When in Wemindji...: January 2014

Wednesday 22 January 2014

Week One NDE (Near Death Experience) Free

Well folks, I made it. One whole week where I burned down nothing, kept my car on the road and managed to avoid dangerous situations by rarely leaving my classroom and/or home. While some may think that this form of hermitism borders on insane, it's the only thing that is keeping me from near death experiences so I'm cool with it!

Okay actually I did tempt the gods this weekend by setting, lighting and enjoying a fire in my wood-burning stove!! Yes! An actual on-purpose fire that stayed contained in its intended place, locked safely behind a door where smoke could exit out the appropriate path (the chimney) Ladies and gents, I had my first fire! No adults, children, pets or woks were damaged in the process.

It has gotten EXTREMELY cold here this week with temperatures (with windchill, and oh what a windchill there is) dipping below -40 regularly. This means that my car GROANS at start up in the mornings and the windshield is in a permanent state of frost. I have developed super-human abilities that allow me to see and drive through a variety of frosts and manage to make it to school without incident! Most would just let their cars warm up for 20 mins but at -40 and gas at $1.66/L I'd rather just put my 20/20 vision to good use.

On the health front there are some new developments. It seems that I may be getting sick AGAIN *cough I blame Monika cough* as with every breath I take I hear a teeny whistle. So either I'm getting another chest cold or my last flu was so epic I blew a hole in my lung from coughing and am in fact dying a slow and painful death. I'm going with the latter.

School is going well, we are powering through math and doing some fun reading comprehension activities for language arts. We have a ton of standardized testing as well as report cards coming down the tube so it'll be crunch time to get as much curriculum covered as possible. Sadly the tests and the curriculum do not coordinate so there are concepts and topics on the tests that the kids simply haven't learned or been exposed to in depth so that disappoints me. As much as I'd like to be able to cover all the material they will be tested on, I don't like the idea of "teaching to the test" and I simply don't have enough hours in a day to cover in the months preceding a test what I need an entire year to take to ensure they learn. So it's a hard one.

Otherwise teaching with Mama is going well, we are doing a lot of planning and team teaching which we and the kids are really enjoying! We are working on probability right now which is a lot fun, tons of predicting and experimenting an testing predictions with hands on materials.

Anyways I have to nurse my dying lungs and take an Advil for my leg which has been bothering me the last couple of days (may also be related to my impending death). Until next time!

Mama's first trip to the Maquatua Inn - the finest in Wemindji's culinary offerings!

Captured: Bobo's sick obsession with Carmonika.

There she is that gorgeous girl.

A sweet kiss or a tasty sniff??

Mama building the fire like a regular old Girl Scout.

Beautiful!

Skype date with the whole gang!

My mom's first watercolor!

Well said.

Monday 13 January 2014

Twisted Fire Starter

Once, just once I would like to complete a week without a near-death experience.

I try and live my life by a few basic principles. Treat others how you would like to be treated, sharing is caring, to each his own, yadda yadda. I am a realist but also a closet optimist and used to think that perhaps if I live my life trying to be a good person, I would recieve the same kind of karma in return in one form or another. I have given up all hope.

On Friday I helped celebrate Marsha's birthday with an evening of my specialty, Pad Thai. I had asked the ladies over for 6pm. I was using my prized electric wok - a beautiful piece of culinary equipment that was integral to my Pad Thai creation. I placed my wok on the stovetop to make use of the space and outlet. Well take a wild guess at what I did next!!! Yes ladies and gents, I then turned on the burner beneath the plastic wok base and burn baby burn it did! While I was rifling through my cupboards looking for essential ingredients, I suddenly smelled and saw thick black smoke clinging to the ceiling pouring from the HUGE FIRE on my stove.

I grabbed the wok with a tea towel as it quickly separated from the melting base, I had to save the chicken!! Chicken rescued, I turned my attention to the tall flames still bursting from the remaining plastic base and burner. I reached around and turned off the burner, ran to the cupboard for some tea towels and smothered the flames with the cloth. I would have used salt but that is expensive up here and I use it for homemade playdoh - clearly I have priorities.

It was once I smothered the flames that my guests arrived! Marsha was the first on the scene, running right into the kitchen, ready to fight fire! Carmen and Monika were quick to follow, all with mixed looks of horror and slight amusement on their faces. After we opened some windows, cleared out some smoke and dismantled all blaring fire alarms, I resumed cooking and managed to turn out a not-half-bad meal!

My dearest mother returned later that night after a social invitation of her own and saw the damage left behind by my careless actions! She rolled up her sleeves, asked for a butter knife, vim and whatever hardcore cleaning tools I owned. 3 Mr. Clean Magic Erasers later, my stovetop was as good as new! As Monika pointed out, mothers possess some kind of elbow grease that we mere mortals will never posses until we pop out a few of our own.

So after that jolly start to the weekend, I was busy with dinners and social events, leaving little time for prep but I managed to get some work done in the classroom! The weather was positively balmy hovering between -5 and -9 degrees. Today we had freezing rain which was a lovely departure from the FEET AND FEET of snow we have been receiving lately (did I mention someone stole my shovel?)

Aaaaaannnyywaaayyyyyyssss, a new week has begun and things are looking good productivity-wise. We are getting lots of practice writing short stories and doing tons of fun hands-on data management activities! The next few weeks are going to be busy with learning challenging concepts like inferencing and probability but I think my guys can handle it!

Stay tuned for tales of my next deadly adventure!

Tuesday 7 January 2014

The Road to Hell is Paved with ICE AND SNOW.

I am seriously considering never leaving my sweet little home in Wemindji ever again. I don't care that I can't go to Costco or Dollarama (my two favorite places on the entire planet) or go to movies, the mall or restaurants. I don't care! All I care about is avoiding hitting caribou and making sure my van stays on the road. More to follow.

Christmas break was lovely. The way back, not so lovely. My mom and I left mid day on Friday with a van over packed with goodies and treasures (avocados, Tassimo discs and lemon juice). We had to ship a few bulky items due to our extreme over-packing skills, but once that was taken care of we were on the road... after returning for my mother's forgotten pillow - an essential item!

Pulling out of the Tim Horton's in Oakville, I was surprised when checking my blind spot to see dear sweet Carmonika at my shoulder! The darling babe had escaped from her cage (a event that would repeat many times over the course of the trip) and was eager to share in the driving! Well thanks Carmonika but you need to at least have your learner's permit before I can let you take the wheel of my white dude magnet.

So we were off - a beautiful day for a drive, clear skies and clear roads - even after a snowstorm the day before. My mom and I shared the driving up to Amos and overall it was a pretty nice day. Bobo was an excellent passenger, making himself comfortable on my mother's memory foam pillow and yoga back support pillow. Most humans don't know this kind of luxury! So anyways we made it to Amos around 9pm, filled up the car with gas, found the hotel and hit the hay!

The next morning we were up bright and early and hit the road after meeting up with our convoy buddies Carmen and Brandi, Shauna and Marsha and her kids! Timmies in the cup holders (my last giant hot chocolate for 4 months in hand) and we were off! Traveling in a convoy this big presented a few issues such as communication and snow blow back. I was at the back of this convoy and was surprised and scared by all the snow blown back by the 3 cars I was following which made visibility nil. I tried not to follow too close but to put enough distance between myself and Marsha (who I was following) to be able to see clearly meant losing sight of her all together, so I drove as safely and cautiously as I could.

We had been hearing reports of very low temperatures in our area which had shut down the power at KM381 which meant no gas from Matagami to home. Most cars wouldn't make it that far without getting very close to empty (600+km) so we were worried that we'd have to fill up jerry cans and refill on the road somewhere. Luckily, power was back at 381 by the time we reached it but something had happened to the plumbing so that meant no indoor bathrooms. I say that like there were outdoor bathrooms we could use as an alternative. How silly. There were no outdoor bathrooms either! So I resorted to grabbing a handful of napkins from the cafeteria, getting a quick "how to" on outdoor peeing from Shauna and headed to the nearest area of privacy. A snowplow. So there I was, squatting in the shovel of a snowplow in frigid -40 temperatures, high winds - all modesty and humility erased with each gust of cold wind upon my exposed lady parts.

The skies were darkening at around 4pm and we needed to hustle if we wanted to spend the least amount of time on the access road and James Bay Highway in the dark as possible. We drove for about an hour before the scariest moment of my life happened. Get your Depends on people. This is one for the record books. Driving no faster than 75km/hr on a road usually traveled at minimum 120km/hr I suddenly spun out and found myself with my back end hanging off the edge of a steep embankment. Some quick maneuvering on my part saved us from sliding full on over the edge but we were definitely stuck. We tried in vain for a few minutes to drive out but the back passenger tire was so deep in the snow at a weird angle I was going nowhere, even with all-wheel drive. At this point the convoy hadn't noticed that I was missing and I was just a LITTLE worried. We got out of the car and stood there assessing the event and what to do next. The roads were pretty quiet that day so I wasn't too hopeful that we would be rescued quickly, but I knew that eventually the convoy would notice I was no longer in back and turn around to find me. Perhaps 5-10 minutes after going off the road, a pair of Cree hunters from Ouje Bougoumou (a Cree community about 9 hours south east from Wemindji) saw us and pulled over. I have to tell you, there is nothing like the feeling of having two capable people with the tools and know-how coming to your rescue. They at first tried to push my van out, but with the amount of crap I had in there, that was impossible. So, they unhitched their caribou- and ptarmigan-loaded trailer and attached ropes to the undercarriage of my van and PULLED ME OUT OF THE DITCH! My mom and I literally jumped for joy and sang these gentlemen (Ron and Emanuel) their praises and we were off!!! Honestly, we couldn't have had better luck in that situation. It was cold, dark and we were of course out of cell phone range. If it were not for these guys, who knows how long we could have been out there without the tools or manpower necessary to pull us out of the ditch. I have never been so scared in my entire life as I was when we were sliding off the road but we were certainly extremely lucky to escape unharmed and with my van in perfect condition. Some of my colleagues were not so lucky and it is safe to say that Christmas is a terrible time to drive and I may never do it again haha!

So anyways, we were on our way and about 5 minutes later ran into a herd of caribou and almost hit one. If I didn't have high blood pressure and white hair before, I sure did now! So that was that and again we drove on. About 20 minutes after that we ran into our convoy who had turned around in search of us! When they heard about what happened, my friends were visibly shaken and we all agreed to drive no faster than 50 km/hr on the access road which was A-OK with me. We made it home after about 12 total hours of driving (usually the drive from Amos to Wemindji takes about 8-9) and I was POOPED. We unpacked the car, built some Ikea furniture and hit the sack.

My mom and I spent the next day (Sunday) getting organized and familiarizing her with her new classroom. If you don't already know, my mom is joining me in Wemindji to teach Grade 2 as my teaching partner Stacy recovers on medical leave for the next 3 months. So far the kids have been as expected for her, testing the waters and whatnot, but my mom has been a real trooper and is learning as much as she can as quickly as she can as she is thrown into teaching without experience. I have to say I am very proud of her so far and I know things will only continue to improve! I know we are going to have a lot of fun together over the next few months.

Anyways, even though I spent my entire Christmas break sleeping off sickness, I still manage to feel extremely exhausted upon arrival. I am not quite back into my normal routine but am looking forward to that too. For now I am busy helping my mom become familiar with her classroom and routine and trying to give her teaching and classroom management tips that hopefully will ease the transition for both her and the kids. Wish us luck as we embark on this journey! Ps did I mention I am never leaving Wemindji again?