The stone church. Angaatdjuvik uyarak -- nutakat ikipkaqtaa.

I think we may have arranged to buy a truck. Which is very cool as it will make it easier to go camping this summer.

Ed's in the Relay for Life... go give him some money.

And Ed -- please just carry whatever you want. Or just run/walk/limp/follolop. Or carry Delia's sign a bit further. I'm shy.

someone burnt down the old church... sad.

Earlier this week. Caller reports, "someone stole my kalvik." Call meanders on, yeah, we usually leave it in the porch overnight, forgot and left it outside, it was gone this morning. I'm taking it all down, but I'm a bit hazy on what a kalvik is. Kamiks I know, that's boots. So I say, "ok, so someone stole your, what did you say, your kalvik?" And the response is, "that's right, someone stole my good wolverine." I've been wandering around saying that to myself. (ok, and other people.) Stole my good wolverine. I had visions of an angry, toothy little carnivore being subdued and spirited away, scratching and nipping, perhaps stuffed down the front of someone's coat, but clarification came later, when I was explaining it to those on duty -- it was a wolverine pelt, stretched on poles. Its owners were displaying it. Anyway, all's well that ends well, the good wolverine was found. Case closed...

It is WARM!!!! It was 0 degrees Celsius today and there were puddles. I was out without toque, gloves, or snowpants. This weekend I may go for a longer walk. The days are very lengthy, now, it's fully light by 4am and it stays light until 11 at night. I've woken every morning this week at 3:30 and thought, "must get up, it's getting late."

I am still, for anyone who cares, not smoking. Soon it will be three months.

Jazzy's no better, but she's no worse either. Miguel's going to Edmonton the second week in May and he's going to take her with him. That way he can be with her at the vets while she has a biopsy done. Poor sweetie. She's still eating well, and playing with her furby, I just don't want to believe that she's REALLY ill...

this time last year we were in England... the Tate Modern.

I'm still up. That's always the problem with working until midnight, I can't unwind and go to bed immediately I get home. I'm starting to get tired now, though. I'm moving into that stage of things where I think I'm craving things (food, drink; something unspecified) but I'm actually just winding down, I think.

Stevie Nicks has been playing in my head all evening:

Somewhere out in the back of your mind
Comes your real life and the life that you know...

Well lately I've been thinking
That the rooms are all on fire
Every time that you walk in the room

I downloaded it off limewire the other day, and it has set itself comfortably in my Windows Media playlist between Simon and Garfunkel and Sting. I was looking for Bruce Springsteen's I'm on Fire because I'd been quoting the lyrics to Ed, and Stevie popped up in the search. Somehow her lyrics are not stellar, I can't tell you I think she's a fantastic poet, a wordsmith -- it's in how she sings it.

Somehow I ended up guarding this evening. There's a beer dance in town tonight and no-one wanted to work. I had another one of those "How the hell did I get here" moments as I was walking down the hallway to check on folks. We actually had some laughs, tonight, as there were two sober weekend sentence servers and then a drunk got brought in midway through the evening. He was very voluble, and spent some time trying to persuade me to marry him. He talked me into singing him a lullaby, because he said he couldn't go to sleep without music, and once I had sung to him he actually went to sleep. The sober guys just thought all this was hilarious. They were ribbing the drunk guy because he hadn't even made it to the beer dance, got arrested before it started, but he took it pretty good.

It was funny, too, because when they first put him in the lock-up, he poked his head out the little window and said to me, "What side are you on?" I said, "Do I have to pick a side?" He said, "yes." I said, "What side are you on?" This stopped him cold, pretty much killed his line of questioning, as he didn't have an answer for it.

I was thinking about it later. Am I on any side? What sides are there? I used to think I had to pick a side, but somehow the boundaries get blurred. I have no objection at all to taking care of the folks who are staying in cells. I made coffee for them and talked to them. Fed them their dinner. Listened to their fears about their children. Basically acted as if they were at my house. Even pushed the tv over so they could watch the hockey game. I can do the job without being mean or nasty. The other day I answered the phone and the person on the other end was complaining about somebody I know. (She's drunk and she won't leave) I said, "Put her on the phone." Then I said to her, "Hey, it's Kate. You don't really want the police to come down and pick you up, do you?" She said no.

For Ed -- on teaching up North. (or should it be Up Norther? relative to that town you say is officially north. We're north of north.)