An Apology

To All My Faithful Blog Followers....

I apologize for not having blogged in a while.  I have been incredibly homesick as have the kids, and I have been trying very hard to be strong for them, which leaves me with little energy or desire to do much else.  I have been consoling, encouraging, cuddling and helping the kids to sleep, and as soon as they are, I cry myself to get out all my sadness in order to be strong for them the next morning.  It's exhausting really.

To top that off, life in the classroom hasn't exactly been easy.  I won't say much, but suffice to say that Grade 7/8, with all the typical attitudes and hormones, is one thing, but add a HUGE disinterest in learning or even caring about school, and that has left both Greg and I disheartened and frustrated. That is not to say that all of the kids are like this is why I am most grateful that Michele, the new Grade 7/8 teacher, is taking over, and I can enjoy supply teaching.

That said, it was hard to leave the classroom last Friday.  The students had been told on Wednesday that Michele would be taking over and that I would be supply teaching around the school.  The problem was, it took so long to hire a replacement for the original teacher who was supposed to be in the role that they grew to like me and who bonded to me.  There were kids who actually cried and got upset when they heard that I was no longer going to be their teacher!  I received notes saying that I was the best teacher they had ever had and how much they were going to miss me being their 'everyday' teacher.  I was shocked, and quite pleased, although I do feel bad that they have to get used to a new teacher and new procedures and a new schedule all over again....6 weeks into school.  However, it is all for the better.  They made me cards, and students I didn't even think cared that much about me were asking me not to go and to please be their teacher.  Huh?  If they only knew how unprepared and overwhelmed I felt during the 5 weeks I was in their classroom!  At least I didn't let them see how I really felt!

This week has been exceptionally difficult because Greg and all of the 800 permanent teachers in the Northwest Territories are in Yellowknife this week for a week-long conference.  This means that not only is Greg gone, but so are 99% of the other adults in Tuk with whom I fraternize.  The kids and I are lumping along, but we will all be happy when our Fearless Leader, who is NOT homesick, arrives home on Friday.

Anyway, it's been pretty emotionally draining around here lately....but the good news is that we have reached out to our family and friends to ask for some help and you have all been absolutely wonderful, bridging the 6,500 km gap through Skype, email, phone, Facetime, Facebook and snail mail.  We are so lucky to have all of you in our lives!!  We have also had loads of support from our Spiritual Army!  You have lifted us up in prayer and during times when I am low, I remember how much love and support we have from all of you, and I immediately feel comforted knowing how much you all care.  Words cannot express my gratitude to you.

It was so much fun to take my Mom, Darren and Natalie on a tour of our house via Face Time yesterday.  We get to show off our place and you can see what I have been describing.  I have heard a lot of compliments about my writing (blush)...many people say that they feel as though they are here with us, and I humbly thank you for your compliments.  It was SO cool to show my family what our house looks like and when I stepped out on the front deck to show them what it looked like outside, they saw, to their shock and horror, that it was snowing out, and that it was staying on the ground!  It hasn't left yet, although as the day goes on you can see the ground poking through.  They also asked to see the Arctic Ocean, and so I swung them around and....there it was!  Unfortunately it was a grey day, so the sky and the ground and ocean all looked pretty drab....but they saw that it was a 2 minute walk from my doorstep.

Charlotte's BFF's family just got a web cam and got all hooked up with Skype.  Charlotte was over the moon that she got to sit and video chat with her BFF, who is just as equally having a hard time being away from Char as she is from her BFF.  Today is also her BFF's birthday, so it was great that they got to chat together for the first time.

So...if you want to Face Time us, call us at the number we have given you, and we'll give you the $20 tour.  As I said to my Mom, it is a $5 tour but because you have to cross the Arctic Circle there is a surcharge.

Again, my heartfelt apologies for not posting recently.  Tomorrow I think I will take you on a tour of Tuk, and I will post some pics of some of the different buildings.  We did go to church for the first time on Sunday and it was....interesting.  We will bring the camera along next week and take some pics.

And thanks to those who posted on my Facebook wall that they missed my posts.  You have spurred me into action and my commitment to you about communicating what life this far north is like will get me through my homesickness.  I have asked the kids to help me tomorrow and they are quite excited.  Hopefully this will help all of us!!  Thank you everybody!!  We love you all!!! xoxoxo

Do You Want to Build A Snowman?

I hate to say it, but we are all sick.  Terribly sick.  Sicker than we've been in a long time.  Our noses are not dripping.  There is no coughing or wheezing.  Our skin is clear.  Our temperatures are normal.  Physically, we are all quite well...thriving actually.  The fresh air and lack of restaurant eating has actually caused both Greg and I to go down a pant size each!  No, I am talking about homesickness.

We have been up here past the Arctic Circle for almost 4 weeks, and we are all carrying a heavy heart, yearning for the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of home.  Even Miss Charlotte said yesterday "I'm tired of seeing the polar bear license plates!  I want to see more plain old boring white rectangle license plates!".

For Greg, it's not being able to see his parents, and missing the good old days of his previous job when the job was a happy and healthy place to be and when he loved what he did for a living and going to work each day put a grin on his face a mile wide.  The job here, although rewarding, is still quite stressful, and getting used to being back in the classroom is taking a bit longer than Greg realized.

For the kids, they miss their BFFs.  Each of them have come to me in the past week, tears hanging on their cheeks, needing comfort and reassurance that we will see them again and that we are going back to Ontario for Christmas.  Some of them are missing our beloved kitties, Orlando and Florida. All three of them are missing their amazing and wonderful school in London, St. Thomas More.  They miss the loving and supportive staff there and the great kids who attend the school.  I have never felt such a loving yet peaceful energy coming from a school before, and St. Thomas More was always a welcoming and happy place for not just the kids, but for me too.

As for me, well, I just miss the way things were.  I miss getting up in the morning and rushing around to get ready so that I could run the Wilson Family Bus to school.  On Fridays when we had a good week, I would make a stop at Tim Horton's for a medium double double and milk and donuts for the kids.  The kids loved sitting in the van with me and laughing and talking while I sipped coffee and resisted temptation of donuts, while the kids munched on their breakfast.  I miss Orlando, my big grey kitty, who followed me around the apartment all day.  I miss the closeness of our apartment.  We needed badly to get out of it....we were way too big AND it was much to small for us after five years of living there, but it was a convenient and happy place to live.  I miss that our kids lived right across the street from a wonderful park and spent countless happy hours there.  That is not to say that up here is so horrible.  It's just missing the ways things were, and it hurts my heart.

Greg and I have been reassuring the kids and we have made sure that we are all extra kind to each other as well as being sensitive to each other's needs.  I find that each kid comes to me several times a day for a hug or a cuddle, and they are kissing me more now than ever.  I am making sure that my hugs are extra tight and my words are extra loving to them.

Change is difficult.  We knew that going into this whole thing, and for as much as I would give anything to jump on a private jet and send it directly to London, Ontario, I know that we will adjust. In the meantime, I leave you with these lyrics from the Disney movie, Frozen...

They say, “have courage” and I’m trying to

I’m right out here for you

Just let me in

 We only have each other

It’s just you and me

What are we gonna do?

 Do you want to build a snowman?

Blow Me Down!!!

According to the elders, the fall season is full upon us.  There are lots of puddles up here, lake sized puddles, because the ground is too frozen for the water to absorb very far into the ground after it rains.  We are beginning to see that these puddles are frozen over in the mornings.  Twice last week we had to scrape a thick layer of frost off the van before we could drive it.  The water levels in the ocean are rising.  As per my previous posting a while back, the Arctic Ocean was nipping at the road, but the waters receded.  We began last week with wonderful temperatures....above 10C and the kids were all dying to get outside to play.  It was beautiful!  The ocean receded 40-50 feet back from the road.  You could walk out on the sand amongst the driftwood.  Now, however, the water is making its way back to shore again.  This morning the waters of the Arctic were slate grey, and looked foreboding and frigid.   I can stand the cold, the frost, the look of the ocean, and the frozen over puddles.  What I can't stand, however, is the wind.

The wind is blowing constantly here.  You can always see waves on the lake, which is across the road from the Arctic Ocean.  Incidentally, the lake is a freshwater one about 20 feet from the other side of the road, which houses the Arctic Ocean.  Anyway, you can always see the flags blowing at top speed at the Northern store, and there is a pick up truck flying half a German flag which is always blowing in the wind.  In the nice weather, the wind is gentle, but constant.  That is why it doesn't get too hot up here during the summer.  During the fall, however, the wind picks up speed and blows with a ferocity that exceeds fierce!  Sometimes it is so strong the house shakes, and clouds coming off the ocean are literally navy blue.  It is wild and crazy!  When you go out in this wind, it takes your breath away, and walking into the wind takes more stamina than a small child or elder would have anywhere else in the world.  Up here, on the other hand, the locals walk in it like experts.  You can tell who is a local up here and who is not by how they are walking in the wind!  All of us are wearing our winter jackets now, or what are now being referred to as our fall jackets, because we will be outfitted in goose down parkas in order to survive the winter, and we are wearing hats and mittens or gloves if we have to be out for any length of time.  The locals, however, are still wearing windbreakers and hoodies.  They laugh at our gloves and our pulled up hoods on our coats. This makes me think we will come home at Christmas and put on our shorts!

The wind permeates everything.  The school is freezing cold, even with all the warm (well, not so warm) bodies in it, and those kids who don't have indoor shoes are complaining about their feet being cold.  We even had a fire drill at school today, and the kids had to walk about 5 minutes from the school to the youth hall, which is our gathering place.  Since it was a fire drill, we were not allowed to stop to put coats on.  Talk about cold!?  The wind was blowing right through my sweater, and smaller children were crying and shivering in the wind. We are having trouble keeping our house at a comfortable temperature, even with a wood fire.  We are wandering around in double layer socks and wool sweaters (thanks Gramma Wilson!) and when we have to get dressed we moan, anticipating the cold making parts of us tingle that shouldn't be tingling!  Apparently, the wind will die down come winter time when the temperatures plummet,  and then we'll all be able to keep our houses warm and cozy.....until a blizzard blows in!!

In the meantime, I implore you, "Send us hot chocolate, NOW!!!!"

Shrug Your Shoulders and Move On......

One of the joys of living in a small and remote community is that sometimes when things go wrong, all you can do it shake your head and shrug your shoulders, because there's nothing else to do.  This morning on my way inside the school, the principal mentioned to me that the phones were all out.  No service whatsoever.  Great!  Does anybody have any idea why it happened? No.  Does anybody know when service will be restored? No.  Doesn't that bother anybody? No, not really.  It happens from time to time.  You have to admit that if we didn't have phone service in Southern Ontario, we'd all freak out pretty quickly, and even worse would be to have a cell tower knocked out somewhere!  Up here, you just shrug your shoulders.

Yesterday I had an appointment with the Health Centre and while I was waiting to be seen, the receptionist received a phone call from the airport in Inuvik that the remainder of the planes scheduled to fly to Tuk that afternoon were cancelled due to foggy conditions between Tuk and Inuvik.  There were people who were scheduled to fly out to Inuvik to see a visiting specialist at the hospital there, but since the flights weren't going, they were going to miss the appointments, and therefore had to be rescheduled to the next time the specialist was going to be in town.  When the receptionist starting make her calls, everybody was complacent about it.  What can you do? Shrug your shoulders, and move on.

Greg just returned from an emergency trip for spaghetti sauce at Stanton's, one of the local grocers.  Apparently the phone lines are still down, and debit cards run on......phone lines, and the ATM machine runs on a......yeah, you know.  Since most people up here pay with debit, what to do?  Well, we happen to be friends with the Manager of Stanton's, who told his cashier, "Put it on his account!", so now we have an account at the grocery store.  That's good to know.

Since the phones are out and nobody can pay anybody up here, I wonder what kind of day it has been for the community?  I had a collection of 'behaviour' phone calls to make to parents, whose little darlings had violated the Discipline Policy at the school, which necessitates a phone call home to parents to make them aware of the situation.  Nope.  Shrug your shoulders and move on.

All I can say is, thank goodness we have a cell phone, because if our internet and cell phone weren't working, I would be pretty upset.  It's one thing to work in a remote community, but it's another thing to FEEL like you work in a remote community when you really ARE shut off to the outside world!

For most people in Tuk, the day did go on as usual.  The water truck made its deliveries, the sewage truck did too.....from what I could smell, the stores were open, the Health Centre was open, the school had a regular day, and as for the phones - oh well.  They'll be up and running......eventually.

Local Sights and Fare.....

Greg spent most of yesterday at an orientation session for new staff of the school.  I stayed home with the kids and slept through most of the day, partly due to sheer exhaustion, the other part illness.  When he came home, though, he was full of stories of his day, and I thought I would share some of it with you.  I asked him to be a guest blogger, but he's shy.  LOL

There were a few very interesting parts of the orientation yesterday.

The beginning of the permanent road from Tuk to Inuvik.

 During their tour of town, the group was taken down the road to where the permanent road is being built between Inuvik and Tuk.  Right now Inuvik is about 200 km away from Tuk and is only accessible by land during the winter on the ice road.  The ice road is usually thick enough to be opened to commercial traffic just before Christmastime and will remain up and running until early mid-April, when the ice becomes unstable. It takes about 3 hours to drive the ice road one way and a strict speed limit of 70 km/hr is enforced.  If you are caught going over the speed the limit, you are slammed with a ticket of $800!  Maybe the powers that be should be consider that for the 400 series highways in Southern Ontario, huh?   The ice road will begin about 30 seconds from our driveway and all winter we will be able to watch the vehicles coming and going.  Apparently it is quite a diversion.

Anyway, despite the winter road, there is still a permanent road being built from Inuvik to Tuk, which will make Tuk all the more accessible.  This will help their economy by lowering prices of goods being shipped up here since they won't have to fly them in.  There will still be all the surcharges of shipping above the 60th parallel and then beyond the Arctic Circle, but at least there won't be the flight and cost of airline fuel, taxes, etc.  That will help a bit.  The road has definitely been a long time coming, and is scheduled to open in 2016.

The other thing that Greg found extremely fascinating is the Ice House.  This was built by community members as a way to keep meat fresh.  Greg actually got to go down into the ground below and see how it all works down there, 30 feet below the ground in the permafrost!  It is pitch dark down there with no electricity, so you have to wear a miner's hat or carry a flashlight in order to see where you are going or what you are doing.  Greg said that as he walked further down the path, he kept thinking of the short story "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe.  His imagination definitely got the better of him because he began to get nervous and said that if he had seen anything that resembled a brick he would have turned and ran!!  For those of you who have not ever read this story by Poe, it is highly recommended by both of us as a perfect Hallowe'en read!  He said the ice was lining the ceiling above him and was formed like diamonds, sparkling and glistening when the light hit it, and it was, of course, incredibly cold.  Not only was he given a miner's hat for light, he was also loaned a pair of work gloves to use for warmth, and for grip as he descended the ladder 30 feet below the ground.  He forgot to get a shot of what the building looks like from the ground, but I have seen it, and it looks like a wooden outhouse, or at least those would be the approximate dimension, and when you open the door what you see is the picture top left. Once you are down below there are a series of hallways with doors leading off along the sides.  Families rent these spaces so that their meat will keep.  Talk about your year-round deep freezer for caribou and whale!

During lunch, a traditional meal was served.  Greg had the opportunity to enjoy some fishy appetizers, of which he is not a fan.  There was beluga jerky and beluga sushi, and Greg can honestly say after trying both that he will never eat the stuff again.  The beluga sushi was the fresh meat after the blubber had been scraped off - which he tried out of respect and sheer interest, but now that his

taste buds have had their say, he will decline any and all offers in the future!  There was also some smoked fish of some sort, which he decided not to eat, given that he was trying not to throw up at the time.  The main course was caribou stew, muskox steaks and Eskimo doughnuts, which is the Arctic equivalent of bannock - a non-rising type of bread made by the First Nations people.  It is usually fried and although fatty, sooooo good!  Eskimo doughnuts are much the same and equally as good.  Greg loved the caribou stew. It was rich and meaty and very savoury.  His review of the muskox steaks was that it tasted much like a moose steak which is slightly more 'gamey' than a beef steak.  Since Greg likes moose meat, muskox was not that much of a stretch.  Dessert was a trifle made with traditional berries and whipped cream and cake.

Now that I have heard about the menu, I am super glad that I was at home with the kids sipping chicken noodle soup for lunch.  Our whole family had been invited along on this orientation session, but  I was not in a condition to attend, and I wondered if lunch would be like this, which meant our children would not eat. Bad news.  It was just as well that the remainder of us didn't go.

The big mountain like thing you see in this photo is the Ibyuk
Pingo, which is the second tallest one in Tuk.

The pingo from our kitchen window, also known as the
local sliding hill.

The orientation group also got pretty close to the Ibyuk Pingo, which is about 6 or 7 stories tall.  A pingo is basically a permanent, huge ice heave.  They appear as slopes of land and are usually covered with the low-lying bushes that cover the ground.  Currently they are all fall colours, red, orange, gold and yellow.  They're beautiful.  Tuk is known as the Pingo capital of the world, because everywhere you look around here, there are pingos.  We can see one from our kitchen window about a minute's walk from our house, and Greg and the kids climb it as a shortcut when they walk to school.  It is also known as the local sliding/sledding hill here.  Kids go up and down particular parts of the pingo based on age and ability level, rather like slopes at ski resorts! The Ibyuk Pingo is the second tallest one in the world. Apparently there is a pingo a bit north of here that you can climb and when you reach the top, as you look out across the Arctic Ocean, you can see the curvature of the earth!  Greg has now added climbing this pingo to his bucket list!

As for me, I'm just happy looking out at the Arctic Ocean and marvel at the fact that this is part of my daily view.  My bucket list contains seeing whales in the harbour and doing some natural 'whale watching' when the belugas come into the harbour.  I have been told now that fall has arrived, the whales' instinct is to move further out into the ocean because the shallower parts will begin to freeze over and they will get caught under the ice.  This means we probably won't see any whales until the spring.  Nobody had our phone number and they were sorry they didn't because the whales were playing in the harbour a few nights ago.  The wind and wicked waves on the ocean dragged a lot of herring into the harbour, and the belugas were attracted to the fish.  Man were we sorry to have missed that!  I have given numerous people our phone number now and said that no matter what time of day or night they see the whales,  call us!!  Sometimes they are seen in the middle of the night, but people call around anyway and everybody congregates to watch them.  I am not surprised considering how majestic they are!

So, Greg has tried some of the local fare, and has joked that I have to learn how to hunt so I can go out and get a caribou to make him stew.  Can you see me doing that?  Well, at least he didn't like the whale, because the last thing I need to do right now is hang out on the Pequod with my harpoon! Imagine that!

A Tough Week.

A Tough Week.....

Yup.  That sums it up.  We are all tired, sore, sick, and overwhelmed.  Did I mention we are tired?  Greg and I are pulling super late nights because we are planning day by day.  I am still working in the Grade 7/8 position until a suitable replacement can be found, which may or may not be me.  I have lots of ideas for long term plans which require unit planning but until we know whether or not I will continue in the role, what is the point?  So, I am working on the curriculum and beginning assignments, but they are all short-term so that if and when a new person comes into the position, (s)he can start with their own assignments.

Although it has only been a four-day week, and we have only been in school for 6 days, it feels as though we have been here a lot longer and that school has been going on for months.  Part of it is adjusting to teaching in our new roles, but it also has to do with how friendly and welcoming people have been to us.  While we were waiting for our van to arrive, the taxi company in town was going out of their way to find a ride for me in the morning when they normally do not operate at that time of day.  The staff at the school are just fabulous!  They have been so helpful and welcoming, and during some moments of overwhelming craziness which I will not discuss on this blog due to privacy issues at school, they have been incredibly supportive to Greg and I.  I have made contact with the Nursing Station as well as the pharmacy in Inuvik, which sends prescriptions over to Tuk.  We have figured out what to do and where to go to get our NWT licences and health cards, and where Greg has to go to get our new polar-bear shaped license plate for the van.

We have had a heck of a time getting our internet hooked up...it was one thing after another, but we're all hooked up now after two weeks. We wound up having to wait for a Technician from Northwest Tel to come to our place and hook us up in person.  It also took a long time to figure out our Bell Express-Vu for TV, but Greg managed that too, after a few days.  It's all good.  We have TV and internet; two things to get us through a long and cold winter!

The kids are settling in nicely.  They have been attending their Inuvialuctin (I think that's how you spell it) classes at school, and learning how to say a few words here and there.  On Fridays, they play traditional games as well as dance.  The Language room is beside me, and I love to hear the drumming coming through the walls of my classroom.  We have been working on the referral for Patrick's speech therapy which seems to happen much faster in the north than in Southern Ontario, and at home, we hope to have unpacked the majority of our boxes this weekend.

Once we are unpacked, I will take pictures to show of our house.  It is such a great house,  so long as we can keep the heat regulated.  We have learned to keep the wood fire burning no mater what the temperature, although I think any nice, warmer days are past us now.  The elders are saying that the fall rains and winds are upon us now, and although the sun may shine, the temperatures will remain colder.  We have been in our winter coats already some days, and others our warm, fall jackets.  Either way, you can't go outside in just a sweater.  The wind blows right through you!

The other way to tell that fall is here is that the Arctic Ocean water levels rise.  When we first arrived the water was way out.  You could walk across a driftwood laden beach to meet it, and the waters were calm and blue.  Now, it mostly has whitecaps on it, and the rough waters come further inland.  The water has almost reached the road that wraps around the ocean by our house, and although it comes right up to the road, the road is built up high enough that it won't get flooded, or at least nobody seems concerned about it. I myself find it alarming to see the ocean 2 feet by my vehicle! Ah, but these are the lessons we need to learn, right?

So, we have learned to keep an eye on our house water supply, that internet and satellite TV are a huge hassle to set up (especially when you require a technician visit), hospital and health issues are quick to be dealt with, the way to stay warm in our house is to have a wood fire burning constantly and keep the furnace set at about 75F, and that it is perfectly natural to have an angry, navy blue Arctic Ocean nipping at my tires while I drive along the road.  I have learned much more about the students of the school, who have hearts of gold for the most part.  Of course, for those of you who are teachers, you also know about the high learning curve of a first year teacher, so add that on to my experiences, and you see why this past week has been overwhelming!  Top it off with a head/chest cold, cold weather, and running out into the community after school to various offices and buildings to gather the information we have had to gather in order to proceed with our settling in process, and that just puts me over the top for now.

I know that things will settle down.  They have to!  We had our honeymoon while we were driving across Canada, and it was wonderful.  It was the rest and relaxation we needed in order to gain the strength to settle in here....the calm before the blizzard so to speak!

I will blog some more later this weekend, once I take some more pictures of the community to share. Thank you to all of you who have requested more entries, who have gone into as Kari put it, "blog withdrawal".  I am committed to this blog just our hearts are committed to you, all our friends and family.  We have definitely all had our moments this week when we have pined for you, but reading your expressions of love, encouragement, and support has kept us going, and we want to thank you for this.  This just proves that you really aren't very far away from us at all.

A Matter of Water

A Matter of Water

It is Monday morning. We do not have any water. We have not had any water since Sunday afternoon. We are on the tail end of a long weekend, and the people to whom we report this issue work for the local government and are therefore enjoying their Labour Day, water-full weekend. Although we may be suffering today, it is actually my fault. Here's why....

Every house in Tuk has a large water tank somewhere inside, usually around the furnace and the plumbing. Ours is taller than me, about 6 feet high, and about 4 feet wide and I'd say 6 feet long. There is a truck that comes by and fills your water tank, followed by the truck that comes in right behind it and removes your sewage. You can decide how frequently you want water and/or sewage removal based on your family's needs. The most frequent plan is a daily delivery/removal but you can tailor your service based on your needs, from every other day to twice a week down to once a week. For a family of five, the daily service is what was recommended for us by Rebecca, the woman whose house we're renting. She also told me that she had daily service.

I mentioned a while back that while we were in Whitehorse, we had the chance to meet up with Rebecca and her family, because she has moved there to go to Teacher's College and we were passing through on our way North. Anyway, she said that she had called the Hamlet (this is what the municipal building and services are referred to by the locals) and made arrangements to switch our names on the account. I thought she had meant that she had successfully switched our names and that we would continue to receive daily water/sewage. I also saw the water delivery/sewer removal trucks coming around our street the day after we arrived. I was busy by the time they came closer to our house and I heard a funny noise and figured that the trucks were doing their business at our house, and thought nothing of it. Actually, it was the furnace turning on and working super hard, which caused the hot water tank to go on and fill up a bit from the tank. This is a familiar noise now, but at the time I had no idea what it was. In actual fact the truck missed us completely and went on down the road.

This means we have not had any water in our house since we arrived on Tuesday. We are coming up on a week now! Our land lady, Maureen, Rebecca's mom, warned us of the obnoxious sound the hot water tank makes when it is trying to refill from the tank when the water level is below the suction line. There we were on Sunday morning and I was trying to get hot water from the sink to wash dishes when out of the blue it sounded like a herd of elephants running through the furnace/laundry room and out into the living room! We ran in and sure enough, there was the hot water tank trying to refill from the water tank, which was below the suction line. Darn! Greg turned off our water, and went out to buy some drinking water to get us through the remainder of the weekend. We will have to wait to wash our clothes (we will have accumulated about 3 loads of laundry by the end of today) and as of last night we have been putting our dirty dishes in the dishwasher. By tomorrow we will need to use the dishwasher but by then we'll be up and running. We all need to shower, but we were told by some of the teachers yesterday that when they learned their water lesson the hard way they came and showered at the school because the gym washrooms have showers.

The most disgusting thing is the toilet but I will not alert your noses to those smells. Suffice to say the bathroom stinks and it's going to take more than a few gallons of water to fill the tank in the toilet enough to be able to flush it. Since a gallon of water is $13, we'll suffer with the smell. That's why you close the door when you're using it anyway! We also had the ingenious idea of taking our pitchers and water bottles to the school for refilling, but we really need the water for drinking, and without our van at the moment, the walking back and forth to the school to refill water bottles is ridiculous.

This really stinks, both literally and figuratively! At least the only thing really bothered here, besides our delicate noses, is our pride. We weren't here a week and we already have learned about an aspect of life in Tuk the hard way. My prep time is first thing in the morning, and you can bet I will be calling the Hamlet to schedule daily delivery/removal. When Greg was telling some of the teachers about what happened, they all chuckled and said that it only took once to be without water before you became super vigilant, and believe me, with the smell in our bathroom at the moment, lesson learned!

UPDATE:

Since the writing of this epistle early this morning, the water crisis has been solved.  The water truck was out doing deliveries this morning and Greg flagged the gentleman down and explained our dilemma.  After a chuckle, the guy happily filled our tank for us.  When the tank is being filled, it sounds like an enormous bath is being drawn in your living room!  It's super loud - impossible to miss, now that we know what it sounds like. It was definitely music to our ears!  We all ran to flush the toilet, and then I hopped in the shower and did a load of laundry right away. Everyone else is going to be showering tonight, too.  Thank goodness! Of course, I still need to call the Hamlet tomorrow morning...no need to experience that again!