped out.

Since this is a bit of a negative post, I can let everyone know there was an ATV accident here a couple of days ago up near tea lake. A couple of middle age men were found dead near what I have heard looks like where they crashed their quad. It has been quite a blow to a few of my students who are related to the deceased.

It is still rainy, foggy and blowing here. It has been trying to snow or the snow has been trying to stick the last few days also. So, it has been relatively cold as well. I wish winter would just come. I miss the snow and want all this mud and sand to be frozen and buried.

Lily has really come into her own with her three year old tantrums. Yesterday we were at the Hamlet office after school and I had some business to attend to and Lily wanted me to pull her rain paints "all the way down" over her boots immediately (for the third time in a row). I told her I would as soon as we got ready to go. Well, poor Lily lost the plot and started crying, yelling and melted onto the ground. When finally, after talking and such didn't resolve anything, I put her in time out. Well, she was upset and crying. The next thing I see is her rolling/crawling across the foyer floor while crying her lungs out. I reminded her that if she could not make good choices we would be going right home and not going to the store or a friends house to play. Well, that helped straiten her out and she calmed down, asked for a hug and sat on the counter quite happily while I attended to my paperwork. It was one of the moments as a parent I was so frustrated, embarrassed and very upset my child was so upset, but there was nothing I could do other than what I did. I realize this is the end of her day and she was already tired, so I am going to give her an after school snack as soon as I pick her up to see if that helps her attitude. I am sure low blood sugar has something to do with it, but still. I wonder if this has anything to do with my new-found lack of energy, patience and such? Hmmm....

So that is what's going on today.

Oh, we have our house sports at school today instead of Friday because tomorrow is our school's Terry Fox Run. I sure hope the weather is descent.

-Richard (I am so wiped out it took me four tries to type my own name correctly!)

Alive and well, sort of...

Hello all. Sorry for the absence from the blogging world. Life has been filled with work, getting back into the swing of things and the fall illnesses that seem to plague our house every fall. Since we both work in germ factories and now we have Lily bringing home god knows what, our immune systems get a workout. But, we all seem to be doing better now. 

I thought I would just give a bit of an idea what we did this summer. Sorry no pictures yet because iphoto won't let me load any new ones for some unknown reason. We spent a week in Downtown Ottawa getting our city fix and it was amazing. We stayed at the Lord Elgin that is right downtown and was fine with pets which was important because we were travelling with Kala and Smoot. Right across the street from us was Confederation Park which was hosting the Ottawa Jazz festival. So after I helped get Lily and Margot sorted out in the evenings I would wander across the street and see a show. I got to see an all time favorite of mine: Elvis Costello, who was followed up by Canadian rapper Shad. The next night I saw KD Lang who also put on an amazing show. What a welcome back to the south: ice cold beer, a fancy hotel and an amazing music festival! During the days we shopped, ate out, played at the surrounding parks and just had fun. Lily loved the pool. I think she may be part fish. One afternoon I stopped in to have a pedicure (you need to treat yourself sometimes right?) and thought I would surprise Lily with getting my toenails painted with sparkles. The day before Margot and her Mom had their nails done and she was so excited about shiny nails that I thought it would be a fun surprise if we all matched. Well, the ladies in the shop all thought it was hilarious that I asked for nail polish. Lily and Margot joined me as I was about to pick which colour to have applied. I told Lily she could choose which shade and luckily for me she chose blue sparkles, instead of pink or purple. She was quite delighted once they were done and I felt great with my happy feet. As well as Margot's Mom visiting her Dad and Step-mom, Rosamond, came up.  This worked out very well for us because West Jet screwed up our cargo booking for the dogs and said that we would have to wait two days to ship them. So after a few very intense and long conversation we found an alternative to shipping the dogs as cargo we had to go buy two new smaller dog kennels ($550!!!) and they flew as extra baggage. David and Rosamond drove us the hour round trip to go and buy the new ones. What a pain it is flying with extra baggage, kid and two large dogs. 

We then headed out to Rossland which is in southern BC. We rented a house there for the summer. This is the same town we moved from prior to moving up here. It was great to be home and near my family. We had lots of our friends come and stay. We spent the summer eating at great restaurants, swimming (Lily had lessons) in pools and lakes, hiking, playing and having a great time. 

I fulfilled a bucket list item. I went on a motorcycle trip with my dad! After getting new leathers and a fancy helmet, we hopped on our bikes and headed off from BC and went through Washington, Idaho, Montana, Southern Alberta and headed back to BC. We put on about 2500 km in 5 days. It was spectacular!

Then at the end of our summer trip we headed back to Ontario to visit with Margot's family and took a train (Lily and my first time) to hook up with everyone. We had a wonderful visit in southern Ontario and then began our stressful trip home. It's always expensive, stressful and exhausting to return to the north with our circus. 

We had a great summer and it was sad to see it end but it is nice to be back and get into the swing of things.

Once we got back I got right to work fixing our "new" 2009 Yamaha 125 grizzly atv. It has been a very frustrating experience trying to get the local Yamaha shop to get it done right, but I think after basically setting my wallet on fire it's running great. I also bought a 2004 Honda fourtrax rancher. It also needed some parts shipped up and a couple of full days work done to it, but now it runs like a top. However with this one, me and another fella spent two days fixing it up. Then we had to build something to house the new machines which was quite a debacle as there is not much space in front of our building it. But we got it all worked out and I spent this last weekend building it so now we're all set. Luckily it seems as though it was just in time as the ground was covered in snow this morning. 

Anyhow, that's what we're up to these days. We will be blogging much more frequently now I hope. 

Thanks for stopping by and drop us a line!

-Richard

Trains, Planes and Automobiles

Hey all, this is just a quick update. We're back home in Cape Dorset after our amazing summer. We have had numerous phone calls and emails from concerned family and friends because a First Air plane crashed the same day we were flying home from Ottawa to here. We heard about the crash after we had arrived home and the news hit a bit too close to home about how scary flying can be. Here is a link to the  CBC News article. We are very sorry for all those who have been affected by this tragedy.

The summer was amazing and when I have some more time in the next week or so and can get some pictures up to share I will go into more detail (for those that care!) about where we were and what we did. Needless to say it was so wonderful to re-connect with our culture, friends and family. I can't speak for the rest of my family but I must admit that I am filled with mixed emotions about being home, as I am sure you can understand. It's foggy, windy, rainy and muddy here now, but hey, it could be worse!

Hope you are having a great summer wherever you are and take care.

-Richard

summertime!

Yup, we're on holidays in "the south" right now. Sorry for the lack of blogging but wrapping up school for the year and planning, packing, travelling, eating, drinking, dancing, reading, sleeping, visiting and tree gazing have been taking up all of our time. We spent a week in Ontario (Loved seeing Elvis Costello and KD Lang live) and are now in southern BC. I will do a large post in late August I suspect when we have more time for things like being on being on a computer.

Thanks for dropping by! We are having a great time with parks, lakes, swimming and travel.

Oh, and we are returning back north for another year. Actually we are all excited about the upcoming year. I think that's the fun part of being a teacher is that you get new kids every year.

Take care and we'll post soon!

-Richard

So much sunlight!

Sorry everyone, it has been a while since I have had the time or energy to post.

I thought I would talk about the amount and intensity of the light up here. We are into light all the time now. It is very bright until I go to bed and moderately bright most of the night. It is really nice to feel the warmth, but I find it hard to unwind and sleep well. Also it is really having an effect on the students. They are much more tired and lethargic because they stay up very late playing. Oh well, we're in the final countdown to summer break. Woohoo!!!! We have been here since August and I am really ready for a break. I am looking forward to some very simple things. Like no snow/rain boots and extreme outerwear, liquor and grocery stores, the mall (even though I have never been much of a shopper), eating somewhere that I didn't have to plan a week in advance for groceries, preparing and cleaning up and finally grass and trees. Mmmmmm, it's gonna be good.

The sad news about it getting warm is that our roads have turned back to gravel, sand and rock strips that make travel around town very hard on snowmobiles. I wish the street cleaning crews were not quite so fastidious about there jobs and had left some snow on the roads considering the majority of town travels via snowmobile. Oh well, the exercise probably isn't such a bad thing. I just hate getting up early and coming home later.

We now also have a front hall very full of outdoor clothes because the weather fluctuates so much. It can be truly cold if the wind picks up, to the point that I changed the other day from my windstopper fleece and down vest into my fur lined, down parka. My neck was so very cold without that fur! Plus we now need rain gear. I am not looking forward to the oncoming heaps of mud, especially with dogs and a toddler. Yuck.

Some sad news, one of my neighbors had her snowmobile stolen. It was locked up in front of her unit and they managed to cut the lock, damage the ignition and go joy riding. Bastards! They returned it, but it was damaged. At this point, I don't think the culprits have been charged, but it's only a matter of time in a town this small. To the individual who had it stolen: I am very sorry for the loss and damage to your property. I know for when we have been robbed (Halifax and here) it's the feeling of violation also. That someone has tread upon your safe and secure world. Sometimes people really suck.

Lily is doing well and loving the daily walks that they are doing at school these days. She is so cute wandering around town with her school buddies. It was sad today because I had to get her before the walk began and she was unable to go. But I told her that tomorrow we would walk to and from school and she thought that was a great "big idea" as she refers to it.

At my school, we have wrapped up some of our courses (social studies, science for my class) and I am teaching 1 credit courses, one of which is a music course. It's been fun brushing up on the mechanics of teaching beginner guitar to the kids. They are just getting into it, but some of them seem really keen on learning.

Oh, and lastly, I have had numerous email conversations with people thinking of moving to the Arctic and looking for advice or information which has been really neat. We got so much help when we moved up from local bloggers that was one of the reasons we opted to start this blog. Well, cool news is that two different families are in various stage of move to Cape Dorset. One of which may be moving into our building this next month. I think this is pretty cool. Technology certainly takes the guesswork out of these sorts of things these days. Although some may argue it takes some of the adventure out of moves and experiences too. However, I think just being here and experiencing this place is a true adventure.

Thanks for stopping by, drop us a line!

-Richard

The end of the blizzards

I realized that in all the hula-ba-loo I never actually wrote that Rick and Maureen got out safely.  On Monday May 9th the skies were finally bright blue and the plane got out just fine.  We also got to see the RCMP plane landing just before their flight.  They had a long stop-over in Iqaluit but then carried on to Edmonton and got there about 10pm.  They spent some time with Maureen's sister and then drove home.  By Friday they were safe and sound back home and according to Lily busy getting their house ready for her!  Lily is happy to be back at school.  She was home most of the time her Mama and Papa were here and was missing her friends.  On Monday she asked to go to school in the afternoon to get to see her buddies again.  I think the distraction was good for her.  So now at the end of the week we have all been at school and are getting back into the rhythm of life.  But now we realize just how close the end of the year is and we are getting VERY excited about heading out of town.  The end is near...
Margot

Theft.......

They are home!!  So here is the story.  We got home from work and as we were getting ready for dinner I asked Richard what he had done with the two bears.  He said nothing.  It took a minute to figure out because maybe we had just moved things.  But no, we had done nothing.  Then we realized that when we got home there had been snow on the floor and the front window was wide open. We figure that someone came in through the window because there was such a big snow drift.  We also think that our arrival home startled him (or them) and he took off.  He may even have left as Richard came into the house.  So once we realized they were gone we looked to see if anything else was gone.  It doesn't look like anything else had been touched.  We started calling everybody we could think of to let them know what had happened after we called the RCMP.  We gave them a description of the two bears as quite likely they would be resold tonight.  Hopefully we had cut off some selling routes.  In the mean time we were trying to feed Lily dinner and a carver came to the door.  It was someone I quite like and so told him what had happened so he could be looking too.  After our makeshift dinner Richard went outside to get rid of the ramp to our window and I went to put Lily to bed.  While he was outside another carver came by.  It was another carver we like who we have bought from before so Richard told him the story.  This time however...a lead.  This carver had seen our bears in a truck belonging one of the specialists who is working on the broken pipeline.  Richard gave him a call but only managed to talk to his co-worker.  This man confirmed that they probably did have our carvings.  After a bit of a wait Richard called back and talked to the man who had bought the carvings.  He was more than willing to have Richard come down and take a look.  So off went Richard with money ready to buy our carvings back.  This was about 9pm.

Just before 10pm Richard came back in and told me this story…

He went down to the hotel and met with the man.  He did indeed have our bears.  He was very sorry for what had happened.  He had paid $100 for them and Richard offered to buy them back.  He said not to worry about it! Amazing!  There are still kind, decent, generous people in the world!!!  The bear’s feet have been sanded and new names carved in.  However you can still see Richard’s name on his bear and part of the original name on the other.  Richard then went over to the police station to let them know.  And there in a cell was the thief.  Apparently he had walked into the station to sell some inukshuks and when the police asked him, he confessed.  So Richard just added to the case.  They say he will have a court date soon.

The little jerk will be released tonight but will hopefully (and had better) steer clear of us.  It is just so frustrating because we know this kid.  He is only about 15 years old.  Everyone knows him as ‘the thief’.  Before we knew who he was he had been to our house selling carvings and when he told us he was starving we gave him food.  I don’t even have words yet for how we are feeling!

But there you have it.  Situation resolved!  And thank you to all those who were willing to help us, and all those who truly did help.

Good night all and close your windows!!

Margot

Richard's Art defaced!  On the foot that is bottom left in this picture you can still make out most of Richard's original name carving.  Its hard to see in the picture but at the very left you may be able to see the R. On the bottom right foot you can see the kid's alteration to the carving.

Theft...

We have a lead......

THEFT!!

Our house was broken into this afternoon!  Have you seen these carvings?  The white bear and the green bear have been taken.  If you see them please let us know or call the police.  The green one is most important as it is the one that Richard carved!  Thanks, Margot