First of all, and most importantly, I’d like to introduce you to my niece Charlotte:
She was 8 lbs 11 oz, born 15 March 2011 at 2350.
I was there for the birth:
Okay, so I wasn’t there there. But I was watching, thanks to Skype and Andrea’s phone!
Andrew met Charlotte in the hospital.
Finally, Charlotte sleeping at home:
She’s absolutely perfect and I can’t wait to meet her. She’ll be two months old by then! I’m so happy for Jaime and Dave, they have a beautiful family. <3
Tomorrow I will have been in Yellowknife for a full month. It’s hard to believe; it feels like so much longer yet it seems like I just got here. I’m almost (if not fully) adjusted to OBS and the routine there, and I take two pairs (two moms, two babies) each shift. It’s a pretty quiet unit for the most part, which I find I have to get used to. I’m used to chaos in the morning, and calm in the afternoon. The workload on this unit is pretty even all day, unless something urgent comes up. It’s great, because we get plenty of time for charting, which is important here because many things are double or triple charted. As a student that’s hard to get used to, because that’s two or three places you have to remember to chart things. One is hard enough!
My snowmobile has been out of commission for a few days after the starter broke on it. Chris fixed the starter, and then the engine seized. He and Erick spent hours trying to get the cylinder and piston apart, and when they finally did, the piston had a giant crack straight down it. Apparently that’s bad, and rare. Luckily Chris had an extra piston for my sled that he happened to buy on eBay months ago, “just in case”. The guys got the engine put back together, and she was alive again. We celebrated the rebirth of the Bravo by sledding to a bonfire on Yellowknife River. The next day the sled was popping and making all kinds of racket, which Chris diagnosed as a crusty spark plug and something to do with the carburetor. He fixed it again, and now it runs like a champ… just in time for the snow to melt.
We’ve had some crazy weather the past couple days, in a warm, hovering-around-0°C kind of way. The roads are bare, the snow is melting, and everything is wet. I went outside in a tank top to take the garbage out and didn’t freeze to death! Going from -40° to -2° is quite a change, and one that I will welcome with open arms. I’ll miss the sled.. but Chris started working on his car today. It’s been knocked out since the fall, parked and abandoned at Chris’s work. He saw no point in fixing it in the dead of winter, so was waiting for warmer temperatures. He’s planning on working on the car over the next two days. The tinkering, fixing and repairing never seems to end around here.
So, I did something bad today and downloaded a file from a website. This prompted the computer to restart and within 30 seconds a vicious virus made its way through the computer. I tried restarting four times, restoring three times, and even called my resident on-call nerd Joe (who had his nerd friend Adam with him) to no avail. Finally I called a cab and took it back to Staples. They swapped the tower and sent me happily on my way. I called a cab to get home and sat the open-box computer in the back seat. I told the driver I liked his car, and we chatted about the weather. Suddenly a car passed us and flew through an enormous puddle, sending a tsunami of mud over the car and in the opened sunroof. I was soaked, the driver was soaked, the car was soaked, and the new computer was soaked. I was so pissed off I didn’t even pay the guy. I know it’s not his fault but, sorry, I’m not about to pay for a service where I wound up covered in muddy water with a potentially ruined computer. That $10 is going toward dry cleaning my freshly-muddied coat. I came inside and wiped the computer off, and – voila – she worked like a charm. Meanwhile, I walked around the house for a few hours before noticing the chunks of mud on my face and hair. Niiice!
