A Little Bit Closer To Nature

Since arriving in Inukjuak Markus and I have been enjoying the great out of doors. Somedays are closer to nature than others. For example, at school I smelt a smell that was quite "unusual." I later discovered that it was the smell of a polar bear being skinned. Yup. Right in the school. The kids each got a chance to help when they went to culture class.

The odour in the school today reminded me that I haven't shared Markus' animal incidents - let me regail you with some tails....

Story #1: Picture this, Markus and I woke up, made a cup of coffee, ate some breaky and I headed out the front door to go to school. Low and behold there was a "treasure" on our front step. Nothing says a good morning like a dead goose on our front step. Later, Markus discovered that one of his students had been a little ticked at him and decided to leave us a Goose. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrreat. Funny enough the same student dropped by our house last night and asked if he could come in for a visit.

Story #2: Students here love to catch things. Flies, are a common distraction here. There have been a couple teachers that come in to the staff room pulling out their hair because a student had caught 15 flies and walked into class and let them go. Chaos results. You would think that a mouse had been released in the class. Of course, this almost happened to Markus too. He was relaxing in his classroom when a student (not in his class) ran into his room and tried to make him scream like a little girl. You will be proud of Markus because he maintained his dignity and refrained from jumping on the desk. Markus managed to get the student outside to release the poor creature before it was accidentally released in the school.

Who Needs Christmas

With friends and family like ours! Seriously, I don’t know what I did in another life to deserve such spoiling. Yesterday Colleen and I couldn’t even see cloud nine from where we were sitting. We got not one, but two care packages from the bestest mom ever and Alex.

We are now equipped with the finest slippers that money can buy. They’re from Egli’s Sheep Farm near Dryden and I have to tell you, getting up this morning was sooo much easier now that the cold tile floor isn’t an issue anymore. We also got tons of other goodies, including super warm socks, homemade strawberry jam, homemade salsa, chocolate, tea, Nutella and about 100 other small thoughtful things. On top of this my mom also sent us up two brand new, shiny black snow suits guaranteed to keep us warm in even the coldest conditions.



As for Alex, he has generously sent up his own personal copies of the TV show Scrubs. We now have season 2 and 3 sitting on our entertainment unit, the characters ready to dazzle and delight us with their fun and witty tomfoolery. All in all, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect day. To coin a phrase from a famous Sicilian, the support we’ve had from everybody so far has been nothing short of “inconceivable”.



Thank you all so much

A Day Of Firsts

Welcome to another fun-filled installment at the Polar Lounge. This entry is particularly exciting because there were a few "firsts" for us this weekend. We ended up going camping on Saturday with about 12 other teachers near a picturesque part of the river. Even though there's no trees here, the tundra is still changing colour and you can see four small waterfalls cascading one after another about every half a mile if you look at the river just right.

Melanie picking a few blueberries in front of the winding river.

After packing the school’s red half ton truck up with our supplies, we all pilled in the back and set off. That’s right, all 12 of us had to fit in one truck and hold on for dear life while bouncing along a small tundra trail meant for four wheelers and snow machines. At first the ride was a little terrifying with the wind whipping at us from all directions, but soon we learned to lean into the bounces and before we knew it, we arrived at our drop-off point.

From this point forward we would have to carry all our supplies about a kilometer to the camping spot. We were all loading ourselves up with tents, backpacks and duffel bags when something completely unexpected happened. It began to snow.

It was a little rough getting our supplies to the campsite and setting up amidst intermittent flurries and extreme gusts of wind. With everyone helping out it didn't take us too long to get all the tents up and get a fire going. Just as we were finishing the wind broke, the snow stopped falling and clouds decided to leave us alone.

With the hauling and the setting up out of the way, it was time to start making supper. As we were cooking and I was enjoying the view of the river, one of our new friends, Inga, pointed out movement on the other side of the bank. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what it was, but as they turned and moved away from us I could just make out the tell-tale antlers of wild caribou. Unfortunately they left a little too quickly for me to get a picture, but that didn't matter because supper was almost ready!

A little Cookin'

Means good eatin'

After a fantastic meal, some great stories and a lot of laughs, the stars came out and we were all treated to some of the best aurora borealis that I’ve ever seen. I tried to take some pictures of them for you, but our camera’s shutter speed doesn’t go low enough to capture them properly. In any case, the rest of the night turned out to be a fantastic time of eating junk and swapping stories and we all went to bed full and happy.



We got back early Sunday feeling refreshed from the much needed social outing. Now it’s time to prepare for work, I'm afraid, and then go to bed. It’s a school night, after all.

Markus

Quicky!

Hey All,

This is a quick post to let you all know that Markus and I are both alive and well. I had typed out a nice long post but, sadly, I lost that post to the never, never world of the web. Obviously, I'm a rookie at the helm of the blogger.

In other news, Markus and I have been pleasantly surprised three times this week to find we have real mail!!!!! ( real mail = not the Canadian Tire Mag or bills) Receiving mail has always been a highlight for me but up here it is like Christmas every time. Christine (and Crew) the chocolates arrived in excellent condition. MMMMMMMmmmm. Thank-You. Now we just have to figure out how to ration ourselves to make them last as long as possible. Gerti I also received the second snow suit. Those two boxes will be crucial in a couple of months. Chocolate and Snow suits, what more can a girl living in the North ask for??

Cheers!

Learning All About Delusion

Hello Everybody,

This past week has been absolutely crazy! I thought that I was going to have all kinds of time to do things while I was up here. Learn to play the guitar a little better, read some books I've been interested in, do some personal computer projects on the side, maybe learn another language, you know, fill up all that spare time I have since I'm up in the middle of nowhere.

Apparently while doing this planning I forgot to inform myself that I have 2 jobs. One requires extensive planning since I've never done anything like it before, and the other one is taking me longer than usual because my internet is about 1 billionth the speed of the T1 connection I so enjoyed in Toronto. In any case, there hasn't been a whole lot going on except for work, which is a shame because the weather is still pretty nice and I'm sure it won't take long to change.

Well, actually, there has been a little more than work. Colleen and I have started to get into baking. We're quite fond of making soft pretzels with either garlic and cheese, or brown sugar and cinnamon on top. We couldn't bear to pay the prices for junk food up here so we decided to just make our own. Colleen has also been busy making muffins and cakes. I've never seen her so domesticated before, but it's been a delicious experience for us both. The house continuously smells of baked goodies, which makes me nostalgic for the days of Dryden where mom always has something in the oven.

On another positive note, we've finally got the house to a state where we're happy with it. I was going to take some pictures today, but the batteries in the camera are dead and we have yet to charge them. I promise I'll get some pictures of the house to you before the week is done.

Till then, take it easy.

Is it the weekend yet?

Today has been really dreary. It has rained all day. For anyone in the teaching world you know that when the weather turns sour students often go mad. Today was no exception. My students are in highschool so they still get to go out for their breaks and they all do because every student in my class smokes. But that is a rant for another day. Todays rant is about students doing crazy things when the weather stinks. For example, one of my students thought it was a good idea to bring a three year old to science class today. Pardon?? We just spent two full classes on lab safety. However, I neglected to mention that bringing toddlers into a room where there are open chemicals and flames is a bad idea. My mistake. I will add this into my notes for next year.

To all my teacher friends reading this post - I hope you are having better weather for your first week of school!

Happy Labour Day Weekend!

It is incredible, incredible that it is the long weekend already. That means that I have been teaching for two weeks. That is crazy like a fox.

Markus and I have been having a fairly laid back weekend so far. I managed to laze about until 10:30 before Markus tricked me into getting up with his stealthy, Ninja coffee pot.

Next, we headed out onto the land for a couple of hours to collect some blue berries and to try to get on top of one of the large hills behind our house. It never ceases to amaze me how beautiful the surrounding area is. The hill we were climbing is a rather large rock. I could be convinced that this is what it would feel like to be walking on the moon....no trees anywhere to be seen.... seemingly, random large puddles of standing water on top of the hill... the incredible gusts of wind that threaten to carry me off of the hill... Here's Markus trying hard not to be blown away.

While Markus and I were on our adventure this afternoon a posse of kids came up to us to see who we were. We are still obviously new in town. I think we glow of "newbyness". Anyhow, they were pretty nice kids out picking blue berries. The boys were obviously bored with the fine art of berry picking though because they decided to follow us on our climb. They really liked the digital camera and kept asking Markus to "make my picture." They are definitely not camera shy! Here's a picture that they took of us while we were out and about.

When we finally got to the top of the hill the view was breathtaking:


Anyhow, we came home, ate some left over chili and after a much needed nap I tried my hand at pretzels. Oh, we went to buy yeast from the local Northern Store and were a little surprised to find that we had to ask for yeast from behind the counter. Silly us. Yeast is a key ingredient in wine and beer making. Since this town is technically dry it is a controlled substance. There's a lot of other crazy little surprises that you bump into around here. For instance, check out what we found in front of our house this morning:


Today Markus is going out fishing in a large canoe for Arctic Char. Yesterday the people who went out caught 30 fish, so we'll see if he manages to bring back supper.

Anyways, I've got pretzels to bake and lessons to plan. Until next time.

Tootles!