Snow Sculptures

It appears to be blizzarding again, although this one is supposed to be good by morning. I hope so for the sake of all those traveling. Its definitely be a weathery year. I heard last night that the failure of pack ice to start forming on time is becoming an issue for the embattled polar bears. Even the lake ice has been slow to form due to a combo of warm weather and wind - which opened the lake back up after it froze initially.

I baked pumpkin chip muffins yesterday. The first baking I've done since the pumpkin cheese cake I make for thanksgiving. I'm tempted to make bread, but its likely that baking bread will just mean eating bread that I probably shouldn't eat... so I'm going to focus on the other things that need doing.

I met up with some friends last night for board games. We played skip-bo (which I haven't played in a long while). At first we tried to play it so we only put numbers of a matching colour together into the piles - We decided that since it was the first game in a while we'd allow mixed colours as it had gotten slow. Then we realized that 1-4 were purple, 5-8 were green and 9-12 were all pink. Making the game difficult to play if you are playing all one colour. I've come to the conclusion that skip-bo is just a version of Dutch Blitz, and that I think I like Dutch Blitz better for its chaos. I also ran into a friend who has left Baker and got to see some pictures of Grise Ford (such a beautiful spot) - its left me hoping that I find a way to do some travelling in Nunavut. Finally, this morning I got to meet Clare from "The House and Other Arctic Musings". For those of you not familiar with the Nunavut blogosphere - Clare is the (un)official leader of the blog community up here and one of the first Nunavut blogs I started following. He keeps the blogs of nunavut site going and runs the Nunavut Blog Awards (aka the Nunies). Definitely, being part of the Nunavut Blogging has enriched my experience in the North - I've built connections with bloggers in communities across the arctic - and better still been able to see pictures from all the communities that I wish that I could visit, but can't afford to yet. I'm still in touch with several bloggers that have since left Nunavut. Its been definitely a hobby that has help me to keep writing - and even sometimes try writing in full grammatically correct sentences - when the mood so takes me. In fact, tomorrow is the 5 year anniversary of the first post on the original incarnation of this site: The Blog Bog of Jennith - changed to the Blog Bog of the Tundra when I moved north. Apparently, I haven't changed much, in spite of following teaching rather than engineering. I still have a scientific calculator with-in arms reach and I still have things I should do because they are due tomorrow.