End of March

It is late March and we are working away. We finished our 280th interview today, and have given out over 800 referral vouchers. We usually expect about a third (or sometimes one half) of the referrals to result in interviews, so we are pretty close to what we expected. With almost 300 done, we are breathing a sigh of relief. The method worked, more or less, and we are starting to feel like the minimum threshold has been crossed.

I took much of the day off thursday, just to catch up on things and to stay out of the office. Josh is back from Montreal, where he want for a couple of days to give a paper at McGill and get a little R and R. The husky dog (above) is Uppik, the dog that Josh is planning to adopt. Uppik means "bake apple", a kind of berry like fruit that grows low to the ground that folks here like for jams and sauces. On my day off I went out walking for a couple hours....to take some pictures and get a bit of exercise. In town, quite a few people are back from caribou hunting. The folks above got 7, which they were butcher when I walked by. They will freeze some, eat some, and give alot away....which is one of the things we are tracking in the interviews: who shares hunted meats with whom.

I walked up the hill behind town, and got up above the tree line, which is less than 100 meters above sea level here. Even though we are at a low lattitude, the geography of eastern Canada makes this a sub-arctic zone. The actually tree-line...the lattitude beyond which no trees will grow, is about 12 miles north and east of here, meaning that the climate is about the equivalent of the northern Coast of Canada around the Mackenzie Delta on the Arctic Ocean. Today, walking to work, the wind chill was still around -30 degrees. So much for March going "out like a lamb".

This last picture is looking down on the village from the hill, about 100 meters above the tree line. you can still make out the houses if you click on the picture and blow it up to a larger size. The wind up there was pretty strong, which made the snow a kind of ice sheet, and hard as a rock. The under packing is actually still pretty fresh, the surface has a harness that seems more the result of pressure than temperature. I have quite a few photos from the walk, but this seemed about enough for the moment. Today we are finishing up interviews for the week, and taking tomorrow off. If it gets a bit warmer, we may go for a ski...if not, I will find a book to hide out with. No gardening on the schedule for a while yet.