Tuesday, March 20, 2012

If fishing is a sport, then I'm an athlete

Well, we have made it back to our Deer Lake home. It was quite the journey, but enjoyed ourselves along the way. We left Bala at 9:30 on Saturday morning and rolled into Thunder Bay at midnight. The drive was actually pretty cool and was nice to see different parts of Ontario. About two hours outside of Thunder Bay, it became very foggy and visibility was extremely low. But we managed to make it into T-Bay. And both Claire and Edgar travelled very well.

Some news from Deer Lake. While we were out, there were two drug busts. The first yielded $1,400 of cash and $47,500 worth of OxyContin pills. A similar bust happened at the same time in another reserve. Later in the week another house was searched and $15,000 worth of pills were seized. Amazing amounts, but consider that one pill is worth $400 on the streets of Deer Lake.

The weather was scorching here as well. When we arrived it reached 19 degrees. The only snow left was in the woods or in piles on the side of the roads. The winter road is no more as the heat quickly put an end to many peoples' minds. In fact, several vehicles had left before March Break via the Winter Road and had tried to come back over the weekend. Since the heat melted away those ideas, cars were stuck on the road. Now, you might be wondering how a car could be stuck on the ice, but the road is actually mostly over land. From Deer Lake, there are only two lakes you must drive over. Cars were now stuck in mud and at the edge of lakes were ice used to be. These vehicles and people were stuck in the middle of nowhere, far from outside contact. To save them, helicopters were picking people up from their stranded positions. Bad luck for the rescuees as they now leave behind a vehicle for an entire year. One staff member was stuck and had a family member kill a moose with a hatchet for food (I don't know how true that story is).

Tomorrow is career day at the Nursing Station, so another afternoon of chaos and missed lessons. Today's title was inspired by Steve's (the Janitor) t-shirt.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Winter Carnival

Today we had our Winter Carnival for the students. It was about -10 outside all day with heavy snowfall to start the festivities, but the sun made an appearance near the end of the morning. The kids seemed to have fun although there were a number of them that went inside due to the cold. Claire was the timekeeper and I ran a hockey-style game in the snow. Afterwards the school had prepared bannock dogs for lunch.

This year the school hasn't run a breakfast program, even though they order food at the beginning of the year. Since much of it was expiring, we have been giving things out for a couple of weeks. Today was the oats that were being given to the students to take home. After a while, they noticed that inside the bag there were bugs so they had the students return the oats. Some did make it out of the school, so let's hope parents see the message on facebook about the bugs.

Tomorrow we are off to Niagara for March Break. Time seems to fly and we are excited to catch up with family and friends when we are home. It will be nice to see Edgar again as we have both missed him the past two months.