Oof. Not long after I wrote the last entry in here on Saturday, I came down with the same flu Rachel had. A nasty one, I'll spare you the details, but although I managed to drag myself to work on Monday for the start of the men's workshop, I've been able to do little else. My stomach still hated me until this morning (and it's touchy at the best of times) and I was dog-tired. So, not much else got done around here. I'm very very lucky that Miguel was here this week and not away like last week, or else I think everyone would have been living on what they could cook for themselves, because I couldn't even look at food.

This workshop is a three-week intensive men's program. Hard core. Many of the participants have looming court dates and are trying to convince all involved that they are capable of change in their lives. They have so many emotional issues... In a very real way, this is a crossroads. Either they change and take responsibility for their actions, or their lives will be changed for them, through prison and all the associated losses. The question of whether the sexual offenders can be successfully treated hangs in the back of my mind. Depends on them, I guess. One of the things that I accept is that change is personal, people can only change themselves... A more cynical mind would say that they're only doing this now because they're scared, but I think it's a fact of humankind that we only change after we've had a shock. Hence the power of near-death experiences. Call these near-jail experiences, perhaps.

Just as a side note, it will be minus 48 with the wind chill tomorrow. It's minus 40 now, and my breath was freezing in my lungs on the way home tonight. At 4pm, in the pitch dark with the stars out. Wild. There are wolves around town, I woke up in the night to hear them howling out on the tundra, a sound that raises the hair on the back of your neck. We had a note home from school telling us not to let our kids play outside alone after dark. (Which is most of the time). The men in the workshop were complaining that they wanted to be out hunting the wolves and not sitting in with us...

Tomorrow night I'm baking for a bake sale to raise money for the shelter. The original plan was that we would get together at the centre and bake together, which I wasn't tremendously happy about (it being my birthday and all) but in the end there's only three of us and we decided to bake at home instead. So I'm going to make turtle cookies and molasses raisin cookies and date squares. Yum. I imagine I'll have plenty of help with the testing, here. I used to make the turtle cookies when I ran the coffee shop, and they sold really well. Faster than I could make them, mostly.