Lessons

OK folks pull up a chair as I am going to give you a little bit of  knowledge of where we live now.  We live in Cambridge Bay or in the native language it is called Ikaluktutiak which means 'good fishing place'.  It is located on the south west coast of Victoria Island, Canada's third largest island.  It was first settled in 1921 and was named for Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge.  The latitude is 69' 7' 0N and longitude is 105' 1' 60W and is the largest stop for passengers and research vessels travelling through the Northwest Passage.  Inuinnaqtun is the dialect of the Inuvialuktun group of Inuit languages in Western Nunavut or the Kitikmeot region.  The Kitikmeot region consists of the following communities, Cambridge Bay,  Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven, Taloyoak, and Kugaaruk.  The population of Cambridge Bay as of 1996 is 1477 and more than 1/2 of the population is in the 1-29 year old bracket, which includes myself. (haha)  If you are ever wanting to visit us you can by air through Yellowknife, First Air and Canadian North Airlines are the two that fly out of Yellowknife to Cambridge Bay but expect to empty your bank account for the ticket.  I promise you it would be worth seeing the North.

So that's your lesson for today and I hope that I got all of the spellings correct.  As you can image the pronunciation of some of the words is crazy and I still can not say some of them, I may have to find an elder friend to help me out.

The weather here has been not bad, usually sitting anywhere between +4'c to -5'c.  I haven't seen the sun for a few days now but I am hoping that it will show it's bright yellow colour soon.  I have been busy this past week, you guessed it painting the living, dining and kitchen area (plus a wall unit that Craig made).  The two colours were either too dark or too dull so we went with a warm green colour to brighten up the space.  All it needs now are some drapes which we will probably pick up down south on our next trip back home.  The 4 windows in the space do have black out blinds which we kept but the 1/2 drapes had to go. The next project is to get the two storage areas in the house organized, a small one at the front and a larger one in the back close to the kitchen.

We were invited to Gary and Kate's home last Sunday for a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner.  They are from the east coast so there were a couple of things that were different.  We had the traditional turkey, ham, stuffing, pototoes and carrots but also had salted beef, boiled cabbage and peas pudding all of which I must have again. There were about a dozen of us at dinner including a couple of guys from Housing Corp that were from another community.  Gary and Kate are very generous people that open their home on many occasions, always a good time with good people.

The pictures today are from some of the signs around town, have fun trying to pronounce some of the words. I wonder if I can use some of these in our scrabble game, heck if Randy can use words that Marlene, Petra and myself have never heard of why can I use these?  The others are before and after pictures of the painting that we did this past week.

Talk soon!