Newest Masterpiece

It's becoming a bit of a weekend tradition. In fact, I dunno what I'd do with a weekend without making a cake! This one is the first one I'm accepting a bit of moola for, as I've realized it takes me a bit of time to produce these edible pieces of art (and not *just* because I have perfectionist tendencies!). I may not have anything on the pros down south, but up here, I get to be the creative genious! I usually get just a brief outline of what they'd like to see, and then I run wild. Thank goodness for the stand mixer; I can just dump ingredients in!

On top of baby cakes, we created an amazing brunch with our friends this weekend. We all brought something, and ate like kings. The Arden Park had nothing on us. We had:

• Breakfast skillet, featuring eggs, bacon, and hashbrowns baked to a yummy-goodness.


• Chocolate Chip Pancakes, smothered in bananas and strawberries and walnuts, with a butter-maple syrup sauce.


• Blueberry Crumble topped with cinammon granola with yogurt on the side.


• Breakfast sausages.


• French french baguettes.


• Fresh oranges and nectarines.


• Homemade strawberry and raspberry pop tarts.


• Choice of orange or cranberry juice, and coffee or tea.

Yum!

Yeehaw!

Maybe an odd thing to say while thawing out, but 'Yeehaw' nonetheless! Let me explain:

As I was leaving the office today, I noticed that it's not fully dark outside anymore at 5pm!

This is exciting because now the shortcut across the tundra is no longer a deathtrap!

And that means I have an even shorter walk home!

Which means I don't get as cold in this -60 degree weather that we're having.

And that means Yeehaw!

Never seen this one before...

It's always exciting when the Weather Network icon flashes it's little white lightning strike on a red background on my desktop. What could it be? Winter storm warning? Blizzard watch?? Blizzard warning????

How 'bout this:

Warnings
Baker Lake
2:31 PM CST Wednesday 19 January 2011
Wind chill warning for Baker Lake continued

Extreme wind chill expected to develop overnight and continue into Thursday. This is a warning that extreme wind chill conditions are imminent or occurring in these regions. Monitor weather conditions. Listen for updated statements.

An extremely cold core of air situated over the north central Arctic will slide southeastward tonight into the Southern Kivalliq. This air will combine with brisk northwest winds, to produce extreme wind chill values in the -55 to -65 range. In addition winds gusting at times to 60 km/h along the Kivalliq coast line will produce some blowing snow overnight and Thursday morning. Wind chill values are expected to plummet into the extreme range overnight and persist over much of the region on Thursday before moderating slightly Thursday night as winds diminish. Despite this temperatures are expected to remain around the -40 Celsius mark until at least the early part of the weekend.

At these extreme wind chill values frostbite on exposed skin may occur in less than two minutes.

Really looking forward to the walk up the hill tomorrow morning....

Snow and Stuff

"When I was younger, I had to walk to work through ten feet of snow. Through blizzards. Uphill. Both ways."

I look forward to saying that to my kids one day...because, in my case, its actually not a bald-faced lie.

Its been snowing almost non-stop since we got back. Sometimes heavy, sometimes blizzardy. Sometimes this light drizzly stuff that's misleading because it never actually stops, and you think it's nothing till you open the front door the next morning and your front entrance caves in.

Several times in the last couple weeks I've had to scratch my head cleverly for a few minutes trying to figure out how to get into my office. You see, my office-house is in a sort of "snow belt" on the street where the drifts pile up into small snow mountains, and one of these mountains invariably ends up directly in front of, and against, the front entrance.

(Quick aside: For the record, we're lucky in that our house doesn't get the most brutal snowdrifts. Our immediate neighbour to the east typically has this freakish mountain that they carve an entrance through. Very cool if you're not the neighbour to the east.)

So back to my office: I typically end up doing one of two things if I really want to get in: 1) Climbing over that hill and down into the doorway, with the understanding that the door is not going to be able to shut once after I open it. (There's two doors fortunately, this is just the exterior one.) Or (2) I can try to climb up the side entrance into the "back" door if it looks reasonably safe, which has the benefit of not caving in a doorway since its eight feet higher or so and above the snowdrift, minus the foot or so resting on the patio.


And on my way out, I get to climb back up that mountain again and down the other side (Uphill both ways...get it?)

About these snowfalls: we've had a couple of official "blizzard" days since we got back, which are sort of nice sometimes. These ones were particularly well-timed because we got knocked down with a nasty flu and needed recup time.

That flu was also brutal enough that we cancelled our New Years Eve party...although we sort of made it up the following weekend!

You'd think between all the flus and snowdrifts and blizzards we'd be ready to get back to civilization...but honestly these things are just fun. I missed it and I'm glad to be back.

Besides snowstorms just mean more time for important projects such as Settlers of Catan! (Thanks for the intro J!)

This one's for Tara!

... she put in her request on Facebook earlier today.

What I'd really like to know is who turned off the heat up here. It's gotten really cold again; -50 with the wind chill. Whoever turned the heat off was at least nice enough to turn the sun back on. One can almost ignore the frostbite on their thighs while the sun is glistening off the snow, or setting over the ice on the lake, making all the snow pink. *Almost.*

We braved the cold temperatures to head out and see what may be our new place. We've been under threat of having our comfy nest sold to the highest bidder since May of last year. On Labour Day, Squire and I walked out to check it out. Turns out, not a whole lot has been done since then. There is now some stone on the front of the house (in lieu of the lovely Tyvek) and lots of snow in the front. The new place is much less centrally located though, it's in what's referred to as Little India, which is further from town than Chinatown. Because of the location of the snow-fence north of town, Baker Lake is starting to extend east along the lake. We've requested the unit on the left in the picture, since it's closer to the lake and has nicer views. We should know within the next month when D-day will be.

So tomorrow I have to remember to a) put some tights under my jeans for the walk up the hill, and b) not spend *all* day daydreaming about decorating the new place.