Things move along... I'm on call again this week for the shelter. The phone rang, quite late, after I went to sleep last night, and I got up to answer it thinking, "gotta go out in the cold, where did I put the shelter keys", steeling myself for the emotions on the other end of the phone, but it was Kirsten's boyfriend, calling to apologize to her for something. She said, "I'm sorry he woke you up, Mum" but I was so happy that it wasn't a crisis situation that I just said, "Oh, no problem, at least I don't have to go anywhere" and I went back to my warm bed.

This morning we got a call from a little friend of Rachel's. She spoke to him briefly and then said, matter-of-factly, "He's coming over because his parents haven't come home and he's hungry." So he came, he and Rachel played video games for a while, we made KD, he wolfed it down and went back home to wait for his folks. Poor little sweetie.

The bake sale yesterday was fun. We had a table in the gym at the school, along with everyone else who had crafts or MLM or baking to sell. I made turtle cookies and date squares, like I used to make when I had the coffee shop, and we sold everything we had. I made tons, I've never gotten the hang of small batch baking again after the coffee shop, if I make cookies I make ten dozen, but it was good because only one other lady baked. I saw lots of people who've taken workshops over the last couple of months, and they introduced me to their spouses and babies.

This bookcrossing site looks like a lot of fun... (you were right, delia, it is my kind of thing) I used to live in an apartment building where people would leave books on a table downstairs, for others to pick up and read, and I would always look when I came home from work to see if there was anything interesting.

On the radio yesterday, there was a man talking about how he feels that writing in books is a good idea, marginal comments in pencil. Then what he does is give the book to someone else to read, and encourage them to write marginal notes and pass it on. So by the time he gets the book back, he has the thoughts of five or six other readers in the margins... I thought that sounded like a neat idea too, except that I'd want to have control over who got the books... no philistines...

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.

Miguel brought me back a box from Yellowknife. It contained a desk for me, which he put together while I was at the candle party, and set up in the cupboard under the stairs. So now I have a little corner to myself, with my books and my buddhas and my frogs. The postcard of Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus that I've had on my walls since university is up again, and I've got space for my papers and binders and daybook. Prior to this, due to the size of the house and the lack of furniture, I've been working either on the dining room table (I have to move everything when people want to eat) or in the armchair in the living room (tv is being watched and I have no workspace). I keep paper journals besides this on-line one, two at the moment: one for my day-to-day efforts to keep the world from overwhelming me, and the other for my ongoing project to find links between justice and mindfulness. It's silly how much pleasure I get from seeing my thoughts and stuff copied from books, in my handwriting, on the pages of my journals... I write a lot of letters, too, some of my friends don't have email for various reasons (imprisonment / paranoia / general poverty). I'm sitting here in my cupboard right now with my notebooks and letters beside me, I won't have to pack up when dinner's ready, and I've got a new book on the Holocaust and two crossword puzzles waiting courtesy of the Globe and Mails Miguel brought me back from his trip to the real world...

We're having a blizzard today. The wind is up, and (surprise surprise) it's cold. This is the view from our front steps. Not sure if you can see my neighbour's pile of caribou heads now, they're kind of covered in snow.

Miguel's back from Rankin Inlet, where he was working all week. He took this picture there.

Rachel's sick tonight. She and I are watching the Simpson's episode where Bart wins an elephant... I think she's got the flu everyone else's kids had, and since she sleeps on the top bunk she doesn't want to go to bed. Can't say I blame her, and Kirsten's not tremendously keen to have someone sleeping over top of her who might throw up.

I went to a candle party tonight. And won the door prize, twelve candles. I haven't shown them to Ian, because I think he bought me candles for my birthday. As I was leaving he said, in a very worried voice, "You're not going to buy any candles, are you Mum?" I told him you could never have enough candles. I actually ordered something, because it was so cool, a wooden lantern-type thing with sandalwood candles. And used Miguel's credit card... (seems to me that's what you're supposed to do, right?)

This week I'm working for the government, filling in for someone who's on leave from the health department... such a lot of different things I've done since I've been here, it's hard to believe it's only been just over two months. It's been very interesting, I'm working with a nice young man and we're trying to sort out a bunch of requisitions and orders for medical supplies, in a quiet little office. He makes the phone calls, which I like. It reminds me a lot of when I first started going into Miguel's other workplace, and trying to sort out their financials, same sort of working backwards with tons of unrelated papers. Tomorrow's my last day, though, as there's a men's program starting Monday. Although, they did say they might be able to use me for the better part of December, if there's no programs, which might be the case.

But anyway. I'm tired tonight. Gonna go to the library. The librarian is very kind to me, he lets me take out more than my allowed two books, and lets me borrow the uncatalogued donated books before he puts cards in them.

Today it got dark at 2:40....

One more Cheers quote:

Norm: It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear.

(Ok, I'm done now, really...)

Long day yesterday, twelve hours at the shelter... I'm still kinda dazed.

Today I am a slug. I slept on the couch for most of the morning, and now I'm contemplating leftover pizza. But it's in the kitchen, which is a long way away. Sigh.

Things I have done this week while I've been off:

-- Hung out with the dogs and watched tv.
Cheers... Rebecca (Wearing her wedding gown, she's about to marry Robin): Ok, I’m almost done, now I just need something old, something borrowed, and something blue.
Carla: How about Norm’s liver?
Norm: (reasonably) I am almost done with it.

The dogs really like old sitcoms...

-- Gone to appointments that weren't appointments. (this is when people say to you, "come see me at 10:15" so you schlepp on down there to find the door locked and a sign saying 'closed due to a staff meeting)

-- Won 500 dollars at solitaire. Then lost it all.

-- Written reports on workshops and worked on program materials. Jealousy. And a self-assessment for violence. The questions are so bland -- 'Have you ever struck your partner with an object.' Somehow the words don't communicate the terrifying nature of the things I've heard in the workshops...

-- This morning I wrapped Ian's birthday presents. In the absence of wrapping paper I used tinfoil. In my half asleep state, I wrapped an empty graphics card box that was in the bottom of Miguel's closet, thinking that it was something he'd bought for Ian.

-- Cleaned the workshop rooms. It's a very quiet building when I'm the only one in it.

-- Went to a meeting for the shelter. This was actually fun, we laughed a lot. Not sure the co-ordinator appreciated that, though... I really like the other women who work for the shelter, they say what they think.

-- Started organizing fundraising efforts for the shelter. (hence the appointments that weren't appointments.

-- Went down and put my name on the 'casual list'. Have been told there's probably a week of work for me next week doing filing for the government.

-- Taking care of my bonsai potato. (yup, yup)

-- Finished the book of Kingsley Amis' letters. In a way it's depressing to read all someone's letters chronologically like that. Makes life less sprawling and more... finite.

-- Eaten a lot of toast.

Further to a long-running and sometimes heated argument that the adults in this household have been dragging behind us for many years, this from Steve Maich in Macleans magazine:

Neil French, an advertising director, a Canadian, Maich calls him a "legend in the ad industry" with "more money than the Almighty himself" apparently said that women "don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to". Because, Maich paraphrases, "most are unwilling to make the personal sacrifices of time and energy required to be the boss".

Statistics tell us that women are very under-represented in the upper echelons of the workforce. And this is where we argue vociferously here at home, because statistics cannot tell us exactly why this is. Steve Maich has a theory.

"Today's working woman is presented with an inescapable dilemma: if you sacrifice your family, in any way, for the sake of your career, then you're a lousy mother. If you sacrifice career for family, then you're letting down the generations of feminists who fought to give you a shot at a decent career. To deal with this impasse, modern society has served up a set of handy myths built around the idea that no sacrifice is necessary. There are 50 hours in every day. Emotional energy is limitless. And with proper planning and enough effort one can have a fabulous, lucrative career and an idyllic family life. If this balance eludes you, then you've failed, and should buy more self-help books. Anybody who dares challenge the myth is a misogynist." (the full text is here, if you're interested)

I personally think (and I'm willing to discuss, have been for years) that part of the problem lies in the question of the value of work. As far as the human race is concerned, what is worth more, really, than the capacity to reproduce? Heck, if men did it, they'd figure out a way to get paid for it. Probably set up ways to sell their offspring. EBaby, maybe. Men make the rules of the game, the rules were set many years ago: work is only important if it MAKES MONEY. The business world is set up in such a way that anyone who wants to succeed has to be able to (as men traditionally have been able to because women were holding down the fort) drop everything and go to long meetings and fly off to see clients and suppliers. If no-one's left at home to do the laundry and take care of the kids, things soon begin to fall apart... As Maich says, "we've established a system in which employers must make up for the lack of gender equality in the home."

Legal equality, as my law professor used to say, is not the same as substantive equality. Although we have every legal right to pursue high-echelon management jobs, we have choices to make. Men don't have to make these choices between work and family. No-one expects them to.

My neighbour is back from hunting. He's out in his yard throwing caribou heads around. I could hear clunking, when I was putting my coat on this morning in the hall, and when I got outside I saw he was standing on top of his shed throwing the heads, some with fur and some just kind of bloody, down onto the ground. I'll be interested to see what he does with them, looks like about a dozen. He also has a pile of furs.

From our back windows, you can see the DEW line station... In the bottom right hand corner of this picture, Jazz is rolling on her back in the snow.

Halloween. I was sitting at the dining room table working on program materials, and it began to get dark. I wondered where everyone was, they're usually home before it gets dark, then I looked at the clock and realized that it was only 3:15... The hour change has taken a bite out of the afternoon. By the time the kids were ready to go trick-or-treating, it was pitch black and frigid outside. Kirsten's friend came over, bringing the two pre-schoolers she was chaperoning, little cuties, one dressed as an owl and the other as a zebra, full body furry costumes. Joeby was very intrigued by these small animals, went and sniffed them thoroughly, which the little guys thought was hilarious.

We had a steady stream of kids at the door, we closed the inner door and stood by the front door in our parkas, and dispensed candy to probably a hundred kids. Some of them were being pulled around on sleds behind snowmobiles, others were walking in noisy groups. One tiny boy, during a lull where I had gone to sit on the couch, opened the door and barged in, yelling "Hello!" Everyone seemed in good spirits, despite the cold, and lots more said thank-you than last year in Nanaimo. The streets are usually pretty quiet here in the evenings, and it was different to see them full of kids and parents and sleds. We ran out of candy in about an hour, something we attributed to having bought it too early and eaten too much of it ourselves.

The cable is out this weekend. However, by fiddling diligently with the radio tuner I have finally found a CBC One station that is playing music tonight. I miss CBC Two, though, it was the sympathetic background to my days for seven years in Nanaimo. The station I found tonight seems to be broadcasting from somewhere East, the World at Six came on at 4 while I was cooking supper, freaked me out a little. I thought maybe I had screwed up the time change thing... I've done that before.

I got called out early this morning, to the shelter. Client was watching Coronation Street when I got there. I sat for a while thinking how strange it was to be sitting in the Arctic watching people with British accents arguing about their dramatic lives. I have been confronted with my own little preconceived notions a fair bit, here, as with my surprise when the two Inuit gentlemen came to fix my closet door and started talking about "While You Were Out"... Did I imagine they all sat around watching North of Sixty all the time or something? I can't say.

Some things I have learned since I've been here:

Lemmings look like little hamsters, and they burrow in the snow.
In a power outage here, it's darker than you can imagine.
It is possible for wind to blow so hard that you can't walk into it.
The generator that runs the town electricity is not constant, and digital clocks are rarely accurate.
"Sybo" is an insult. (but I don't know what it means)
Dried caribou is very chewy.
A 'sled' is a snowmobile. This was confusing... (What size engine does your sled have?)
The Innuinaqtun words for "I'm fine" (in response to How Are You?) sound a lot like "Not so much tuna."
My daughters can manage to share a room without maiming each other!!!

Ian had his birthday party today. Five 12-yr-old boys playing poker and watching movies and eating. I made a cake and caramel corn, we provided them with chips and pop and let them get on with it. (I typed 'pot' in there, had to change it, that's a very different type of party...) Tonight I'm just sitting and enjoying the quiet. Ahhh. It is minus 31. My neighbour (mentioned the other day) is camping in his TENT out on the tundra.

Time changes tonight. The sun doesn't get very high in the sky during the day now. It travels horizontally, even at noon today it was in such a position that I expected it to be setting, but it kept moving along the horizon until about 4 pm. I guess since it's been so cloudy the last few weeks I didn't notice.

I'm still trying not to smoke. As I don't smoke in the house, my wanting to be on the porch in my parka is not strong.

I woke up in the night to the sound of the wind. Miguel has been in Iqaluit all week (hence the lack of additions to this log, he took my laptop) and was due to fly back this afternoon. When I went outside with the dogs this morning, the wind was whipping snow down the street and the clouds were ominous and seemed close enough to touch on tiptoes. This is a hazard of travel in the Arctic -- having reservations does not guarantee that you will be flying anywhere, even in October. Conveniently, however, the cloud cover lifted during the morning, and his plane came in.

He brought A&W, at Rachel's request, and donuts... mmm donuts.

My neighbour is gearing up to go hunting. He's got his sleds out, and tonight he's putting up his tent, a large white army-looking structure. I've heard he's an excellent hunter. The caribou are migrating.

An emotional week. The group of women in this program are amazing, they've had such hard lives in many ways, but they can still maintain hope and humour. I am very privileged to get to work with them.

The continuing process of settling in... We voice our regrets, the things we miss. The Wallace and Gromit movie is opening "everywhere", says the tv. Mmm. Not here. The librarian is out of town, so the library is closed. I miss coffee that is made by someone else, and a store that sells Mars bars at midnight when I'm craving. I miss my friend Jane, and bookstores. Email is good, but getting together to eat licorice and talk all afternoon would be better. Ordering books on the net is fun, but you can't browse as easily. I miss my mum and dad.

The sea is frozen now, and everyone's buzzing around on snowmobiles. The programs I'm helping with are going well, school is good for the kids, Miguel likes his job. The snow is fun, it drifts around alarmingly when the wind blows. One of the neighbours said that with us being on the edge of town, when there's a really big blow there will be 15 foot drifts in the road.

Some things save my sanity: Macleans magazine in the mail, really good cable, having brought the breadmaker, the friendliness and incredible sense of humour of everyone who lives here, sunrises like Monet paintings, the quiet of this snow desert, Miguel's support during my growing pains in my new occupation, phone calls and letters from friends, the internet.

Also, recently, a big book of Kingsley Amis' letters, and the revelation that he has shares my objections to Henry James... "I find the trouble is that he can't tell a story, and can't gather his observations, some of which I don't mind, round any central idea. These enormous wodges of undramatised family-background, she-was-a-woman-who, he-had-first-been-attracted-to-his-present-profession-when-travelling-to balls confound me and make me not want to have any more. I find he gives me more information about what he is telling me about than I care to have..." Yup, that's what I think too. Plus he uses the word "vague" too much, which may be telling in itself. I can back this up, if anyone cares to play:
Here...

we find this classic passage:

"She heard no knock, but at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow grey she started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons. It seemed to her for an instant that he was standing there—a vague, hovering figure in the vagueness of the room. She stared a moment; she saw his white face—his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure. She quitted the place and in her certainty passed through dark corridors and down a flight of oaken steps that shone in the vague light of a hall-window."

Yeah, yeah, I know. English degree worth all that, etc... (but seriously, 'the vagueness of the room'? sheesh.)