All over the place

It's Friday evening, the pig is fed, the dogs are well fed (more on that later), and we are winding down after a busy week, with a bottle of wine, a tasty stir fry, and some great jazz courtesy of the CBC.

Colin's been juggling a few jobs lately, and added a new one today- working at a fish farm! He spend the day learning the ropes of farming and processing Arctic Char, and came home with an enormous frozen block the size of a sofa cushion. The dogs could tell what it was way before I could... fish bits! The fish farm sells the leftover fish parts that humans don't want, and local mushers pick them up for dog food. It's a perk of this job to bring the blocks or bits home for free, so on the way home we picked up a 5.5 cubic foot freezer- a dedicated freezer for dog food! No more chicken heads or fish spines staring out at us as we open our fridge freezer to get the edamame or cranberries. Woo hoo! Colin axed the block up into single servings, and we got the new freezer up and running outside on our back deck. I never thought of having an appliance outdoors before coming here, but apparently it's a normal thing to do, and pretty soon the freezing temperatures will allow us to unplug the unit and enjoy the extra food storage space without the electricity usage!



It was great fun watching the dogs chow down on the Char chunks, and there are no photos for a good reason... it was a really long and drawn-out process! There was no action to capture- they just focused on the task of licking up every molecule of fish. It usually takes them about 30 seconds to clean their bowls of dog chow, but they were working on the fish for at least 40 minutes. They both had their heads down in the bowls, and were pushing them around the entire pen, bonking into things and flipping the bowls over and over, making sure every surface was checked.

Tomorrow we're at the Mt Lorne Community Centre for a Work Bee, which will hopefully be as wholesome as it sounds. There are opportunities to paint, clear trails and fix up various things, and it will be Colin's first chance to work as the Community Centre's Maintenance person, a 20-hour/week job that he recently landed.  It seems that Colin has found himself another job that gives me the opportunity to get involved too, just like at FRW. Tomorrow evening, we'll be at a friend's place, enjoying a curry dinner, and finding out whether we have any talent for the game of Risk. We'll keep you posted on that.

From this week's reading, here are a few things to pass along:

An interesting unidentified photograph

THE COLOURFUL FIVE PER CENT SCRAPBOOK

By Jim Robb

Wednesday October 5, 2011

   The people in this photograph are unidentified. This interesting picture arrived with a batch of negatives from Dawson City that once belonged to an early-day resident of the Klondike. Where it was taken and who the photographer was are not known.

It appears to be a family gathering.

If you have a clue as to who the people in the photograph are, please write to me c/o the News.

I believe the lady in the centre of the photograph lived around Whitehorse in the 1950s and ‘60s. I’m sure I’ve seen her before.

Photograph from the Jim Robb Collection.

Anyone with information about this subject, please write Jim Robb: The Colourful Five Per Cent Scrapbook - Can You Identify? c/o the Yukon News, 211 Wood Street, Whitehorse, Yukon, Y1A 2E4, or email through the News website, http://www.yukon-news.com.

From the Yukoner Magazine, one of our new favourite bathroom reads:

"In the early 1930s, the population of Whitehorse numbered about 500 people. Demand for electricity was mostly commercial and industrial. Residential use was chiefly limited to powering electric lights and radios.

It was that backbreaking, loathsome task- the family wash- that was the first domestic chose to be mechanized. Electrically driven washtubs with mechanical beater arms began to appear in Whitehorse. Soon after came the electric iron.

To accomodate these popular new devices, the Yukon Electrical Company was obliged to make electricity available- for the first time- on Monday mornings for washing, and on Tuesday mornings for ironing. Such was the power of laundry."
(from a Yukon Electrical Company Ltd ad) 

Love Lauren

PS- I just have to make sure that you have seen these little videos already. Here's one of them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNdO-hRQgqg