roadblocks

We’ve been up here for three weeks now, and must apologize as our internet connections are sketchy, borrowed (and sometimes stolen), and therefore blog posts are few and far between. We’ve been loaned a modem for the weekend, and I wanted to take the opportunity to fill everyone in.

We are finally getting settled in our ‘permanent’ home, as the house that was originally supposed to be home may be used for another purpose. We’re happy with the new place, as it is all over homier and suits our lifestyle better. Squire likes that there is carpet in the bedrooms – sleeping on laminate wasn’t her favourite. It also has a super dooper long soaker tub, which I’ll be enjoying on a regular basis.

It hasn’t been without its difficulties though, the way things are done up here are a bit foreign to us. For example, there has been an ongoing parade of repairmen through the house – first because we had no heat, and then no hot water, and (as I sit and write this) now we have no water at all. Water and sewage are held in tanks at ones’ house (water delivery and sewage pump out is via truck based on a schedule). Apparently an account wasn’t set up and we were cut off… it’s difficult to comprehend how much you depend on running water until you live without it for half a day. In any event, I have been assured that we are on the list for delivery today. Because we had our phone line connected prior to coming up here, it was set up at the home we thought we’d be going to. Streets aren’t officially named here, and there is no municipal number system like what exists in the south. I was on the phone for almost an hour with Northwestel to get the phone line moved two doors down. I kinda hope that we don’t ever have to move across the territory.

Prescriptions work vastly different up here as well. As the patient, you really don’t ever handle your prescription. It floats from health clinic to doctor, back to health clinic, to the pharmacy in Rankin Inlet… who’ll call you to get payment information prior to processing your meds. Then they’ll put it on a shipment (via plane) back to Baker Lake, where you pick it up from the kind people at the Health Centre. The whole process can take as long as a week, as the pharmacy in Rankin is closed over the weekend. As a side note, we’ve found the people at the clinic to be very helpful – from the first day when he was medi-vac’d, to his follow up appointments, to late-night “please make the pain stop” visits.

The last, and maybe most saddening, stumbling block is that our personal effects are still sitting at Canadian North’s terminal in Ottawa. In the three weeks our stuff has been in Ottawa, it hasn’t moved except to be bundled together for delivery. I’m on a first name basis with the people at Canadian North, since I call almost daily – we just keep getting bumped for more ‘important’ cargo. It’s extremely frustrating because we’re looking forward to different items of clothing, and being able to set up house. Oh, and of course, we sent a bunch of food items for us and the pets, and paying $25 for 4kg of cat litter (a small bag) gets pretty old pretty fast.

All that said, we are enjoying our time up here, and we are starting to get into a routine. There are a lot of positives (which we’ll go into shortly), but we needed to give some rant-time to the obstacles that needed overcoming!

~ she