Cubs finished their birdhouses last night, and they look fantastic. They painted them wild psychedelic colours and then stuck on hippy flowers and dinosaurs. One enterprising little boy painted "Bird House for Rent" on the roof. The others told him very seriously that birds don't have any money.

Rachel's been quite sick, had to take her down for a pronouncement of strep throat and a prescription. To add to the 10-yr-old-taking-pills fun, Jazz has a bladder thing so we've been having to feed her penicillin too. At least with a dog you can pry her mouth open and throw the pills in. We contemplated doing that with Rachel, too, might save time and the tears would probably be shorter, too. Ok, I'm being callous. I feel sorry for both pill-taking beings. But I wish they'd just swallow the damn things and be done with it. Jazz will take the pills if we hide them in something relatively meaty, she sussed them out of ground beef tonight, but gobbled them down in pork chop bits yesterday. Rachel has worked her way up to being able to swallow a half a pill with water. At first we were feeding her bits of bread and getting her to swallow the pills that way...

Saw the sun on Friday, and again today, about ten minutes each time. It was cloudy all weekend. Soon it will be a bit lighter during the day. The darkness has seemed long. I lack energy. Read a lot. Neglect things. Still, it's the middle of January now. By the spring equinox there will be 12 hours of daylight. Better get on with that, sun.

My brain is a bit fuzzy, I'm looking forward to the sun coming back. I'm trying to overcome my desire to eat too much sweet/salty food, which I'm told is cravings caused by the darkness. One thing that's making it all a bit more bearable is that Miguel tried to order me a Globe and Mail Saturday subscription but they screwed up and sent me about two weeks worth of daily papers before we got it sorted out. So I've had news and crosswords galore. Just like home. The papers take between a week and two weeks to get here, and have been coming out of order but I don't care. (Just for the record, it would cost 950.00 to have the Globe and Mail delivered to our mailbox up here... the charge on his credit card was what alerted Miguel to the fact that something had gone wrong).

Going to the library. I wish to escape the mountains of laundry that appeared in the upstairs hallway when I asked if anyone had anything that needed washing. Rachel has tonsillitis again, and was feverish and confused in the night, poor kid. I spent some time sitting on the couch with her watching the sort of pre-teen sitcoms I normally abhor, because she wanted company.

So, Happy New Year to my far-flung readers, I hope that all of you and your loved ones have a wonderful year...

It has been an interesting year, and I've been caught off guard by developments more than once.

Miguel and I managed to put together the mammoth autoparts convention, and in the process repaired the holes in our relationship. The high point of the convention was hitting downtown Nashville on a Saturday night and eating pulled pork in an authentically grungy bar, listening to a country band.

I finished my university and even aced the stats course, then we went to England and France. We spent a few glorious days wandering Paris and London, taking lots of touristy pictures and drinking beer.

During the summer, due to the instability of Miguel's job and my fruitless job search, we sold everything we owned and moved to Nunavut. Now, Miguel really likes his job, I've worked at three different and interesting jobs in the last four months, and now it's looking like I'll be working for the police.....

Along the way, the children have grown and the dogs have kept me company, I cut my hair and let it get longish again, I got glasses, and learned to cope in the Arctic.

I was sitting next to my neighbour, Karen, last night, at the New Year's Eve party we attended, listening to people doing karaoke, and Karen said to me, "If I'd told you last Christmas that on December 31st of this year you'd be sitting in the Arctic at a karaoke party, would you have believed me?" I said no. Last Christmas I spent an hour and a half crying on the ferry to Vancouver, and thinking that I couldn't take any more of the situation I was living in. I wanted to drop out of my schooling, when my last two courses started in January, from a belief that I was wasting my time and would never get a job in the field...

Just the fact that we went to a party last night (actually, first we went for dinner with the neighbours, then we went for champagne at another set of friends, and THEN we went to the party) tells me that I'm a long way away from my old life. And it was a fun party, silly with karaoke, off-key renditions of Karma Chameleon and I Will Survive being the high points, and I felt very cosy and friendly. I like my new life, despite the cold. It retains all the things I enjoy (my books, my friends, my family) and lets me out of a lot of things I had grown to hate (my old neighbours' clannishness and judgementalism, my lack of career prospects, the children being bullied at school, Miguel's on-again-off-again job, the expectations...). It's different. I feel (as I think I mentioned last week) that I have regained the idea that neat things might actually happen to me...

Enough seriousness. Re: the job I want, they called today and asked me to come down and fill out a few forms. This turned out to be for security clearance, and the first one is probably ten pages long. I have been trying for three hours to fill it out. You have to list all possible family members, including inlaws, and all their biographical data. So far I've had to call my mother-in-law (she has FOUR middle names and I didn't remember all of them, nor did I know where she was born) my brother in Calgary (left a message, don't know his new address) and email my other brother in Australia (what exactly do you do?). My parents are away for their anniversary, so I'll have to call them tomorrow. I know we arrived in Canada in 1975, but I don't remember the exact date, and it's needed. Heck, I was seven years old. I've also been racking my brains trying to remember old addresses going back ten years. I went upstairs to ask Kirsten if she recalled the name of the road we lived on in Lake Louise when she was six, and she said, "All I remember is that the house was brown. You should just put that."

But it looks like I've got the job, they asked me when I could start and I said, "I'm ready whenever you are." Although I've enjoyed my stint at the health centre, there are, as I mentioned before, a lot of politics operating, and while I'm immune because I'm just casual, I feel as if I'll get drawn in if I work there too long. At this point, when I'm asked for opinions on different staff members, I just say, "Don't ask me, I don't really work here..."

"Worry is usually about the future and most people are extremely good at worrying and often fail to stop and think how useless and absurd it is. Worrying about the future is meaningless. The person who's worrying is not the person who is going to experience the future. There will be change, not just having grown older and hopefully a bit wiser, but a totally different set of circumstances with different thoughts and different feelings. Quite useless to worry about the future... That doesn't mean one can't plan. Planning and worrying are not the same thing. Planning turns into worrying when one starts thinking whether the plan is going to materialize. Planning is fine, and then dropping the plan until one can actually put it into action, without being concerned with the future results." -- Ayya Khema, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere

"Over the years, I've noticed that sometimes the Dalai Lama is asked to boil his philosophy down to a single fundamental principle. To this difficult question, he often replies, 'If you can, serve others. If not, at least refrain from harming them.'" -- Howard Cutler and the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work

"When two people talk, they don't just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they'll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they'll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. we imitate each other's emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other... Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. All of us have had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood. If you think about this closely, though, it's quite a radical notion. We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes inside out." -- Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

The first quote, the Ayya Khema, is one I return to when I start worrying too much about what's going to happen... Miguel is concerned about what will happen with my employment (as it's all over the map at the moment) but I keep telling him I'll deal with it when I have to.

The second quote has been rattling around in my head since I read it a few weeks ago. Is it enough to serve? It's all I'm really doing at the moment.

The third quote made me think that it's possible that we're wasting our time trying to convince our program participants that "you have to take responsibility for your own feelings, no-one can make you feel anything you don't want to". The men especially always argue this point, and I know that on some levels I agree with them. Someone who knows you well, who knows all the right things to say, can piss you off whenever their little heart desires....

I miss the sun. I miss rain, water shushing in the ditches, running to the sea.

I miss trees. The sound of wind cracking branches, leaves bursting mint-green in spring.

I chafe against the winter clothing, that narrows my view to a fur tunnel and holds my head forward when I want to look around at the sky.

I want to nap in the afternoons, when the sky is black at three, like a bird with its head under a downy wing.

And yet, the sky is limitless and streaked with aurora borealis, twisting and writhing overhead, shaken ribbons of light.

And then, the silence feeds me and envelops me, broken only by children playing hockey in the street, ravens barking on telephone poles and dogs singing in the evening.

Time moves sluggishly, becomes meaningless. My dreams are long and convoluted, like childhood dreams and just as colourful. I thought I had stopped dreaming. I thought nothing more would ever happen to me, and yet it does. I live in the Arctic.

Last year, while I was trying to cook Christmas dinner, Rachel was driving a remote controlled Bratz car around my feet. This year, my in-laws very kindly sent EACH of the children a tiny remote controlled car, and so I had three little cars buzzing round in the kitchen. Which isn't a big space at the best of times. But I only stepped on one, dinner got made and was eaten, we all wore our paper hats from the crackers and now we have enough leftover turkey to feed us for a few days. Kirsten emerged at nine this morning saying, "I think I'll have turkey for breakfast".

Miguel got us a satellite radio, which we've been trying to persuade to pick up some signals. No luck yet. I think we'll need a more powerful antenna. The radio here is limited to two CBC stations, one from here and one from Iqaluit. The station here plays requests, and they are eclectic to say the least. I actually heard the Numa Numa song a couple of weeks ago, followed by King of the Road. The one from Iqaluit is mostly Inuktitut talk shows. My vocabulary is not developed to the point where I could get anything out of the programming. I know a few words in Innuinaqtun, the local dialect: kinmik is dog, nutakat is children, an office is lunit, koana is thank-you, qallunaat is what I am (white folk), ilihakvik is school, tuktu is caribou, nattiq is seal, umingmak is muskox, kamik is boots, hivajaut is telephone... so unless the conversation is about putting your boots on and telephoning the school to tell them that your children are bringing muskox to the office, I'm pretty much lost... If someone calls the health centre when I'm answering the phone and launches into Innuinaqtun, I say "tatjaygu" which is phonetically what I've been told is "please hold" and I pass them to one of the staff members who understands the language. For all I know, I could be telling them to "shut the f*** up", but I'm hoping not. My son knows a lot of body part names (typical for 12 year old boys) and it doesn't sound like any of them...

Books this week:

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. This is a book I've been reading about in the newspapers for a long time, fits into my fascination with chaos theory, and I'm reading it slowly with pauses for thought.

A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey. First thing I did when this came in the mail was pick off the "Oprah's Book Club" sticker. I don't care what Oprah thinks about it, it's a good book anyway, and I got it because my brother recommended it.

The Idea of Perfection, by Kate Grenville. I'd never heard of her, but the book jacket had the typeface I associate with books published in England. Turns out she's Australian, and it was a very thoughtful book. It features a very well-rendered dog as almost a main character; it adopts the heroine and follows her around. I always like books that can do dogs properly.

Well, I made it through another week. And all the presents are wrapped, the cookies are baked, Mr. Turkey is thawing nicely in the fridge, having been sitting in the freezer since the middle of November as we weren't sure of the reliability of the food mail... We even got squash and yams from foodmail, for casserole, and I have all the ingredients for trifle except the sponge cake, and I'm off in search of that shortly.

Last night we made our usual garish Christmas cookies; blue snowmen, green stars, yellow and red Santas, etc. Molasses cookies have been made, and we have nuts and chocolate. My dad sent us Christmas crackers, as he felt we wouldn't be able to find good ones up here and he was right. We're all set.

We only got invited to two parties, one at work and one at a friend's house, we skipped the work one because of an emergency at the health center and we skipped the friend's one because we were just too tired. The Cubs Christmas party was very low-key and fun, and no-one asked me to bake for a school party. All of the things that I associate with Christmas in the city; crowded malls with Christmas hype, 'open houses' and the elaborate parties of various children's and adult's social groups, Christmas muzak everywhere, people giving us poinsettias and stuff from Starbucks, being asked to swap cookies, my parents showing up on Christmas Day with the contents of a decent-sized liquor store, all of that is non-existent here. Which has meant that I can concentrate on doing only the things that my family wants. And I'm really enjoying it. I have none of the dread that I usually feel at this time of year. We were talking about it this morning, and it's a bit like going back twenty or thirty years in time, to how I remember Christmas when I was a kid. Tomorrow we can have our dinner, and then play poker or StockTicker all evening.

Merry Christmas everyone!

One of my friends from prison called yesterday. He had been out on a pass to attend his mother's funeral. He's in the process of being recommended for parole just after Christmas, after 25 years.

About halfway down this page is a link to a song my friend Carley has recorded. I like it. Unfortunately there's no picture...

This week I am trying to tie up loose ends. Got my Nunavut driver's license, as my BC one expired on my birthday. This was a fun process, the man doing it printed it up first with a misspelling in my name. I also called the bank to explain why my account was overdrawn: when I left Nanaimo there was no money in it, and they keep taking off service fees but I can't deposit any money as there's only a different bank's machine up here. They were very understanding, and suggested some ways I could remedy this situation. Today I'm going to write some letters and get some tax documents ready to send out. Although I don't have nearly the number of responsibilities up here, no volunteer stuff, no university courses, I seem to have almost lost the ability to get things done... In the evenings, if I don't have to go anywhere, I just read or surf, and go to bed early. We were in bed last night by 9:30, and as we were lying there Miguel said to me, "Didn't we used to stay up on Saturday nights and watch Saturday Night Live until 1:30 in the morning..." However, we were both awake before seven this morning, drinking coffee and talking about things in general.

As I was walking to work the other day, people were buzzing by on snowmobiles, and it occurred to me that I've stopped thinking of that as strange. We went to the Christmas concert at school on Wednesday, and Miguel mentioned afterwards that it surprised him to see that Rachel was the only white kid in her class... Although, with her dark straight hair she doesn't look really out of place.

A movie we were told to watch, The Snow Walker, was on yesterday, so we watched it. If you get a chance, it's a good movie and it was filmed not far from here, so you can see not only what the terrain looks like, but the skills the Inuit have.

Books I'm currently reading:

Anger-Free, by W. Doyle Gentry. An interesting thing: "The intensity of a hangover after an evening of drinking may to a large extent reflect how angry the person was while drinking" (p. 132).

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: A Novel, by Mark Haddon. There's a good review here

It Takes A Village and other lessons children teach us, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. This probably wouldn't have been my choice, but the librarian had put it on one side for me (before he got hauled off to jail for trying to strangle his son. or so I heard. I have yet to establish the truth of this)

I heard yesterday that I'm most likely wanted for the other job I mentioned last week... Good stuff.

I've been working for the last few days on a whole bunch of statistics for the Health Centre. A time-consuming study of maternal ages from 2001 to the present, and tabulating appointments made and kept over the last three months (on Mondays, interestingly enough, only half of the folks who make appointments actually show up). The maternal ages thing was complicated because: there's a database with birthdates of children. Ok, print that out. Then, on cards in the immunization files, I had to find each child's mother's name. Then, armed with mother's names, find their birthdates in a different database. Then figure out how old mom was when baby was born. I made cool tables. I guess the stats course earlier this year was useful for something.

Kids are off school now for Christmas break. Kirsten is dogsitting Kaylar, the dog next door. (we call the dog Teflon or Kevlar, and she's confused) Rachel is pigsitting her friend Liam's guinea pig, and Ian is ratsitting one of his teachers' degu. Apparently these are like large gerbils with tufty tails. In other words, everyone gets to go somewhere else for Christmas (Ontario) and we stay here and look after the animals. Still, kids are getting paid so they're happy, but Kaylar the wonder dog needs to be let out at 7am and Kirsten's not the biggest fan of that.

The internet has been... intermittent... all week, perhaps due to the temperature... I was standing on the porch on Friday morning getting ready to go to work and a truck pulled up. It was two of the folks who work at the health centre, and they yelled "get in!" and when I did the driver said to me, "It's -49 this morning, too cold to walk".

So anyway. I had a very different week, I did about four different jobs all over the hospital: filing charts and immunization cards; reception for the nursing station; assistant to the director (this was fun, I'm researching oxygen concentrators and other supplies); transcribing translated documents. Two women from the Arctic College had made handwritten translations of various forms into Innuinaqtun, and I had to make the Innu versions look like the English versions. Which is more difficult than it sounds, as the words are really long and full of Q's. At one point one of the translators was looking over my shoulder as I typed, and I typed "kanok" because that's what the word looked like, and she said "No, that's a 'U', we don't use 'O'" and I looked through all the other stuff I'd already typed and saw that yes, indeed, there were no 'O's. But it's really tedious to proofread it myself, because I don't know how to spell a single word. This is partly because rather than having articles and adjectives, each root word gets added onto (as if they weren't long enough to start with). Our town is called Iqaluktutiaq, and someone who lives here is called Iqaluktutiaqmi, and the whole population is Iqaluktiaqmiut, for instance... Some of the documents were a rabies advisory, someone's puppies have rabies and the health director wanted a flyer to put in people's mailboxes.

So it was a fun week, although I did miss Miguel, who was in Rankin Inlet all week. When I left work on Friday I went to the bank and the store, to get some supplies and a chocolate cake for dessert. I was cutting through the school field, and it occurred to me that I was alone in the Arctic with the children, and yet I'd coped fine all week. We had the Cubs Christmas party on Tuesday, and I ran the craft table, taught thirty little kids how to make God's Eyes. You know, the popsicle sticks with the wool artfully woven around to make a square around a cross. Everyone seems to have made them at some summer camp in the course of their lives.

My brother Roy and his new wife are going on their honeymoon to Peru shortly. I told Roy I wanted to come, but he laughed and said, "I can't see that really fitting the definition of a honeymoon: Oh, by the way, my sister's coming with us." Personally I think it's only fair, he was at the hospital when Kirsten, my first child, was born, helped me take her home in a taxi and everyone thought he was the father... Ok, so maybe that's a bit of a weak argument. I just wanna go to Peru.

Some cool words:

Schadenfreude: glee at another's misfortune
Vituperative: given to speaking abusively, berating, reviling
Hebetude: the quality or condition of being dull or lethargic

Leaving the house requires dressing for an Arctic expedition. Toque, scarf, snow-pants, parka, mittens, make sure there are no cracks between clothing. My toque is recalcitrant, and gets stuck somehow, so that when I walk my hood pushes the toque over my eyes. Which then means that my glasses fog up. If I stop to adjust things and take my mittens off, my hands start to turn numb within seconds. Add to this that it's dark and you can't see the dips in the snow, and you have a picture of me, the crazy white woman lurching around the streets with my hat over my eyes and my glasses frozen up. When I come inside, the dogs rush me, and I either can't see to fight them off, or, if I took off my glasses and put them in the front pocket of my parka, I'm worried Joeby will put his paw on them and break them. So I generally come in yelling, my hair frozen, trying to get my mittens off. (The ATV will no longer start and anyway the streets are too icy, so we're all on foot unless my kindly neighbours offer to drive us, as they did to Cubs the other night, luxury).

After my fantastic day last Friday, I figured it would be hard to go back to being second banana, and it was. I've been fighting the urge to tell my boss to take a long walk off a short pier, in not so nice language... Interestingly enough, one of the evaluations at the end of the workshop had the answer to the question "What would you like to see done differently in the workshop" that he would have liked to have heard more from me...

Anyway. There are no more workshops until the middle of January, so I'm off to work for the Government of Nunavut again, doing HR stuff on contract for a few weeks. Apparently I even get an office. Not someone else's this time. So that should be fun. I also followed another lead on a full-time job today, and had a promising response, but I'm not going to say anything else about it lest I jinx myself. Although I love the clients, I'm unsure as to the long-term viability of working there, and when my co-worker advised me to take any full-time employment that was offered to me elsewhere, earlier on this week, I decided to take his advice.

We had a graduation ceremony for our three-week program today, and it left me very drained. I'm looking forward to the weekend, to decompress and watch the Tragically Hip concert DVD that came in the mail this week from my in-laws for my birthday.

Books this week:

Primo Levi -- The Drowned and the Saved Heavy stuff. He survived Auschwitz.
Introduction to the Lotus Sutra
Anne Rice -- Blood and Gold For some reason I'm finding this slow to get into.
Howard Cutler and The Dalai Lama -- The Art of Happiness at Work I'm reading this bit by bit at bedtime, it's lovely.
Alice Munro -- Open Secrets
Michael Caine -- What's It All About This is a biography, and I don't know how good it will be later on, but his childhood in London and as a child evacuee is very funny.
William Fleeman -- Anger Management Workbook
This one's interesting, with some good stuff on anger as an addiction in itself.
Daniel Sonkin and Michael Durphy -- Learning to Live without Violence.
Stephan Pastis -- Sergeant Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic Pearls Before Swine, Rachel's favourite.

Yesterday my co-worker was sick. He had been making fun of the rest of us who got sick, saying, "I never get sick, I'm too healthy." Cursed himself, I guess. But anyway, I arrived in the morning to find a note telling me what to do for the day, as he couldn't get out of bed. So I was in charge. I had a few moments of nervousness in the morning, these are mostly older men with really long rap sheets, and some of them are very resistant to the things we're trying to tell them. In the morning I went through some cognitive anger stuff -- along the lines of 'no-one can make you mad unless you allow them' but a couple of them weren't buying it. They truly believe that they are subject to external forces and the manipulations of women (who they cast as pretty cold-blooded) and they argued with me. It was fun.

I also debriefed with them a movie we watched on Thursday, the story of Tina Turner, her relationship with Ike was particularly stormy. I've felt, since we've been doing these workshops and showing the movie, that we should debrief it because it's pretty intense. Got my feeling validated, as the men shared a lot of emotion surrounding the video, in fact we talked about it for over an hour. Although I admire my co-worker's style in some ways, I personally like to let the participants get their own realizations, rather than trying to feed them 'program'. A couple of the guys were crying, when one man said he recognized himself in Ike Turner's abusive behaviour, and that's something we would have missed if we hadn't debriefed...

Needless to say, I was high as a kite by the end of the day, and when I went back to the centre to talk to the family violence coordinator about schedules for the shelter, one of the supervisors said to me "How are you" and I said, "I'm fantastic" and she laughed and asked me what I'd been smoking. Then she said to me, "You always seem so happy, do you like your work?". I told her I love it... then she proceeded to offer me more. Doing women's empowerment and self-esteem workshops on a continuing basis, for those who've taken the two week programs and need follow up. Which is funny, because it's something I've been thinking about, that we give them two intense weeks and then there's no more contact.

Anyway. Enough about work. I'm lazy this weekend. I was on call all week, had meetings after work almost every day, and so today I did very little. Well, other than clean house and watch The Witches of Eastwick. (Miguel's comment when he came home and found me on the couch was "Not that again..." It seems to get shown on tv about once a month, and I generally watch at least some of it. I've seen it so many times now I can come in at any point. It's not even so much the plot, it's just such a beautiful movie, lush. The tv guide channel teased me by saying The Last Remake of Beau Geste was on, too, but it wasn't. When I changed the channel it was a cooking show.

It is going to be completely dark here very soon. I seem to be wandering around in the dark, dusk, or twilight an awful lot. At certain times in the day, the sky and the land are exactly the same shade of dusty grey. At other times, there are long blue and pink shadows, and the smoke from the chimneys picks up a salmon colour from the low sun. I'm disoriented, when it's getting dark when I'm going back to work after lunch I feel as if I should be heading back to make supper instead...

This men's workshop is very intense... I'm coming home and needing to play my music really loudly, afterwards. At the moment I'm craving Santana, especially. Nice warm music. And the sun is disappearing, it rises about ten thirty and is setting again when I'm heading back to work after lunch at one. This afternoon as I was going down our street, the sun was dripping down the horizon like a giant russet teardrop. Something to do with the curvature of the earth.

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...