Well, things change.

Now I am a full-time lockup guard. Freak me green and call me frog.....

I can't say this is my favorite way to spend time. But in some ways, it's like being the night desk clerk at a very strange hotel. Like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I sit and amuse myself while drunks sleep in the cells. The regulars know my name now. I even found my name in dispatches on the cell walls -- apparently I'm a bitch. I know who wrote that, though, and it was a young man who was trying to convince me that having a cigarette would be a good idea. I disagreed. Especially since it sets off all the fire alarms if I let people smoke in the cells...

I'm fighting the urge to listen to the same songs over and over again. It seems that that is the doorway to manic. Either it's a symptom or it's a cause, but either way listening to OUTKAST doing "Roses" or whatever repeatedly seems to trigger something. I suspect that all of it revolves around lack of sleep but I have no proof....

I'm off tonight. I called (I'm so STUPID sometimes) and volunteered to go in at 6 am . don't ask me why... All I know is that *I* like it when I know when I'm going to be able to go home, so I called and told the person who's working right now that I'd be in at 6...

Apologies for absence. I had not intended the quote from Gnarls to be the only entry last time, but the planned sequel didn't get done.

I've barely been home since the afternoon of the eighteenth. Miguel said to me on the phone today (while I was down in the guardroom yet again) "These long-distance relationships are hard." At this particular moment I should be phoning my mother and responding to emails, but I feel a need to explain my silence.

On the afternoon of the eighteenth of August, I took a call at work. For this. Some calls stop your blood from circulating. I think I handled it ok. The aftermath was time consuming. Somehow I found myself sitting in the morgue for 18 hours guarding the body, and then doing overtime guarding the suspect over the next few days. The paperwork was immense, and Major Crimes were here, big burly guys using our office space.

However, the upshot was that Major Crimes needs someone to transcribe all the interviews they conducted in town while they were here. As in all small towns, I imagine, everyone knew something and wanted to talk about it. So I'm going to be doing that over the next few weeks. The lady I was replacing came back to work this week, too. I found that hard, to give up the job, but it's all done now. And this weekend, due to a guard shortage, I've been working midnights. And while all this has been going on, I've been ill, first with a cold contracted in the draughty morgue, and then yesterday with a killer flu.

So. Crazy, yes. But it's a good kind of crazy.

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that phase.

I am enjoying my new camera. It is allowing me to chronicle the oddities of the north. Such as this. I'm wondering who decided that this sign was needed, and why?

Other people have laptop problems. In fact, according to CBC, who we all know to be a bastion of truth and non-sensationalism, it is the Summer of the Exploding Laptop.

In other news, today I met a wonderful man. So wonderful that I invited him to dinner on the spur of the moment and then had to explain what I'd done... to Miguel. I also offered to lend my boss' daughter our truck to take her drivers license test in, and I forgot to tell Miguel that, so he was a bit surprised when she showed up to get the keys.

I digress. The man I invited to dinner has been canoeing solo in the Back/Baillie/Aramark river system since July 1st. Some of my neighbours are canoeing enthusiasts, and so I invited Bob the canoe man, three neighbours, and two of their children. Suddenly we were eleven for dinner.

I should really start at the beginning, because Bob is an amazing man. In June, I received a letter at work informing me of his trip. I sent back an email, asking for his date of birth, and when the email was answered, by his wife, she told me he was born in 1936! So there's a seventy year old man out canoeing around in the middle of nowhere... Yesterday he phoned me on his satellite phone, from somewhere up the coast, because he was trying to reach people to come and pick him up, he was done. I was a bit worried, because one of the outfits he was trying to phone called me, too, and asked me if I knew what he wanted. I made a call in the afternoon to make sure that someone had in fact gone to get him. They had.

Bob came to check in with me this morning, in person, as he had promised in his letter, and I was instantly enthralled. I could have sat there all day listening to him. My boss was bugging me, after he left, saying, "Are you in the habit of inviting total strangers to dinner??? He could be an axe murderer." (Policemen can be soooo cynical...).

But it was a fantastic dinner, lots of great stories and my neighbours were just as enthralled as I was. Too much fun.

I've only got just over two weeks of work left. I'm sad about that. They will continue to employ me, as a guard, and probably to do the cleaning, but I won't get to do all the fun stuff I have been doing. We're very busy right now because of this... and other midnight activities of the more adult variety.

I worked all weekend. Not on purpose, so much, as I went on Saturday at lunch time to wash the floor in the main building (Friday was a muddy day... when it rains in this place the mud is like concrete) and was met by a panicked guard who had been working since 4am and REALLY wanted to go home. Her relief had failed to show. I arranged for someone else to come in at 4, the next shift change, and he stood me up too. So by the time I got home I'd been away for almost nine hours. The problem with doing impromptu guard shifts, that I've found in the past, is that you are stuck either reading old Reader's Digests or watching the one channel on the television. All the drunks in the tank were sleeping, so no entertainment there. I like it better when I know I'm going and I can take my writing or reading or crocheting. Or all three, in case my mood changes halfway through.

Well, my laptop is still limping along. However, Miguel brought me a beautiful digital camera back from his trip. I've never had a digital camera. Haven't even had an old-fangled camera since before the kids were born.

My laptop is dying. About every third time I start it up, it just goes through the motions but won't let me do anything. It gives me the desktop and all, but the icons are just pretty pictures, can't click on 'em. And yesterday Mozilla disposed of all my bookmarks. Argh.

It is HOT here. 22 degrees today. Not very Arctic, as such.

The National is here today. A helicopter buzzed me while Joeby and I were walking on the tundra. My neighbour is hoping we'll be on tv.

Yesterday I went off up the coast by myself. Drove the ATV up to Long Point and fished for a while. Didn't catch anything, as usual. But it was a beautiful afternoon, just enough of a breeze left over from our windstorm to keep the bugs away. So I sat on the beach with my thermos of tea for quite a while, thinking about things. The sky was blue, the water was choppy, and I saw a herd of muskox on my way back.

Today Joeby and I went for a walk on the tundra. He went swimming. I didn't. He's tired tonight. And jealous. The dog from next door is staying with us. She's very quiet, and no trouble other than a bit of nervous peeing on the rug, but Joeby seems to be feeling a need to be right next to me at all times to ensure his favoured dog status. It's funny, because I thought he missed Jazzy, and would be happier if we got another dog, but I'm beginning to think that wouldn't actually be the case. He has settled in to his only dog life.

It's been ten days that Miguel and the kids have been away. I've enjoyed the solitude, but I'll be happy when they're home. Not for another week, however. A week tomorrow. I haven't seen Ian for quite a while, as he was at cadet camp before they went on holiday. I'm looking forward to hearing all his adventures, and Kirsten's from her trip to Ohio. I think I'm starting to get a bit bored. Good thing I've got to go to work tomorrow.

One big factor in my boredom is the fact that I tried to go to the library AGAIN today and it was closed. I wish they'd just give me a key. I swear I'm the only person who takes out books with any regularity. Sometimes I come in to return books and put them in the box right on top of the last books I returned.

It looks like I'll be working until the end of August, anyway. After that, who knows. I'm going to miss it. Best job I ever had....

It's like this. Ed linked to an article about being bored by kids.

I've read the article twice, and gone through a fair number of the attached comments, and I think I've got some things to say.

I was bored by some of the more tedious bits of child-rearing when my kids were younger. The videos that got played over and over. The Berenstain Bears. Hated those books, they are so saccharine, but my kids loved them and I was forced to read them out loud. And my girls always wanted me to play Barbies.

Rachel and I (she's 11) went to babysit for a friend of mine recently. We were watching Terra (she's 3). Rachel was really doing the babysitting, but it was her first time, so I went along to provide moral support. Rachel was in the bedroom playing Barbies with Terra, and I was watching TV, and after about an hour she came out and said to me, "Mum, you go play with her. I can't any more." I sprawled on the floor as best I could with Terra, and played Barbies. It was fine, because I knew it was only for an hour or so. But I remembered the endless appetite of three-year-olds for your time. How they'd suck it all if you let them. Which I often did. Because I loved them. But Barbies, seriously, they get boring. Their stupid little clothes that don't fit over their pointy hands. Slutty clothes. On their cold plastic bodies. And the games that get played consist mostly of a running commentary from the girl 'playing', while I put different clothes on them. "Barbie's going to a dance. She needs her purple gown. Now she's going to the beach. She needs her bathing suit."

When we got home, I said to Rachel, "So. When I say I'm done playing and I go do something else, is it because I don't love you?" She replied, "NO, it's because you're getting bored."

Watching kids do sports can be boring, too. Depending on the sport. Watching a beginners gymnastic class, especially if the kids aren't paying attention, is painful. If it was interesting, on a basic level, we wouldn't bother with major league sports. We'd just show home movies on ESPN. School plays and things like that are good for the three seconds that my offspring are featured, and yawn-making the rest of the time. All the other parents are just there to see their own kids, too. Otherwise the principal wouldn't have had to remind parents not to take off home after their little darlings performed. The last Christmas production I went to, they didn't announce it, and by the time the grade sixes were performing the final song, there were about seven people left in the auditorium. Which tells me that not even all the parents attended in the first place, since there were 20 students in the class.

Ok. So I've said how I agree. But -- there are so many ways kids are not boring. There's Plasticine. I can play with that for days. There's making really messy crafts. We did lots of that. In fact, Rachel and I spent an entire evening last week making crazy collages with the pile of magazines in the living room. And there's poker. And swimming. And reading Roald Dahl out loud. And I LOVED going to the park. That was one thing that kept me sane when they were younger, (I had the three of them in four years) was just getting them out into nature and letting them run around.

I hope the woman who wrote the article is being a bit tongue-in-cheek. I'd like to think that she's not always bored silly by her kids, that she's somehow trying to be ironic, to question the motivation of the sort of people who talk to their kids in silly voices and pretend that everything the kids do is fantastic and interesting. I remember being in the grocery store one time and the cashier said to Ian, in a sickly sweet voice, "Isn't it nice that you're helping Mommy to shop. What a good boy." He was about four, and he turned to me and said, "Why is she talking to me like that? I'm not a dog."

Terra's mom said to me, when Rachel and I were leaving her house the other night, that another friend of ours who has a three-year-old boy, David, had phoned her the day before and said, "You have to bring Terra over. I'm home alone with David and I can't play Spongebob Squarepants for one more minute."

I'm all by myself at home. Miguel and the kids have gone to Edmonton and Nanaimo. And I think I might be out of work again real soon. The lady whose maternity leave I'm filling has decided (I've heard) that she needs to come back to work on Aug. 7th. Which presumably will mean I'll be out of a job. I'm sad, I had a hard time not crying when my boss told me what he'd heard, because I've been thoroughly enjoying the work. And even though I've kept trying to remind myself that it's not 'my' job, I've bonded with it anyway. However, no-one has officially told me that I'm laid off or anything, it's just all office gossip at the moment. Until I see a piece of paper, I'm gonna continue going to work.

We are having a storm. When I took Joeby out on the tundra for a walk, the wind was incredible, I could hardly walk in it. The rain is coming sideways. When I've been walking towards the Distant Early Warning Station sometimes I've come across strange things -- plastic bags and diapers and cardboard boxes way out there, and I wondered who would have brought garbage so far from town, and why. Now I know. As I was coming home, I saw three large pieces of fiberglass and a red-and-beige tarp go by, on their way to the open tundra. Fast. And high up in the air. The tarp entangled a man and a small child who were walking along the side of the road. The fiberglass just sailed. Probably a good thing I had Joeby on a leash, he's pretty skinny.

Polar bears, it seems, like lettuce and radishes.

I've been helping an older lady of my acquaintance, Jess, with her Canada pension application. The government keeps sending her demands for documents, most of which she doesn't have. I've called Ottawa three times for her so far. Once I got a snarky bitch. Who insisted on talking to poor Jess. "Well, is Jess there?" the S.B. demanded, when I had explained why I was calling. When I said yes, she said, "I have to talk to her." Jess listened with a bewildered look on her face for a minute or so, and then said, "I don't understand", and handed the phone back to me. Another operator, on another day, was super-helpful and patient but didn't have a clue where Nunavut is located. She guessed northern BC at one point.

We've been trying to track down documents -- but Jess and her husband were married, she tells me, "Eskimo-style". No certificates. She didn't know him, when they got together it was because her family and his family decided it between them. In fact, she was away at school when the plans were made. I asked her if she was ok with that. She looked a bit confused, and so I said, "Was he cute?" She giggled at that point and said, "Oh, yes, very cute."

One of the forms Jess was sent, a declaration of common-law relationship, required his signature. As he's been dead since the early eighties, this meant another call to the pension office. When I explained to Jess that the pension office had helped me to find and print out a different form, because we'd never be able to get his signature, she laughed and put her hands together as if she was praying, and then looked up at the ceiling, saying, "Please come down and sign my form."

But anyway. We got talking about polar bears. Jess says she has lived in the Arctic all her life, sixty years, and she's never seen a polar bear. And when she was a girl, her family lived out on the land, down at Bathurst Inlet.

Paper I made. Letters are a bit askew, I notice.

I emailed a friend about a month ago, and told her about my trip to Iqaluit. I told her how wonderful it was to fly across the Arctic in the small plane. She didn't write back until yesterday. And then her email said that she hadn't answered because I made her feel that her life sucked...

Envy's a funny thing. And friends are too. I've hesitated over time to give my envious friend my weblog address, and I've never been entirely sure why. I mean, I know that people read this, people I've never met, and yet my parents and my best friend don't. I've been writing an online journal of one sort or another since 1999 (it used to be Diaryland but they kept locking me out) and yet I'm selective about my audience. Every now and then I need to complain about my mother, and I can't do that if she's reading my journal. And my friend, although she's my closest friend, needs to be exclusive. She wouldn't like me having a readership... (all six of you)

What am I trying to say?

There are some people whose attention makes me edit what I'm saying. These people, I email or phone them, and the messages are geared towards them. Because they would read things into the content that I'm not putting there.

What if you could write a novel and stipulate on the front cover: Only people who understand me and can read this work objectively, without finding hidden messages to themselves, can purchase this book?

We took our ATV and borrowed our neighbour's, and headed off for Starvation Cove. Me, Miguel, and Rachel. Kirsten's in Toledo visiting a friend and Ian's at cadet camp in Whitehorse.

It was a great trip, although kind of long. In the picture above, we are waiting for the tide to go down so that we can ford a small river without drowning the ATVs. That's me in the red hat.

We were sitting around having coffee about 1pm, waiting for Miguel's friend Allen to decide whether he was coming with us. I should add that the trip was his idea, as he claims to have caught 10 huge char at Starvation on Friday. The phone rang. Thinking it was Allen, we let Rachel answer it. It was my work. Asking if I could come in for 4. I said yes, because I hate to say no, but we weren't happy. We ended up going and driving around to find a guy who sometimes guards but doesn't have a phone. In the course of looking for him, we found a girl who also sometimes guards, and she said she'd go in for four. If I promised to go in and take over from her at midnight. So by then it was 2:30 -- we had about nine hours for our trip.

Although I drove a snowmobile this winter, I've only driven an ATV once. With Miguel on the back complaining. I don't think he should become a driving instructor. It turned out that without him sitting behind me it was a lot easier, but I still wasn't terribly fast. So it took us quite a while to reach the river, and then we had to wait an hour or so for the tide to go down. Four hours all told to reach Starvation Cove.



At that point I told him he had an hour to fish, because if it was going to take us four hours to get back, we needed to leave at 8pm. On his last cast, at 7:55pm, he caught a nice-sized char and then we packed up to head back, in a light drizzle.

However. The tide had continued to go out, and we thought it would save some time to cut across the first bay.



At the end of the bay, the mud got us. We were stuck, both ATVs and when I got off I sunk in the mud to the tops of my rubber boots. Put Rachel on the red machine and got her to press the gas while we pushed. It was just like Wile E. Coyote, the mud came splashing up from the wheels and covered us from head to toe. And then when the machine started to move, I found my feet were stuck and I fell face first into the mud. Came up spitting mud, but that one was out and on the shore.

The yellow one was harder. It's heavier, I think, and was probably deeper in. We were still struggling with it when two guys roared up on their ATVs and said to me, mildly, "Having fun?"

"Oh, yeah," I replied. I think I must have looked like the swamp thing, but they didn't laugh. They just got out a rope, and we got out our rope, and we pulled the yellow machine out. The older of the two told Miguel he had gotten stuck in just that spot once, when he was alone, and it took hours to get out.

The mud hardened, as I drove home. But it was a quicker trip, the return journey. Rachel and I arrived home at 10:15, (Miguel had put his camera down at one point and had to go back for it, so he was about ten minutes behind us) and I set about having a shower so that I could go to work.

And then, the miracle. The girl who was guarding called and said she was GOING HOME and I wouldn't be needed for the night shift, as the detainees had been let go. And I think for the first time this year, it was Saturday night and there was no-one in cells. I figured I'd go to sleep and they'd call me out, but at 7am I woke up in bed.

Some Bob Dylan for your evening... Personally I think the line about "Nobody can get no sleep" is apropos.

Also you have to go read my little brother's story of how they baked his skates.

And this suggestion for how to solve Iqaluit's dog problem.

Ian is in Whitehorse at cadet camp. 200 teenage boys. Kirsten's leaving on Thursday for Toledo, to visit her friend. She's a bit paranoid about the travelling aspect, being only fifteen, and going by herself (with various folks helping out at different airports) but I'm sure she'll rise to the occasion. She's packed already. Don't know whose kid she is.

A phone call today: "Hello, I'm calling about the turbo beaver you guys are looking for."

My brain was doing pictures of beavers equipped with jet propulsion, speeding across aquatic habitats (Gee, look at how fast that beaver swims, Dad. Yes, son, that's a turbo-beaver.)

Turns out it's a type of float plane. That isn't so much lost as misplaced. It was flying around with the wrong set of call letters, or something. I don't know.

There's a certain type of caller (that Ed will probably be familiar with) who feels the need to unload whatever they have to say on the very first person they encounter on the phone. Phones are such strange things. In the absence of a human face to read, some don't know when to pause and allow things to sink in.

I've been thinking about an encounter I had with a visitor, at work, ever since it happened. Here's how it went.

There's a barge down on the waterfront that needed to be inspected. The inspector was on his way from Ottawa, and I began to receive a series of phone calls inquiring about arrangements for the inspector and keys for the barge, which were allegedly in our possession. Keys were located, arrangements were made, most notably between me and a man named Will who was to escort the inspector onto the barge. I know Will, we were on a course together for three weeks last year, and we are on first name basis. And we spoke a few times in the days before the inspector came.

The inspector dude comes bouncing into my office, and I give him the key I have put aside. He introduces himself (I promptly forgot his name, but I believe his first name was Roy or Ron or something). He says to me, "And you are?" I say, as I always do, "I'm Kate."

Then I phone Will. "Hello, Will," I say, "It's Kate. I have your man here, to inspect the barge. Do you want me to send him down to you?"

I have to tell you, I went out of my way to locate these keys for this man. It took quite a few phone calls, as no-one initially knew what sort of a key we were even looking for. And so his next comments surprised me.

When I got off the phone with Will, Mr. Barge Inspector said to me, "I'm going to give you a tip. When you talk to people, always give your last name. That's why women aren't getting ahead in this world." And then he said, "You have to show people that you take yourself seriously. Kate will always be the under-parlourmaid."

I laughed, because I wasn't entirely sure what else to do. He tried to impress upon me his seriousness. Asked me my surname. I told him, and he said, "Well, you should be proud of that, it's a good French name." I replied, "It's my husband's name. He's French. I'm not."

I don't know what to think of this. Should I be offended? Or is he right? I should add, I think, that Kate is not a common name in this town. And I always say, when I phone on business, "It's Kate at the RCMP." We're a first-name sort of town. When people call to talk to the constables, they use first names.

Some twenty years ago, someone told me (Phil Litke) that "Katie" was a girl with pigtails and I should make everyone call me Kate. So I did. And when I went to Iqaluit last week, after this latest conversation, and had to introduce myself to strangers I told them my full name.

However. I'm inclined to think that women will never get ahead in the world while some men feel free to give them hints like that. I can't think of a situation in the last few months where I was made to feel more inferior. Oh well.

Sleep is all screwed up. At 11:20pm we decided to go for a drive. To take pictures. We were gone for an hour. At 12:42am, now, it is still broad daylight. Rachel, who got up at noon, is reading Garfield in her pajamas. I think Ian might be asleep, I haven't seen him for a while.

What seems to happen, mostly, is that you go to bed and can't quite manage to get to sleep. So maybe every three or four nights you crash and get a good night's sleep. Other days you nap. Somehow the body is aware that it's light outside, even with tinfoil on the windows, and refuses to fall asleep.

Sometimes the North is a very strange place.

Social Services called me today. I had printed them out a document and sent it over. It had printed itself on legal sized paper and I'd chopped off the bottom couple of inches. Which usually turns out ok but today it made the edges kind of ratty. The social worker who called me was asking in a concerned way if he needed to send me over a ream of paper, as perhaps we had run out. I said, no, and explained about the printer settings and how I'd tried to cut off the excess with scissors, and then I realized he had me on the speaker phone and some other people were laughing at me in the background. I will get my revenge. I just haven't thought how yet.

I have to tell you that, in the aftermath of court, we have been making bets on who will last the longest on their probation.

Also, did you know (I had to go look) that there is a town in Newfoundland called Dildo? My boss was talking about it today. He says that it's just down the road from Come By Chance.