Tomorrow I will have been here three weeks. Friday I start work. I've been lazy this week, hanging out at home in the peace and quiet, reading the books I got at a garage sale on the weekend. I've walked on the tundra, with the dogs, and sat with the kids after school while they talked about their days. Very laid back. Miguel and our neighbour helped the kids make a fort out back with scrap lumber.

This morning two guys from the housing department came to fix a closet door that was jamming up against the wall. They wandered in, two impassive gentlemen looking like fifty-something repairmen everywhere, in coveralls and baseball caps, and said to me, "This was supposed to be done in April, but we didn't get around to it." I chatted for a bit with one of them while the other was out in the truck looking for a hammer. He told me that it's usually winter by now... Then his partner came back in, and they fixed the closet door, and then the one I hadn't been talking to to said to me, with a straight face, "Can you just move out for 3 weeks so we can paint your house". The guy I had been talking to said, "It would be just like 'While You Were Out'.

Saturday night we went for dinner next door, with our new neighbours, and met some friends of theirs. Funny, really, we lived for seven years in the same house in Nanaimo, and I never set foot in any of the neighbours' houses. It was fun, lots of kids, and they told us stories about travelling in the Arctic and trying to come to terms with life up here. One of the men told a story about staying in a hotel in a small community, he's a lawyer and has to do the court circuit, and he said that the window in his room was broken, and the room was about 5 degrees. So he took all the bedding off the bed he wasn't trying to sleep in (fully dressed) and stuffed it into the window, which raised the temperature enough for him to sleep. He was funny when he told it, and Miguel said to him, "You seem so calm about this," and he replied, "Well, I wasn't at the time..."

My parents are dealing relatively well with this. It's not the first time we've lived a fair distance from them, and we've been talking on the phone. I feel released from their expectations about my life... they had, while we lived in Nanaimo, a habit of dropping in on the weekends and criticizing my housekeeping, yard maintenance, the behaviour of my children, etc. As I think I've mentioned before here, I'm not much of a housekeeper, and over the last few years while I've been working/volunteering/going to school it has been almost impossible to maintain any sort of standards. This year I didn't even plant a garden, as I was dealing with final exams and then we went to England, and after that working a lot on the Celtic Music Festival, and it didn't happen. They had plenty to say about my lack of ambition. Which I find a bit strange, as it's only since all of us left home that they themselves did any gardening. It's as if they think everyone has as much time as they do... While Kirsten and Rachel and I were staying with them, before we left Nanaimo, they harassed the girls almost unmercifully, calling them lazy and stupid and ungrateful. At one point, while we were eating breakfast, my father started saying, belligerently, that Rachel and Kirsten weren't worth cooking for because they were unappreciative, and I got up and left the table, quite abruptly. They must have known I was upset, but nothing was said. I've always found it much easier to deal with them in a phone relationship...........

We saw the northern lights a couple of nights ago, while we were sitting on the porch after midnight. Beautiful ethereal green ribbons. Miguel and Rachel went out to Mount Pelly to fish yesterday, and Rachel caught a lake trout. She's pretty happy about that.