All right. My brain hates me. So, just for a bit of background, some news items from our widespread and sparsely-populated area. (and, just for fun, the backstory that goes with them).

Friday there was an armed standoff in Igloolik.

I ended up being involved in this a bit at work, fielding phone calls back and forth between the airport and Igloolik... didn't know air traffic control was in my job description. (I had more story here, but I'm still pretty nervous about talking about my job...)

Second news item has to do with the muskox harvest around here.

I saw the posters in the Coop a few weeks ago, asking for applications from hunters to be part of the harvest. I was joking around with Miguel, saying to him that I was going to apply.

Anyway. I'm told that there is a 45 minute window between killing and cutting the animals, which has to be done in the abattoir, rather than on the land as traditionally. All wonderful intentions aside, the problem with the new rules is that the time limits and the need for the abattoir have made it very difficult, given that the timeline requires a very early start that the hunters don't like. (I don't blame them one bit, it's bloody cold out there...) So the hunt is going very slowly and the folks manning the abattoir are bored. The best laid plans of muskox and men. (I personally don't understand the 45 minute thing, I'm pretty sure that in these temperatures the meat's not going bad in a hurry.) People have killed and eaten these animals for thousands of years. I think I'd rather eat a caribou that I can see was healthy and running around millions of acres of clean land than a cow that was stuffed into a feedlot in the Fraser valley within breathing distance of Vancouver's pollution. Who knows.

I went for dinner next door with the lawyers last night. I got to ask a lot of the questions I've been wondering about, to do with cultural differences and my place in the scheme of things. Although my brain still hates me, my emotions are a bit calmer. I love it here. Strange. Miguel's already starting to talk about wanting to go back to the real world. Not yet, but he's thinking finitely. I can understand that. But I'm in no hurry.

Hey Delia,

I didn't get Crow...


Badger


What Is Your Animal Personality?
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Miguel's comment when I showed him was: "That's you all over." Grmph.

Early Sunday morning the phone rang. I lurched to grab it on the first ring, as I'm supposed to at the police station. At the last moment I thought, "Hmmm, I seem to be in bed", and said, "Hello," instead. The voice on the other end said, "Uh, hi. Who is this?" I replied, "This is Kate. Who is this?" There was a pause, then the voice said, "Oh. Sorry. Wrong number," and hung up. I was telling the corporal about this, at work today, and I said to him that I was all ready to say, "Where are you calling from? What's going on? Is anybody hurt?" And he laughed and said I must be learning something...

This not-smoking thing is ok, I guess. Really I've gotten to the stage of things where I don't want to smoke because I don't want to have to quit again and I know I have to. If that makes sense. I am enjoying the re-threading of my brain. There are definite changes in how I see things when I'm not smoking. I have to fight through the moods, at first, and try to sort out whether everyone really does hate me and is out to get me. I get a bit more selfish than usual, and want to get people to do things for me. Especially, it always seems, as I mentioned last week, I want someone to make coffee for me. It doesn't count as a treat, an alternative to cigarettes, unless someone else produces it. Don't ask me why this follows, but it does. And I don't want people to stand too close to me. This passes, but if I remember correctly it takes a long time. If someone stands too close it makes me dizzy, and I think I'm going to grab them to keep from falling. Like a sort of proximity-induced vertigo.

Jazz is going to Yellowknife next week to the vet. She's been peeing blood and we're worried about her. We got antibiotics sent from the vet, hoping it might be a bladder infection, but the vets said they need to do more tests as the drugs didn't help. We were thinking we might have to send her by herself in her crate (poor sweetie) but it turns out Miguel's going to meetings in YK next week so he can take her. I'm really hoping that it isn't kidney failure, and that she gets to come home again........

Things not-smoking has done for me:

1. tonight an episode of Futurama made me cry. Fry's dog waited for him to come back for 12 years...

2. yesterday Miguel and I had an argument about the alarm clock. that pretty much lasted all day. we made up in the evening (after I showed him again how to set the damn thing) but nasty things were said. and credited to lack of nicotine.

3. keep losing my voice and croaking all over. difficult when answering phones. also sneezing a lot. respiratory system doing spring cleaning, I figure.

4. napped at regular intervals all weekend. like a big floppy dog.

5. the necessity arises to fight a tendency to whine. (although, it does get me coffee once in a while)

Given the amount of papers I had to sign promising confidentiality, I'm thinking there's not a whole lot I can safely divulge about my new job... Except that I really like it, the guys are super nice to me; they are horrified by the idea that I walk to work and the staff sergeant has taken to picking me up in his truck in the morning. I've learnt an awful lot, and I have been able to finally APPLY stuff that I learnt in my criminology studies. There is a chance that I may never have to work retail again.

Also (and this may explain the silence of the past little while...) I have quit smoking again and it seems to be sticking this time. I must be insane, I guess, wait until I start a new job and then quit smoking but although I've been quite tired I haven't been grumpy.

Roy and Robyn, my wandering brother and sister-in-law, have returned from Peru. They went to Macchu Picchu and I'm jealous. Graeme and Rae, my other brother and his soon-to-be wife are in Tasmania. (Me, I'm still in the Arctic, and yeah, it's still good-and-cold, thanks for asking.)

The power in our neighbourhood was on low this weekend. One of the transformers in town was shot and we came home to an orange note on the door saying that we should keep our power use to a minimum as the "crew" was in another community and the power wouldn't be returned to normal levels until they returned. Strange; not enough power to give us much light, most of the fluorescents wouldn't even turn on, microwave just hummed and didn't heat up food, the water pump whined all weekend, but: it was the perfect excuse not to do housework. So I didn't. Well, no, I cleaned bathrooms and tidied up but skipped the vacuuming and laundry.

I re-read The Magic Army this weekend. I can never resist reading bits of it to whoever will listen. Bad habit, that.

I also read Lawrence Osgood's Midnight Sun, which is about a fictitious village in the Arctic. He gets it right, the life up here, if you get a chance to read it.

Started my new job on Thursday last week. I really enjoyed myself, they had me doing all sorts of cool things, the biggest project being transcribing interviews (from tape to print) and I learnt how to do criminal record checks and administer written driver's tests. I also rearranged all their files (they asked me to, really) and answered the phone a whole bunch. I'm still scared of the dispatch radio, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. All in all, very neat.

We've been messing around this weekend trying to install an antenna
for our satellite radio, finally got it working to some extent, after
a lot of giggling on the back deck Sunday afternoon. Mounted the damn
thing on the pole six feet up the wall and then realized when we went
back inside that we'd forgotten to connect the wire to the antenna and
had to take it down again, since it was out of our reach Miguel had to
stand on a table, at which point we dropped all the nuts and
connectors into a snowdrift and had to dig for them for a few minutes.
Then I tried to pick up the nuts with my bare hands and froze them to
my fingers... but now we have 184 channels of radio and I'm
listening to Strauss.

We also tried to (oh my god, we're not handy) hook up the tv we bought
at a garage sale, and we had a sort of metal shelf thing that we were
trying to put up on the wall. Somehow we managed, in the course of
trying to find a stud, to drill about seventeen holes in the wall and
NOT FIND a stud. So the wall looks perforated, like we were trying to
put in a new window or have a bad case of woodworm. Tv ended up on
the top of my dresser, and Ian had to hook up the cable for us. He
stood there saying to me, "Mum, you have to take off the plate and
strip the wire and poke it into the back of the... oh let me do it."
So now I can watch Cold Case Files in bed. Luxury.

Is it wrong if I delete anonymous abusive comments and don't respond to them?

I gotta say, though, it doesn't make me really want to keep putting myself out there...

I've got a toothache. Coincidentally, this week is one of the times there will be a real dentist in town, so I've got an appointment for Wednesday morning. When I was packing to leave Nanaimo, I came across a vial of Tylenol 3 with codeine that I was given the last time I had a major toothache. Something prompted me to pack it rather than put it in the box of household things that I was giving to my mother. At 3 am the other morning, when the tooth was keeping me awake, I suddenly had a little mental picture of putting it in the shipping box, and got out of bed to go down and look for it. There it was, a bottle hiding behind the bandaids, and it made the toothache recede and a comfortable fog descend within half an hour.

One of the things that is difficult to get used to here is the lack of options for obtaining things after hours or on the weekend. Just down the road from us in Nanaimo was a drugstore that was open 8am-midnight, and a 7-11 that never closed. Here, if advance planning is lacking, nothing can be obtained after 7pm or outside the limited store hours on the weekends. And even when the stores are open, you can guarantee that the thing you need badly will be sold out. Or there will only be a strange substitute, like long-life milk that tastes like (the kids say) goat hair. Look for bread, and you may end up with a choice between three-week-old hot dog buns and a little round loaf of rye bread... My point here, (yep, I'm assuming I have one) is that we got spoiled in Nanaimo. Our expectations are often out of whack with what's real up here.

I spent this week doing inventory at the health centre. Had some help one day, but mostly it was me. I had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the difference between seemingly similar items. As in, I write down: Adult oxygen mask. Go upstairs and start entering things, and find out that the master list contains multiple types of adult oxygen masks -- rebreather, non-rebreather, latex-free, comes with tubing, comes without tubing... you get the idea. Ditto for bandages. Added to this is the fact that bandages are labeled capriciously; some with metric and imperial, some just with metric, some just with imperial. I went to sleep a couple of nights and dreamt confused dreams of trachea tubes and proctoscopes. The proctoscopes were in a box that the stores guy told me was 'stuff for asthma'. I asked a nurse who was in the storeroom at that moment, "What's a proctoscope used for?" She said, "It's for examining, um, uh," and her colleague, who had been listening, turned around and said, "Rectums". I said, "Oh. So, nothing to do with asthma, then." They both giggled, and one of them said, "No kind of asthma I've ever heard of."

Watched The Shining this morning, and it was still as good as I remember. I should add that I only got away with this because Rachel was next door and Ian was playing a game with Miguel. Usually I have to avoid the scary movies. Kirsten came down at one point, and sat for a while, but she got creeped out and went back upstairs. She's ok, though, mostly, she watched Saw with me while Miguel was out of town a while back.

I'm sitting in my closet with my headphones on (Nazareth and Nickelback...) and the kids keep coming and trying to say things to me. When The Shining was almost over (Jack chasing Danny through the maze), Ian and Miguel finished their game and Ian came and started asking questions. "Why is he chasing the boy with that axe?" I told him that Jack Nicholson's character had been stuck inside the hotel alone with his family for a cold winter and the boy drove him nuts. Ian said, "Are you trying to tell me something?"

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.