my first foodmail

Well it cost an arm and a leg but I got my first foodmail shipment: 10kg of organic produce shipped up from Ottawa. It smells great! I got an assorted fruit/veg box and it was a great selection, as you can see:

Two pounds of carrots, a bunch of celery, a head of red-leaf lettuce, 2 bunches of kale, 5 pears, a field cucumber, 6 tomatoes (in the box under the pears), a couple pounds of new potatoes, 3lbs onions, 5lbs apples, a giant head of cabbage, a melon, a box of mushrooms, and three bananas (one of which is kind of flattened in the middle, boo).

Oh and a box of cereal as well, because they had a kind I like.

I'm open to the suggestions for the head of cabbbage, I've never cooked it before. I think the peppers might get stuffed and the mushrooms are destined for tomato sauce.

I will definitely be ordering from these folks again. And tonight I'm having salad for dinner. :)

more pix!

so I got back from my first set of site visits on Thursday night and it was excellent. I had a really good time, the weather was excellent almost right to the end and the projects were super interesting, I learned tons of things.

Also I saw lots of wildlife! Here are some pictures!

My first musk ox sighting (yay!) - a herd of about a dozen that we spotted from the helicopter.

This is a caribou we spotted on our tour of a site - he's not very old, probably only a year or two, and he's rather scruffy-looking because they're starting to moult at this time of year.

He just sort of wandered by the truck, not concerned about us at all.

Me at the mine! The haul trucks behind me are ridiculously large and the tires alone are more than twice my height.

Bunny!

Count the ptarmigans! I've come up with anywhere between 14 and 20. I can only spot one adult but there has to be at least one more, I don't think they have more than half a dozen chicks in a season.

This is probably my favourite picture so far. The musk ox near this camp discovered that the grass was particularly green around the greywater drains from the kitchen and showers, so over time they have made their way closer and closer to camp. Now they come in twice a day for lunch, and I think I'm only about 20m away from them in this photo. There were about two dozen all together in the herd and about 5 of them are calves. They are surprisingly smaller than I expected - musk ox are not as big as domestic cows but their coats make them look much bigger.

Yay!