Happy Mother's Day!

Rachel made me frogs, for Mother's Day. Lots of frogs. She enlisted the help of her class. She gave one to the shop teacher and he used it to demonstrate a nail gun, by nailing it to a table.

Wish You Were Here

Rachel and I went to Kitiga Lake today, to go ice fishing. I didn't fish, I don't have a licence and I can't eat fish anymore anyway. I caught just as many fish as everyone else - zero.

The trip is cross-country, and it's hard to tell you're at a lake, except that when Gord and Ben got the ice auger down far enough, they hit water.

smile

The cadets seem to be having a good time in Burnaby. That's my boy looking serious.

Things I did today:

Got up early. couldn't sleep - it's not really getting very dark any more. I nap randomly.
Drank coffee. Probably too much. Sat around in my pajamas until noon.
Tidied up at work.
Cleaned my desk at home. long overdue. found a whole bunch of pens. some that even work.
Re-potted some plants. I'm growing a pineapple.
Cleaned house and cooked dinner, Miguel's parents came over because they're leaving soon.
Walked out to the dump with Patti. Everything was smouldering, no good pickings. Strangely, though, there were a lot of pickles.

Things I didn't do today:

The dishes from the dinner. I'll be sorry about this in the morning.
Work. I've done lots this week.
Wear my snowpants to the dump. I'm sorry about this already, as I'm chilled.
Go to the store. Now I'm really out of conditioner.

Ah, it's FRIDAY.

I finished (at three minutes after five this afternoon) a project that has taken up my every evening this week, including last night until midnight, at work. Someone was rummaging through drawers, over in Iqaluit, and they found some stuff that needed to be transcribed because it's going to court next week, and sent it to me in a bit of a panic. I promised completion by the end of the week. I delivered it, but it was painful today because I was tired and my brain hurt and I kept having to go off and do other things (like the work I'm SUPPOSED to be doing) so it took longer to finish than I hoped. But, it's done now and I have no commitments for this weekend other than the last session of the lay leader course on Sunday.

Tomorrow I can sleep in.

And in a surprising reversal of the hate-on I was ascribing to the universe, the person who could have bumped me from my job has decided not to do so, and the guy who I was figuring wasn't really sending me my daybook wrote today and supplied me with a tracking number! Which indicates that my book is at the post office, believe it or not! It says they "attempted delivery" on the 28th (they did no such thing, I would have definitely gone and turned in the parcel card if'n I'd gotten it) so Monday 0830hrs I'm gonna go down and insist they produce it. We only have boxes, for mail, it's not like they came to my house or anything. I'll have a daybook, and I can stop keeping track of things by sticking post it notes to my coat, or emailing myself.

I still don't know whether I'll get to keep my job, but I have a better chance now, I think. And a daybook is not going to make me stop forgetting things entirely, but at least it gives me a place to write down "I owe $10.00 to the boy who dressed as a girl to go to the dance" and "if I don't buy more conditioner Kirsten will yell at me."

The universe does not want me to have a daybook.

I have a Dayrunner binder that Miguel gave me a few years ago. We have no stationery store here. The Dayrunner website took my order back in 2005, for 2006 pages, and they were shipped up here to the wilds. Success. This, however, was, I realize now, a freak occurrence contrary to the laws of nature. Like, oh, I don't know, when it.... rains frogs....

In September of 2006, feeling very organized, I went on the Dayrunner website and ordered new pages for 2007. They did not come. My credit card was never charged. I wrote to them in November, wondering about the status of my order. I got back a terse email that informed me that my "address was not in their computer". So no pages. When I headed out to Australia, I did a bit of shopping in Edmonton and looked for pages, but it was March and everyone was sold out.

2008 was approaching. I'd been writing my appointments and to-doings in list form on the spare looseleaf pages that came with my Dayrunner when I first got it, but the spares were running out. I went south in November, but got caught up in other things and never did find a store that sold them. Miguel looked in Toronto, when he was there. No luck.

On March 5th, I went on the net and, as I mentioned, ordered a Moleskine. I expected that it would be in the mail when I got back from holidays. It was not. I emailed the seller. He said, oh, it must have been lost in the mail, I'll send you another one. That was two weeks ago.

I realized today that according to Amazon Stores' policy, I have three more days to claim a refund. It's been 57 days since I ordered the book. 57 days that I have not been able to keep track of, because I DON'T HAVE A DAYBOOK.

Rachel said to me, (When I was yelling about it at lunchtime) "You'd think it wouldn't be so hard to mail you one. It's not rocket surgery."

I'm doing the dishes. Sometimes this process takes me an hour, because I am easily distracted.

First I had to find appropriate music. Today it was Outkast, because I needed to drown out a rowdy game of Life in the dining room. The game broke up quite quickly, with some shouts of "I hate Life" and some withdrawing to rooms. Then I had to suggest some alternate diversions to Rachel and her friend Siobhan. But Siobhan called her mother and was told to go home, so then I had to explain why I couldn't drive her. (look out the window. do you see a car? no?) She and Rachel set off on foot.

I also got sidetracked by sweeping the floor (because the dining room table had crumbs on the placemats and they ended up on the floor) and finding a disk I'd lost, under my desk - the bunny hunt picture disk that I was supposed to add my own pictures to prior to giving to Dan. So I did that. Also for some reason there was a maggot ??? in the disk case. So we had to examine it.

The spaghetti pan had been put back on a burner with wet spaghetti in it. Now dry spaghetti. Much scraping. I also thought of something I'd been meaning to Google - we were talking about Facebook jealousy at work. So I went off to do that, and ended up here. Not doing the dishes.

Joeby's eating the dirt I swept up. The clam chowder pot is soaking. Condemned is being played. I'm nowhere near the kitchen.

On the plus side, I accomplished a lot this weekend, work-wise. We're almost done the lay reader training course. Apparently in short order I will be licensed and allowed to lead prayer services, perform funerals, do baptisms in extremis, and anything else the diocese decides it wants done. And yeah, I'm still a bit bewildered about this. I keep waiting for someone to come and say, "No, really, ha ha, not you, we were just kidding."

It was bunny hunt day today, at Beavers. As you can see from the picture, it's still pretty cold here. Dan, this year's long-suffering bunny, kindly agreed to come and allow himself to be found, captured, chopped up, and made into stew. Great fun was had by all, and Dan even seemed to be in pretty good spirits afterwards.

From Ian re-doing his cadet uniform buttons, I have a small pile of black shiny buttons on my desk. I keep catching sight of them out of the corner of my eye, and thinking they're candy and I should eat them.

Lucky I learned the self-Heimlich maneuver at the first aid course I took recently. If I'm going to take up swallowing non-food objects I'll probably need it.

Guitar Hero came back from our vacation, with the kids. I didn't buy it when I was Christmas shopping because I failed to see the point. I still don't see the attraction - I could stand it if they were legitimately practicing a musical instrument - God knows I lived through the "Ode To Joy on a recorder" days and the "Theme from Star Wars on a clarinet" days, at least that seemed to be an accomplishment. But Guitar Hero? Songs I didn't even like from the 80's are being played to the accompaniment of tapping on a mock guitar. I need new knitting needles. Because in addition to my button-swallowing fetish, I have the urge to plunge needles into my ears.

It's been blizzarding the last few days, and everything is all drifted over again here. Will spring ever come? Where oh where is Delia's global warming? (Just kidding).

We drove out on snowmachines to West Arm on the weekend so the kids could jump off the snowcliffs. We were just ahead of the storm, and when Kirsten and I rode back it was behind us, blowing hard. Bit of a wild ride, but fun. Tonight it's calm and cloudy, but the storm is done. It will be back to business as usual tomorrow. Which is good because we're almost out of water. I don't know if I've mentioned here that water and sewage are trucked to our house - we have tanks in the furnace room like everyone in town - and if the trucks don't run we have to go into conservation mode. Hard with teenagers.

Ian and the Cadets were shooting in Yellowknife this weekend, they came first in the competition and get to go to the Nationals in Vancouver in May.

Over at Arctic Hound I got tagged.

What was the first rock concert you went to?
I think it was Bryan Adams when I was in grade 11, in Lethbridge. Him and Platinum Blonde. I know that the first rock concert I wanted to go to was Journey when I was in grade nine and some friends of my dad's had offered to take me but my mum said no.

What is the best rock concert you've ever seen?
I would have to say The Tragically Hip (oh, you're not really surprised are you?) at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre as reviewed in this very weblog back in 2002. But I also remember quite fondly an amazing and deafening Def Leppard show back in the late 80's and a raucous Nazareth concert in the same time period. On the not-so-good side there's a Billy Idol concert where Billy was so drunk he could barely stand up - at one point he fell off the stage and then climbed back up and started swearing at the audience. The Cult were the opening act and they definitely outdid him.

We enjoyed the cruise - here's Miguel on the bed with our towel elephant. (And Frederick, he came for the cruise).


One of the most interesting (to me) results of travelling is the perspective it gives me on my life in general. Especially when making journeys with kids, things get very basic - do we have food, are we all warm/cool/sunscreened and where will we be sleeping tonight. The conversations we had on the upper decks of the cruise ship in the dark, me and the kids, were wide ranging and free of the distractions of television, computers, and phones. We talked about the future, theirs and mine, and what we remembered from the past, when they were children.





In the course of one of these conversations, Ian told me that he always thought, when he was small, that the tattoo on my ankle was a telephone pole... (It's a cross.) I laughed and asked him if he had a theory as to Why I would have a telephone pole on my leg, and he said, "I thought it had something to do with a Tragically Hip song". Which is not a bad theory, really. Wish I'd thought of that...





Rachel and I snuck off to get ice cream one afternoon, and Kirsten and I had coffee on the deck of the boat late at night, talking about love and relationships. Miguel did Miguel things, mostly, but one afternoon we forgot to tell the kids we were going to sit in the bar down on the casino deck, and managed to be there for about two hours, talking and drinking margaritas, until the kids found us.





There was a slot machine called Lucky Lemmings, that we kept walking past on the casino deck. On the third day of the cruise I said to Miguel, "I think it's a sign, we're from the Arctic, lemmings, you know, we should put some money in it." So we poked in a five dollar bill, and as it was a nickel slot we played it for quite a while. It kept spitting out money, periodically, and I was putting it in a bucket. After half an hour or so, Miguel went off to watch an art auction, and I was still playing all the quarters. Pushing the buttons, listening to the lemming song, playing a nickel at a time and the money was still coming out faster than I could put it in. When the bucket was full, I figured I'd go cash it in and see how much I had. The cashier took the bucket without comment, and poured it into a counting machine. As I watched, the display went from 10.00 to 20.00 to 30.00, counting all the quarters, and I thought, oh, hey, 40 bucks or so, that's cool. But it didn't stop. It kept going and going and didn't slow down until it got to 190.00 Grand total 192.00. I said to the cashier, "Pretty good for five bucks, hey?" and she looked a bit startled.





I went back to the room and put the money in the safe. Miguel put a bit more money in the slots later in the day, but I kept the lemming money and we went to a steakhouse in Cocoa Beach for dinner when David (Kirsten's boyfriend) and his mom and sister were with us. Nice dinner, even if the servers were a bit surly. Wait staff in Florida, I guess you have to feel sorry for them - they're probably a lot friendlier when it's not Spring Break. Even at the IHOP the waitress told me she didn't know where her head was that week.

Well, I'm back.

It was warm, in Florida. And we went on the cruise. Which was lovely. This is the beach on the far side of Paradise Island that we hung out on ten years ago, when we were in the Bahamas without the children.

I'm making lists, prior to packing. I love this bit.

The other day I ordered a daybook. I found a red Moleskine on Amazon Stores, and I couldn't help it, I had to buy it. Even though it will be April before I get it. There's just something about a new notebook.

I also got a prayerbook, when the church made an order. It's easier to help with the services if I know what the readings and such will be. I guess I'm committed to the whole lay-leader thing now, I've gone to half of the course already and soon I'll be licensed.

Well, very soon we will be South.

I leave Friday for Edmonton. Then Florida. At minus 51, today, I can't wait. I was sorting out my summer clothes yesterday - tank tops that I generally wear under sweaters, a pair of cropped jeans I wore in Australia, some skirts I brought from Nanaimo and have never worn here - and they look so flimsy. I almost can't believe I'll really be wearing them. But it's 30 above in the Bahamas and I remember what that felt like the last time I went there. Hot. And sticky. I guess I'll have to buy a pair of shorts, as in sorting out I find I don't even own a pair any more.

Joeby is staying with the housesitters. I'll miss him. But he'll be ok. He likes company and he's not fussy who it is, as long as they don't mind being drooled on.

It's court week and I'm trying to finish everything I need to do before I go. I've got too many things to do on all fronts, as usual. I gotta figure out a way to make that stop.

Kiviuq, formerly a puppy, is staying with us again while her family's away. She's getting really huge, but that's not surprising given that her daddy's a St. Bernard and her mum's half wolf. She does have one blue eye and one brown eye, and she likes to eat things.

The frogs in my bathroom are on strike. Their spokesperson presented me with their list of demands tonight.

Funny thing, in a way, being married. Later on this year we will have been married for 20 years. Given that I'm 40, that pretty much tells you we were very young, comparatively, when we decided to be wed.

Miguel has started smoking again, the latest in a long lines of unquits. Or restarts. However you want to put it, the end result is the same. He resumes smoking slowly, hides it from me, is extra nice to me because a/ he's feeling guilty and b/ he's happy to be smoking again, and then one of the kids rats him out. This time he actually confessed about twenty minutes before Rachel told on him. Because, I'm figuring, he knew it was coming. He has a new job, started this week, with all the stress that sort of thing always engenders. Although in my mind it would be easier not to spend time your first week on a job standing outside smoking. But I digress.

Miguel has started smoking again, and that means that I have to (paradoxically) reassure him that I'm not planning to leave him because he's hopeless. And he plays certain little games (that I fully recognize) to ensure that I convey the necessary reassurance.

At one point the other day, he said to me, "Why do you stay married to me?" With the feeling that no answer I gave would quite be good enough, I said, "I don't think anyone should examine the answer to that question very deeply." I reminded him of a particularly cold-blooded conversation we had a few years ago where he basically told me that he enjoyed talking to me, but that our relationship could be conducted mostly over the phone. I wasn't terribly flattered at that time, and I don't want to fall into the trap of trying to answer that question.

I don't know that it matters, really, why. The fact is that I do stay married, and I don't think about the reasons. If this sounds cynical, perhaps you all will sympathize with Miguel... he needs the reassurance. Oh, and bring cigarettes.

Somedays I don't think I'll ever be able to fulfill all my obligations. It was a long week, I have a silly cold and I'm still not putting milk or sugar in my coffee. And I'm still trying to fast. And I'm working on transcribing a difficult case from the East, that I want to get done this weekend. Also we were curling this week twice, I said I'd take minutes at the school board meeting on Thursday, I agreed to do the church service this weekend, and we were cleaning the mission house today. And Miguel's parents are coming for dinner tomorrow.

However. I've been told that my contract at work is being extended for another three months, until July 1st, so I'm happy about that.

Joeby's ear is better. Doesn't seem to have any lasting damage. It's a bit warmer now, only minus 40 instead of minus 60. Can't wait to go to Florida!