Gloaming Skies and Stuff

 
Winter seems to be here, but its the arctic - so the rapidly shortening days are simply a part of the rhythm of life here. It is the best time of year for sunrises and sunsets - glowing colourful skys becoming near every day. The practical end of it is that its dark during first period, and I have to use my overhead projector to supplement the light from the computer projector if I want my students to be able to use notes. I wonder what they do at the Woodlands, where so many classrooms don't have any windows so it doesn't matter that the sun is usually up by first period (although not necessarily because when I went to school there we started at 8 am and finished at 2:30, which was nice that there was still a good bit of the evening to do home work and all, although I think it meant that if you had period 3 lunch, you ate from 10:30 to 11:45 - somehow I managed to have mostly 4th period lunch. My last year I had 2nd period lunch and a flopping period 1/period 5 spare. It meant I could stay home period 1 and part of period 2 every other day to work on one of Mr. K's two weekly essays and then bike to school.... on a 286 PC or was it a 386 I don't know... it was pre-Pentium and slow, but a step up from the commodore 128 I'd been using the previous 4 years. Gosh.. I even took our dot matrix printer to university with me - replacing it 2nd or 3rd year, when the the painful speed of the dot matrix printer started making me late for class. I think I gave the printer to SJA - or something like that - it could still be in use now... although probably not.

I'm in love with my current printer. It was a good choice and makes it a tonne easier to get work done from here (especially since I was essentially without a printer the last few months of last year and the beginning of this year - my old printer trying to swallow all the paper in the paper feed at once and choked to death on it. Not sure what to do with it - it could be fixable. At present, the old one is packed up in its old box. I should at least see if I can sell the ink.

Yesterday, I did a thorough cleaning of my apartment. I usually give it a good once over, but I did the nooks and crannies. I mopped the floors and I even cleaned the inside of the fridge (although I was motivated by a combination of container of milk that had been leaking and incoming foodmail (meaning that my fridge was mostly empty - making the job of cleaning it easier). Food mail brought humus - and vegetables. I'm nervous about the new food mail program because I like being able to have a choice of produce and generally the freshness/quality is better - sometimes its kinda beat up and occasionally something goes bad en route. It is certainly cheaper even if you add the cost of taking a cab to the airport and the shipping fees. It also means being able to get things that are low fat. Its hard to find a lot of low fat stuff at the store. I still shop at the northern, but I can say without questions that I'd be eating a lot less fresh produce if there was no foodmail program. I guess I'll wait and see and deal with whatever - at the very least, they are finally building a new Co-op, so at least there will be some real competition in town. Its still a much better situation than when I was in Kashechewan where I ended up living off rice, pasta, hotdogs, hamburger meat, frozen veggies, onions and apples and white bread with peanut butter and junk food because that was the cheapest thing to buy in town.