Home Sweet Home

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow Canadians!!
This year we are thankful for our lovely new home! Come on in for the tour. :)

Residents

After an extremely long wait, we finally got our home phone set up!!! It was originally supposed to be wired up and installed before we moved in at the end of July, but there was a lot of technical issues and no technicians to fly out to Baker Lake, so we were told it was going to be a while. Fast forward to Friday afternoon and here we are with a home phone!

Since moving here, we also learned that in super small communities, all the phone numbers have the same first three digits, and it's only the last four digits that are different. So when you're giving/getting a telephone number, you only say the last four numbers. At first I thought everyone was giving out work extensions, but no, that's the whole hamlet. You just go by last four digits and everyone knows what the rest is.

We were also lucky that in the first week we were here, they were doing a P.O. box clean up and there happened to be an empty one that they gave us right away. I know some co-workers who have been here for months and are still on a "waiting list" for a box. It's a good one too - right at eye level, not the ones at the very bottom like some people. Maybe it helps that we've been super friendly with the lady at the post office and she knows who I am when she sees me now!

Anyhoo, our new "official" Baker Lake address is:

P.O. Box 523
Baker Lake, NU
X0C 0A0

It feels incredibly real now that we are considered "permanent residents" so we have a box, and a home phone - and now we're in the process of getting our licenses and health cards.

I guess this really is turning into home.

-L

More excrem...sorry, excitement!

I promise you, one of these days we'll actually tell you about our first week here, but the last few days have been so crazy you need to hear about them first. 

Two days ago as mentioned, we had the second half of our shipment show up and I spent all day unpacking and letting Lily (who is much better at organizing things) figure out where we would put it all when she got home from work. As Lily mentioned in her last post, we were out of water...and this issue continued for two straight days! I flagged down one of the sewage trucks (sewage and water trucks are indistinguishable except for the smell) and the driver told me the main water truck was broken...and the backup was also down for repair? This is fairly common I was told, which did not inspire much in the way of confidence. At least we got our sewage pumped. When I was talking to the driver outside, I was wearing shorts. Today I have many mosquito bites. Deet-based products are about as effective at repelling these bugs as air freshener, so I am going to use Febreze from now on, as it smells better. 

First Impressions/Thoughts: A List

1. It's been quite warm and sunny here - there were days that were about 25 degrees! The coldest it's been was around 9 degrees, and that was on our first day when it was overcast and rainy. No humidity at all!
2. The bugs here are ridiculous. They attack you the second you step outside and make you miserable for even thinking of leaving your house. Bug spray has been ineffective, and the bites they leave are big and angry looking. They're also jerks - I've had two bite me on the forehead. There's nothing to bite there!!!
3. There is more traffic (ATVs, trucks, etc.) passing by our house here, than there was in Ontario. I was looking forward to peace and quiet and I hear a lot of gravel crunching, trucks backing up, and children playing at all hours of the night.
4. The sun sets around 10:30pm and then it's a light-dark until about 4:00, so you can still see outside. It really messes with your system; especially when you hear the kids playing!
5. There are a lot of dogs here; most of them are chained outside their houses all day and look really bored.
6. The water and sewer trucks drive by constantly, but don't necessarily stop by your house on a set "schedule." We have been without water since yesterday morning, but thankfully, more of our stuff arrived so we had bottled water to use.
7. Groceries are expensive, but you learn to get over that pretty quickly because you need to eat.
8. It makes me sad/angry that once people are finished with their ATV or other toys, they just park it somewhere and walk away. The landscape is littered with abandoned vehicles. In the winter, they park their snowmobiles on the ice to let it melt and sink to the bottom. Grr!!
9. It's amazing how a simple thing like having your own dish rack arrive, can make a house feel more like home. For the first week, it felt like we were vacationing at someone's cottage because nothing here was ours and we were scrimping like squatters. We still don't have all of our stuff, nor our furniture...but it's slowly been arriving.
10. Even though we've literally been here a week, we find ourselves missing the strangest things. Things we wouldn't have wanted at home, but just because we can't have them - makes us want them.

Here's a picture of our lake that we took on the first day, just so you can see how beautiful our view is.

-L

Finally!

According to Genesis, God worked feverishly for six days to create the world, then rested on the seventh; we took a different approach. We've had a reasonably leisurely six days of touring the hamlet, setting up our Internet, and shopping for food, amongst other things. Yesterday was the complete opposite. The movers greeted Lily at 10am with half of our belongings, so we spent the morning and early afternoon unpacking boxes and filling shelves with food, closets with clothes, and drawers with everything from Tylenol to tequila. At 2:30 we drove to the airport to pick up the other HR manager (our next-door neighbour) and his family, then continued sorting and re-arranging until 10pm when we surrendered. Upstairs is mainly complete, while the main floor still resembles a college dorm/cardboard hoarder. Lots still to do but by this afternoon it should look a lot less cluttered. I never realized until today how little things really turned this house into something resembling our home. The dish rack, the rice cooker, and even my Despicable Me minion plush (thanks Omi & Kaitlyn!) make such a difference just on their own. 

It's hard to believe we have another 100+ boxes to come, and all of the furniture ordered for us. Lily's off to her first day of work today, and I'll be finishing the organization of the house. There's still lots to tell you about - shopping for food, taking Lily kite-flying for the first time, our horrible-but-in-the-end-great trip up, and I'm putting together a video of the town , so stay tuned for more shortly. 

As always, let us know if you like our blog, and suggestions and comments are welcome. 

-J