Brrr

Winter arrived with a vengeance last weekend. Woke up Saturday morning to -30; Sunday and Monday was -35. Since then it's been between -17 and -20, which is much nicer but still pretty cold.

I started out today rather poorly. Went to work, parked the van and got stuck. As I walked around the van to see how badly stuck I was, I noticed the back tire was really low as well. When I got home after lunch I also found out that I had forgotten to unplug the van before I drove away. All in all, not a great start to the day.

I have been doing a lot of work this past week volunteering for AWG. I have made presentations to opposite ends of the age spectrum (teenagers at one of the high schools and then seniors). I also made informal presentations to both of my classes. Bram helped me prepare the PowerPoint presentations. There's also been several meetings and tomorrow there's a big rally with the hopes of signing up more volunteers (I'm on the committee that's job is to get and train the volunteers). For AWG we're going to need about 2500 volunteers; to host the approximately 2000 athletes, cultural performers, coaches, etc. When you consider that Yellowknife has a population of approximately 20 000, that's a lot of volunteers. More than 1 in 10, especially since you have to be 12 or over to volunteer. So anyway, I will have done about 12-14 hours by the end of this week.

Rose is talking to us on the phone right now. She's confessed that she's lost her bank card, is broke and has also misplaced her student card (so she can't eat in the cafeteria). I have suggested that she start looking for things. This week she's missed supper every night, for a variety of reasons. Also something I'm not encouraging. Several of them she's slept through, so Lloyd's talking to her about setting an alarm to go off right before supper.

Bram has been working most of the week on his English. He's been writing a short story. He doesn't like writing stories. He's also not finished, but I'm not letting him off the hook because my deadline for him was today. So he's going to have to work on it over the weekend, because he does have other subjects besides English to keep up with. Having said that, I'm really behind on the WebCT course that I've been taking. I need to get back to work on that. I'm also a little behind on my marking.

Lloyd has had a hectic week at work, but he says he's gotten through nearly everything he wanted to, so that's good.