Week 22 - Consolidation Time

Well, I missed a significant amount of time for blogging for two reasons.
1. It was so busy over Christmas that I hardly had a chance to sit still much less make a post
2. My computer died a week after I came back to George River so that made things a little difficult.

But now I have a new computer ( A Sony Vaio E-Series, 6 gigs of RAM and a 2.4GHZ dual core processor :D)

I was originally going to put of some posts of what I did over Christmas since I was pretty busy and all over the place, but seeing as how it is February 5, I'm just going to scrap that and move on!

So what have I been up to since I returned?
Not much, everyone got back into the same routine as before we all left.  There were a couple of brutally cold weeks where the average temperature was around -30C and the windchill was -40 to -45.  There was one awesome snowstorm one weekend where I could barely see across the road.  Here's a picture I took of a statue that we have by the entrance of the school after the storm.

This weekend was actually the most busy one so far.  Friday night we decided to have a belated Chinese New Year celebration dinner.  We had Ants Crawling up the Hill, Vegetarian Spring Rolls, Tofu and Vegetables wrapped in rice paper, BBQ Pork, Egg Foo Young, Fried Rice, Steamed Rice and Soup.  We also had some Aloe Vera Juice, Jasmine Tea and Tikuanyin.  All in all it was a good time.  Too bad I couldn't get my hands on a duck!

Saturday was also an interesting day.  I finally got to go dog sledding for the first time!  Mark, my principal, has a dog sled team and he was taking them out of a training run to their tent out in the woods.  It's about a 18-20Km run so I thought I would tag along.  It was a pretty nice day outside (Sunny and around -20) so I thought I would be good with my normal gear.  I was wrong about that one.  Snow boarding gloves do nothing for warmth out here and normal hiking boots suck too.  I went most of the way on a skidoo and by the end I could barely feel my toes or my fingers.
One of the cool things about being out here is that you actually hang out with your students.  On this ride, one of my students was driving the Skidoo.  Fortunately we didn't die or crash which is always a plus!

Now the sledding part was pretty interesting.  Mark let me go at it alone for a little bit since it was a straight path and it was very difficult for the dogs to get lost.  Before we go out they actually make trails in the snow with snowmobiles so that the dogs have something to follow, although sometimes they remember the trail from last year and follow that instead of the new one.  You have to fight with them sometimes to actually get them to listen, but for the most part they are pretty co-operative.  The hard part was also watching Mark go up a hill.  When that happens you actually have to get off of the sled and run with it so that its easier on the dogs.  Overall they don't run as fast as I had thought.  They definitely go faster than I could jog, but they only run around 10-12Km/h.  I can imagine that it would take people quite some time to get anywhere back in the day.  Here's the view I got from the front of the sled.

Next week promises to be a normal week, although the administration will be gone for meetings.  Too bad, it's never the same without them.  In 9 weeks Ashley and I are going to go on a vacation to Cuba! That will be fun, now we just have to keep an eye out for deals!