More of the weather

Well, I'm sorry - but the weather seems to dominate all conversation here. It's -42 this morning, and it's been a full week that every day has been below -40, although it may rise up to as warm as -33 during the day. I've discovered many things about living in an arctic climate (technically, we live in the subarctic here) over the past week.

First of all, I can still count my blessings. It may be colder here in YK, than in any other community in the NWT, but our furnace works, our car still starts, and life is still good.

In addition, our pipes all drain! This wasn't true earlier in the weekend, but thanks to my wonderful husband, and lots of patience on everyone's part, he got the sink draining again. We discovered that when the plumbing company put in the new fuel tank this fall, they disconnected some of our heating tape and removed some of the insulation around some pipes, so that they'd have room to install the new pipes to the furnace. That's all well and good, but it would have been better if they had told us that they had done that. I also learned that the crawl space under our house is truly a crawl space and that I don't really like small enclosed spaces. I'm quite willing to let others take on those challenges.

Number 3. I am going to have a really clean kitchen after all this (I'm busy procrastinating right now). I'm sure our floor has been washed at least six times over the weekend due to water spills, I have all the accumulation of several years underneath the kitchen sink cleaned out, our dishwasher needs to be run every six hours to ensure the drain doesn't freeze up again (so no excuse not to do dishes), etc.

Thankfully, we didn't have to fly anywhere over this past week. Air Canada's flights into and out of YK have been cancelled all week, as their planes weren't certified to fly below -40. However, Canadian North and First Air's planes were, and they have benefitted from a lot more business. Hopefully, by the time Rose is due to fly home in mid February, things will have warmed up a bit, as she's on an Air Canada flight pass.