pictures again!

so it's been forever since I updated. Partly I have been busy, but also I have been kind of lazy about the blog. I will try to keep up on it more regularly.

Since I last posted at the end of August (yikes) I have been as far north as I've ever been, and I've also been underground at an exploration site, both of which were awesome! The weather here has gotten progressively colder, and about 10 days ago we had our first real snowfall, just in time for Greg's visit. :) Which was fantastic! (The part where he went home again was less fantastic.)

Anyway here are some pictures!

There were some northern lights the other night! They are a faint green streak down the centre of this image. My camera didn't do a great job with them, I'll have to try again with a better camera if I can get my hands on one.

I have owned my cellphone for 1.5 years and I only discovered this weekend that it will take panoramic shots! This is a picture of Frobisher Bay taken from the Iqaluit breakwater.

This wooden boat hangs out behind the museum. It was especially calm on Friday; in contrast we are having very windy conditions tonight with gusts up to 65km/h.

Maqtaaq! This piece is from the bowhead hunt that happened here back in the summer. It was good although it didn't have much flavour - if anything it tasted faintly of salt water.

A pretty sunset from a couple of weeks ago.

Snow!

 Hee. :) We got snowed on rather a lot actually.

A geologist outstanding in her field. :D This was from the furthest north I've been. It was super cold that day!

I'll put up more in the next day or so - I'm thinking of doing a post of all the neat sundogs/rainbows/etc I've seen since I got here. There have been a lot!

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!

piiiiictures!

A photo collection from my first field trip!

Some garnets in some rock. Not as exciting as rubies but still pretty nice. :)

This is an American Golden-Plover.

An inukshuk. The bear spotters build these when they're out spotting for bears. There haven't been any.

Purple saxifrage! I love these flowers.

This is either a semipalmated plover or a semipalmated sandpiper. 

Siksik! Also known as arctic ground squirrel. This guy was pretty chill, he just sort of came out to see what we were up to.

The sky was very pretty.

The white blobs are flocks of snow geese. They were either in those huge clusters, or paired off (being as it is that time of year).

More flowers! I don't know what these are called but I like them.

And ditto these (although they might be a kind of heather?).

Hoping to have some pix of larger creatures after my next trip, I hear we may be in an area for caribou or musk ox... fingers crossed!

out of the old, and into the new apartment! Everything but me and my computer are moved to the new place. So glad to be done with this moving around!

I should hopefully have internets tomorrow night but there won't likely be pictures until I can get it into some semblance of order down there, heh. It's pretty cluttered. But hooray for tons of storage space!

unpacking!!

A mover came over this morning to help with unpacking, which was more putting furniture together and unboxing large things. So now I have a bed, a kitchen table, an awesome couch, a desk (that I will have to redo once I find my allen keys because the drawer didn't go on before the legs went on), a chair, shelves, an awesome lamp, and a shiny TV. :D

It's more organized than this now, all the large boxes are emptied and the small ones (with food in them) are moved out of the way. Tomorrow the movers are coming back to remove the rest of the packing stuff, which will be great because I'll be able to unpack all the dry goods into the storage room where the boxes are.

Tonight will be my last night in this apartment though! woooo! Real home tomorrow!

omg yay!!

My stuff arrived! It's in my new apartment *right now*! Woooooo!

I cannot. wait. to have everything unpacked.


Because it showed up on Friday afternoon (of course) it won't get unpacked until Monday, but I get 2 days for unpacking etc, so one will be for the unpacking and I will distribute the rest over the rest of the week for things like internet setup. I had to go with NWTel which is a little disappointing but I'm still looking into a way to get the satellite-based, cap-free 'nets.

2 weeks and change

On Friday it was 2 weeks since I got here. I am kind of in limbo as far as settling in goes, because my stuff is still in transit. Apparently it left Halifax on Thursday though so it should arrive here midweek next week, which is *awesome*. I get to take a day off when it gets here to deal with the unpacking process, which will be fun. Or possibly Fun, depending on how smoothly everything goes. But the movers will be unpacking as well, so I hope that will make everything go faster - it only took about3.5h to pack everything up and I can't imagine it will take that much longer to unpack.

Those may be famous last words, heh.

I found a bread machine last weekend! I went out to the yard sales again last Saturday and scored myself a really nice Black and Decker bread machine for $20, which is an awesome deal. It works really well - it's very particular about measurements and the first loaf I made resembled a brick more than anything else, but the one I made tonight came out very well and tastes delicious. Yay! So far I've tried the white bread and the lemon poppyseed bread. It's awesome to have fresh bread around, plus it's so much cheaper than buying it at the store (where it averages $5/loaf).

Work is fine, we're all fine here, how are you?

apartment things

I saw my new apartment today. It's significantly smaller than my current place (the bedroom is smaller, and there's no more walk-in closet, sadface!) but the kitchen and living room are the same, and the view is better, so I'm calling it a win. There's still lots of storage space and the other advantage of being on the other side of the building is sun in the winter because it faces south. So, I think that will be great. It might be better for satellite internet reception, too.

The downside of all of this is that a) I still don't have my stuff, or any idea when it's going to leave Halifax, and b) apparently I have to be out of this flat on the 27th because there's someone else who needs the staff housing. I have no idea what's going to happen but I'm surprisingly not stressed about it. There isn't anything I can do about it myself, so, I will just keep waiting.

Work is still going well, I have been working on reviewing a couple of reports, and my boss gave me another project today that should be an informative exercise. Monday we're all having a meeting to talk about site visit travel plans for the summer, so I'm looking forward to finding out more about that.

I'm roasting a chicken for dinner tonight. It will be delicious.

Things I didn't expect to find in Iqaluit

• a co-op greenhouse
• a delicious shwarma/donair place
• a 24h snack bar/convenience store
• reasonably-priced produce
• an active composting co-op program (including worm composting)
• the awesome yard sales!

I'm sure I will have stuff to add to this list as I explore some more. My plans for this weekend involve more yard sales (yay) and checking out the library and the visitor's centre.

Also, I picked up my first rock this afternoon on my way home from the grocery store. That means I made it five whole days without collecting a rock. -_- In my defence it's awesome and is full of garnets (one is the size of my thumbnail!).

Iqaluit!

Here I am! it's pretty awesome!

In my first 24 hours here, I have:

• been to a work BBQ where I won a lawn chair
• had dinner with my new coworker and his wife
• used an ulu
• gone to 4 yard sales
• seen a snow bunting and a Canada goose and LOTS of ravens
• gone grocery shopping (which wasn't as scary as I'd feared!)
• walked A LOT, it's really hilly here!

Everyone here has been really friendly so far, both the people I'm working with and the folks in town - people just say hi to you all over. It's so nice. :)

Tomorrow is my first day at work and I am beyond excited! There will be a lot of paperwork and meeting coworkers and that kind of thing. Also I have to talk to the movers, my stuff didn't leave Hfx this weekend because I didn't get the money from Brookfield in time. But it sounds like my move has been pretty painless compared to some other people's experiences up here, one of my coworkers waited for his stuff for like 2 months. So a couple of weeks is not a problem, and my temporary apartment is really nice - I have close to triple the space I had at home. It's awesome. ^_^

Today my plan is for laundry and organizing and some more settling in, I might also go for a walk and get myself out of the house for a bit. There is a museum and a library and a visitor's centre, so I will probably visit them today.

Yay!! :D

it's official!

My official offer has been made and accepted, and I'm off to Iqaluit! In five weeks! Ack!

I've been allotted 900 kg of belongings/furniture/etc. The pare-down process begins when I get home...

hold please

*dusts off the blog* Hooray, I remembered my password!

I know some of you out there were hoping to see some really cool pictures of Mali by now... so was I. Unfortunately the whole project is on hold. My coworker who was over there is now back here and we're waiting to see what is happening with the project. Hopefully I'll have some info about that soon. In the meantime, I've been working on de-cluttering my house, which is about as exciting as it sounds, and trying to keep busy outside my house a little too.

Anyway, you'll know as soon as I do (provided you check back here regularly :).

winding down...

So things are starting to wind down here in camp and I'm thinking about the end of the season... which means that if you would like a postcard from Greenland, now's the time to say so. :D

Send your mailing address me at my gmail (which I think you can get from my profile), and I'll do my best to get you a postcard.

Still not sure when I will be home, but I'll update once I know.

impending snow

Yep, that right there is snow on the mountains around camp. There's quite a bit of it and it just sort of appeared overnight, with no sign of going away. It's been cold enough the last couple of days that there is ice on the little puddles in the morning (although it's pretty much melted by midday). There is snow in the forecast for this week.

*shivers*.
We had a pretty extraordinary storm here two nights ago. The wind was pretty crazy, every so often there would be huge gusts that felt like someone was taking my tent and shaking it, and heavy rain that would wake me up. So I didn't sleep too well. Yesterday was pretty sunny and today is spectacular, with a perfectly clear blue sky. It's only a couple of degrees C out there, but when the sun's out it's not so bad.

Yesterday Mike and Catherine and I got to take a trip into Fiskaenesset, which was a really great break from the routine. :) We went to the store and got some licorice and related gummy things for the next time we play yahtzee, and I bought some chips that turned out to be really terrible, which was disappointing. Danish chips are weird - they're all kind of like Munchos and Pringles and that kind of chip - like they're made out of those fake mashed potatoes or something. If you want chips made out of potato slices (like Cdn chips), you need to look for 'franske-kartoffeln', French-style potatoes.


I really like the little dragon/sea monster finials on the top of this house. It's fun to see little decorative touches like this - most of the houses in Fisk are prefab so they all look pretty much the same.


A view of Fiskaenesset from the ridge above the town. This is probably one of my favourite pictures I've taken this summer.


A shipwreck! This is on the other side of the ridge, I guess it wasn't worth it for the ship owner to recover it, so it was just left. It's in reasonable shape, I suppose - Mike climbed on it a little and didn't fall through the boards or anything. Anyway, it made a great subject.


Mike and Catherine on the ridge where I took the last picture from.

picspam yay!

Yesterday was one of the last really nice days we're likely to get, so I spent some time in the evening taking some photos. I also found out it was blueberry season so I picked myself some delicious berries as well. :)


This plant is related to Labrador tea, but I'm not sure of the name. You can see by the red that leaves are starting to turn... (it's also blurry, I wish I had a tripod, my knee isn't cutting it.)


I like how the hills look when only parts of them are sunlit. The clouds have been pretty low the last couple of mornings, and this morning they were low enough that the helicopter couldn't fly until almost 10.

More turning leaves.

A couple of neat fungus-like things.

More pics upcoming soon, we had some pretty impressive aurora last night...

The last few days have been pretty awesome. I got to do some real field work. :) We went up the hill to the place where the drilling was, and Mike and Jose and I made up a grid to map the area on, which Mike and I then photographed and mapped. It was tough work but a lot of fun. Also the weather has been*fantastic* for the last three days, so we finished just in time - today is cloudy and cold and tomorrow through Wednesday call for rain in the forecast. (It was nice enough that I got a bit of a sunburn on my arms and my nose has come over all freckly. oops. -_- My hands are nice and tanned though!) In this picture I have just finished painting some lines.


Yesterday I also learned how to drive a Zodiac boat, which was pretty cool. Mike and I weren't sure if the helicopter was going to be able to come up for us in time, so we took the boat across the lake and were just getting ready to start the hike down the hill when it showed up, so we took the boat back and got back in time for supper, instead of an hour late. yay!

The view was pretty spectacular from up there, too.

A handful of the remaining people in camp left on Saturday. Brian, Iqbal, Jose, and Gary have all left, so things are even quieter than before. I think pretty much everyone has a cabin to themselves.l-r: me, Mike, Jose, Brian, and Gary.

a caribou!

I saw a real live caribou yesterday, yay!


My camera is not so good with the wide shots, though, so that's why there is an arrow pointing him out. If I can get my hands on some of Britt or Gary's pics I'll post a better one.

I also got a nice shot of a raven:


And it was Jeppe and Tom's last day in camp yesterday. They are heading back to school soon, so off they went to spend most of a day in Kangerlussuaq (which apparently has a golf course! so they are going golfing...), and then leave for Copenhagen. Camp has been much quieter without them.
(Britt, Tom, me, and Jeppe. yes, I know, I look even shorter than usual. I'm actually standing in a hole. :P)

foodz

So we have a new cook/chef person at camp. Last night was his second night here; this was dessert:


Yes, that is in fact deep-fried ice cream with whipped cream and maple syrup. I made sure to skip for extra time last night. *sigh*

aaaaargh.

ETA: never mind. apparently it depends on the browser you're using or something. bleh.

why, why, WHY can I never seem to prevent the floating words that show up to the right of the pictures I'm posting? They are never there in the preview!

if anyone reading this knows how to work blogspot enough to fix it, please, I'm begging you, help me get rid of this ridiculous little quirk.