HALLOWEEN!

Happy Halloweeeeeeeen! We had a great Halloween weekend here. On Friday Kalina and Tom had people over for a little pre-halloween party. On Saturday it was our lovely party! Everything went really well! No big mishaps. Here is a group shot of most of our friends haha:

Here is one of my roommate and I. She is the black swan and I'm hurricane Katrina but it's hard to see the hurricane part:

There's a few more on Facebook for people to browse but not that many yet. People are slow to post pictures sometimes.. I know I always am! There isn't a whole lot else that's going on here lately. My finger is officially infected again.. surprise surprise! It's windy/snowy/borderline cold with nicer times mixed in! CHRISTMAS IS COMINGGGGG :)!

SNOW!

Lots of snow up here... well not lots but it has been snowing a lot in the past two days. It warmed up a bit today and melted quite a bit and now it is snowing again and freezing the water... the roads are very slippery. A vehicle actually rolled this morning on the main road. Not often you hear sirens up here at 7am. I have more pictures :):

The sunrise yesterday morning :):

On the way to work yesterday morning @ 8:30am. Yep it's still dark-ish!

First snowmobile tracks of the year. They came pretty close to hitting me! Good thing they weren't going too fast:

Some ravens in the trees:

Another raven picture:

My crazy purple tongue! Alex thinks I should go for Halloween as a purple tongued rat girl... I should have never told him Jordon's nickname for me because he loves calling me that now!

Back to the doctor tomorrow :). I have tomorrow afternoon off and I'm so excited. Our building has reno's being done and I'm being displaced from the building until my office is redone! Should be interesting! I'll still be there lots obviously. Our Halloween party is Saturday and it should be a fabulous turn out. We are going to decorate and finally get our place in order. Lots of jello shooters and Halloween baking! You all are invited! I'll take lots of pictures because I'll be sober... one of two sober people if Alex's roomie is coming.

On Saturday my roommate and I are carving pumpkins! I am convincing Alex to do it too as he has never carved a pumpkin before! He will be hooked and will carve a pumpkin every year to make up for all the years he missed!

Ok that's all for now... I'm going to go look through the Wish Book! There is a post below this explaing it :)!

Goodnight!

Wish Book

I got the WISH BOOK! Well my roomie got it and I never really realized how exciting it is to get a sears catalogue in a small town. Growing up it was awesome.. since Trail really doesn't have any decent stores. It was really like Santa gave you a book to pick toys out of. I wonder what growing up in a city would have been like? Diane did you get excited by the Sears Wish Book? HAHA. Ok I'm going to write another post then pick out some toys for Christmas! LESS THAN TWO MONTHS TIL SANTA GETS HERE :)! (Mom that means that I still get Santa presents because my previous sentence proves that I still believe in Santa!)

Long time since I posted anything! I'm still sick.. surprise surprise, so I've been a bit under the weather.

There really hasn't been much to write about! Days are getting colder, days are getting shorter but everyone is experiencing that :). It's getting into freezing temperatures but at the moment it's 2 or 3 degrees out. I tried out my jacket this weekend even though it's not really that cold yet. I love it! The jackets nickname is Pepto Bismol... they are identical colours. My boots came in too but I ordered the wrong colour.. too bad it was my own fault haha.

I went grocery shopping today. I was disappointed that they didn't have any bananas... however they did have radishes! I haven't seen those things in awhile. I'm sure they have had some in but I haven't seen them.

Here are some pictures from Friday. I know I've been slacking on them since I lost my camera.

This is myself, Vina and Kalina:

This is Curtis and Kalina playing beer pong. Kalina is getting feisty!

This is Sunny, Jeff & Vina. Sunny is from Kenya and invited us to his beach house there. How sweet of a trip would that be?

Here is Alex and his roommate Adam (one of the guys that lived in PG at the same time as me) peeling apples for the apple crisp that I made for Thanksgiving!

That's all I got for pictures! There should be lots after next weekend. I don't know if I mentioned it before but Meagan and I are having the Halloween party for our group. We decided this a month ago thinking I'd be drinking again but I'll probs be sober for our party haha. At least I can enjoy all the stupid stuff that people will end up doing. For the past couple weekends people have been asking me if I'm preggers... they are serious too haha... I'm definitely not.

I should probably go study :)!

Random Thoughts:

I ordered stuff from Sears (bookcases and a vacuum) at the beginning of the month. Estimated delivery date? October 28th lol. Then my roommate ordered a bed from Sears... EDD? Next week and she ordered it a couple days ago. Stupid Sears. Hopefully they come at the same time.

Interesting stuff about health care up north. Down south it takes FOREVER to get into see specialists. Often over a year to get into see an ortho surgeon. Up here I was referred to one to get an injection and I saw him yesterday. Yep it took less than 2 months. I am also going to be seeing a ENT (ears, nose throat) and internal med. specialists and it shouldn't be more than a month. Crazy fast. I think I'll stay up north :)!

Ice Pilots NWT premiered for the season yesterday. It's up on the internet today. Gives a glimpse into life in the north. It features Yellowknife and Hay River (my birth place). The guy who runs Buffalo, "Buffalo Joe" used to live in Smith for a long time.

Speaking of airplanes.. I found this kind of funny. Because the pilots fly only when it's light out for so many months they have to do what's called night circuits. Basically when it gets dark they have to take off and land multiple times in a row at night to get used to it again. Tonight Alex is doing his and he has to do five take offs and landings. Pretty soon they'll almost solely be flying in the dark.

It is starting to get colder and darker. It's dark when I get up and starts getting dark when I get home, depending on how overcast it is. There was tons of frost this morning and my friend Kalina was telling me that were suppose to be getting snow this weekend. Weather reports never seem that accurate up here though.

Kalina, Katrina, Katerina, Katalina. It's almost a rarity for someone to call me by the right name up here. Everyone gets Kalina and I confused. It happens all the time. Everyone laughs about it a lot so we came up with a combined name... Katalina. Katerina is a lady who works for the health authority as well. It's almost daily that people call me Katerina. All you can do is laugh about it!

It looks like my contract will be extended. We are still waiting for it to be official but my boss came and asked me what my plans were today. She wanted to know if I will take the extended contract. I was telling her how I was worried about being locked into a contract in case another position opened up and apparently it's not a problem. She said I would just have to get permission from her and the CEO to apply and that it wouldn't be an issue. I just didn't want to be stranded in May and be disappointed that I couldn't apply for any openings that might come up that are permanent. Great news that that won't be the case :)!

Here is something random. There is a girl who is a teacher who moved up here from the states although she is Canadian. I found out at our Smith Family Turkey Dinner that she is actually up here to save money to go back to school to do the same thing I want to do. She is also taking the prereqs to apply to a program like me and she is also planning on doing it in the states. Pretty random and sweet!

Finally, a very big, huge CONGRATS to Jo and Andrew on their beautiful baby girl :)! I'm sooooo excited to meet that little munchkin!

That is all for now :)!

Since this seems to be a common theme to start my posts off with... let's start with the bad news. No plane crashes, just car accidents involving moose. A friend of ours up here passed away on Thursday night after hitting a moose :(. Greg was driving to Canmore and hit the moose after High Level. Very sad. We were hanging out with him last Friday. He worked at the college and was from Alberta. He was very known for being a creeper on the girls in the nicest possible way. I met him my first week up here at the grocery store when we ended up in the same aisle a few times. With him recognizing that I was new in town thought the best way to make me feel welcome is to accuse me of stalking him in the grocery store. Every aisle he would say more and more and when we ended up in the same check out he asked me how I was liking town and what not. Looking on comments on his Facebook so many people are commenting on all the lame pickup lines they learned from him haha! My roommate Meagan had the claim to fame that she was the only girl in Smith to scare Greg off and now she has to write the newspaper story on his death. The joys of living in a small town!

From Thanksgiving on, we're hoping for only rainbows and cupcakes up here! Yesterday we had a big Smith family thanksgiving dinner at our friend Lisa's. 13 of us piled into her little place and it was a feast and a half. On Friday it was one of the boy's birthday so we celebrated. I celebrated with coffee and everyone else celebrated with copious amounts of booze. Still trying to fight off my infection.. I'm on day three of three of the drug that's awful for your liver. the regular dose is 1 pill and that's it and mine still isn't gone. Fingers crossed that this last one does the trick. When I went back on Friday I found out that I most likely have strep on top of my other mouth infection and I also have a growth on my tonsil. It looks like a sideways uvula (dangly thing in back of the throat). I can't have antibiotics for the strep until it's confirmed through the lab because my immune system hates me. My good health news is that my finger is still looking like a great finger :)!

Ok back to cleaning :).

Well let's start with the sad news. Another plane crash. Yep that's right, four in less than 6 weeks, not including Reno. The one people may not have heard about is a man who was flying solo went down and wandered from his plane up here but they found him alive and well. The one yesterday is pretty tragic. Another pilot and passenger dead, two survivors. Apparently it's harder to fly up here between the seasons but still this is getting out of hand!

In happy news, we had a great weekend here. There was the International Travelling Lute Festival lol. We went to it, it was at the church and yes it's lute not flute. It was really good but really long. After that there was a celebration for Smith's 45th birthday. There were some amazing fireworks and birthday cake for the town. There was also free skating during the day and it was someone's b-day here so we went to bonfire after the fireworks. Here is an Iphone pic of the fireworks... turned out really well:

The fireworks lasted quite a long time. Very wonderful for such a small little town.

On Friday night we had a great night. Went to a friends place, then to the bar, then to an after party at another friends place complete with a bonfire! I stayed sober (yay me) for the third week in a row. It was still tons of fun. We got home after 4 but heard the next day that a friend tried to break up a fight at the bonfire that some randoms started (normally it's just friends but rando's showed up) and he got pushed into the fire. His arm was burned. Pretty crappy.

Other sad Smith news. This is typically what we hear about but in the past couple weeks there were some other crappy stuff going on. A man broke into a house and raped a girl and was on the loose in town for about a week. He had previously done the same thing and was released from jail after a few years. He turned himself in thankfully. Also someone stole a van from our Healthy Babies program in town and another building was broken into and vandalized the same night.

Here's a nice picture of a fish that Alex caught when we were fishing. Making this post end on a cheery note :). We caught lots of fish this time but let them all go because we're nice people:

Fishing season is almost done. It's getting pretty cold up here and darker too. It was 3 degrees when I woke up the other day. We're starting to lose a lot of light. Thankfully Diane is going to come visit me in the dark around my birthday and I'm sooooo sooo excited! I'm still trying to figure out Christmas plans. We have a pretty sweet deal with holidays and what not. On top of all our vacation time we get 5 mandatory days that we have to take each year (vacation can be carried over). If you take these 5 days between certain dates (in the winter) you get bonus days off. Basically I could take 2 weeks off and not really use any vacay time.

For Thanksgiving one of our friends is having a little Fort Smith family feast which is really nice of her. Gotta love Smith! My roomie moved out and I have another in the process of moving in. The new reporter for the newspaper. Very exciting to unpack my stuff. It's like shopping because I haven't seen anything since I was in PG. Speaking of PG I still think it's weird that Alex's roomie and another pilot and myself all lived in PG at the same time and ended up in Smith in being friends. I should get a PG friend picture to post. Unfortunately I lost my camera during the GloBall Tourney so I'll have to order a new one. Back to shopping; even though I am unpacking I still wanna go shopping.

I KNOW WHAT I'M BEING FOR HALLOWEEN! It took forever to think of and I don't know why I didn't think of this previous years but I'm going to be Hurricane Katrina. Oh yeah, I'm stoked!

Ok that's all for now. I'm just delaying unpacking! If anyone has bookshelves, a pantry (very small kitchen), a vacuum, side tables, a dresser, and a desk (I think I've found one) that they want to ship up to me... please feel free to do so. People might have thought I was crazy for bringing up so much stuff but there's still stuff that is necessary.

Ok that's really it.

Byebye!