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.