Str8 Up Krazies

It’s been a pretty busy few weeks with a lot of ups and downs. Ender and I have the day off from school because of a power outage (which has since been fixed at least for the teacher houses) and are trying to get the house back in order.  But let’s start this update with the positives shall we.

The Ups

 

The spoils.

 We got a mean amount of treat making done for a bake sale for the high school. Jenn is an amazing baker and gets pretty excited when experimenting with new recipes. She tried out pumpkin cinnamon rolls and they were pretty delicious. I stuck with my tried and tested banana bread for the bake sale. There is something comforting about being able to bake a cake from scratch without a recipe and have it turn out. I’m sure that over the winter months that will become true with a number of recipes.

Last week we attended Circles of Knowledge and Practices Conference in Winnipeg hosted by MFNERC, meant to provide resources for teaching Language Arts and Math to First Nations students as well as to promote partnerships in education. Some parts of the conference were very informative and it was nice to see other teachers from other communities across Manitoba. I really appreciated what the keynote speaker Sylvia McAdam Saysewahum has to say about Indigenous Nationhood and raising students to be lawful citizens for their respective Nations. However not being an Indigenous Canadian citizen it’s difficult to know how to approach that topic in school especially in a community like Garden Hill which in recent years has become resistant to their heritage and traditional cultural practices. 

photos by Chrissy Poitras of Spark Box Studio

The conference also gave us the opportunity to make a quick visit home to Picton to celebrate our friends Tamara and Adrian’s wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony and a pretty awesome reception and we spent the night dancing, sipping scotch and eating poutine. The following day we caught up with our friends Kyle, Chrissy , Morgan and Chris, and then later had dinner with the newlyweds. Unfortunately when you are on borrowed time, you miss out on some awesome things, including when your friends decide to celebrate birthdays by lighting pianos on fire.

The Downs

At least we got some decorations up!

Our time of good fortune pretty much ends there. On the way back into Belleville we received a text informing us our house back in Garden Hill had been broken into. We had been warned about break ins and made sure to pack up anything of value and stow it in less than obvious places but we did lose some food, drugs, toothpaste and Ender’s camera as well as general feelings of security. If it’s never happened to you it’s a pretty terrible feeling to have your home broken into.  Even if you haven’t lost much (they appear to have been in and out pretty quickly) your personal space has still been violated. We have since boarded up the door that was kicked in and added additional locks to the door we will continue to use.

Unfortunetly bad luck comes in threes. Halfway through the school day power went out due to a line breaking out at Oxford House and because of a storm they were unable to get someone flown in to repair it until this morning. Water was out too until the evening and when it came back on we all rushed inside to fill containers just in case it shut off again. At this time our water heater exploded and split down the back and we had a pretty frantic hour stopping and cleaning up the water while we tried to contact someone from Operations and Maintenance. We are now waiting for a replacement water heater which will hopefully get here before freezing pipes become a problem.

We are lucky to have good friends here to help us out when our lives fall apart. In the past few days we’ve been given cookies and coffee, lent mops and towels and have still managed to try and relax and play cards by LED night bug light through all of this. It’s been a rough week but if we can come out of this alive we should have a few good stories to laugh about over coffee when we’re fifty.

A feast, a rescue and an aurora.

Happy Thanksgiving fellow harvest celebrating European descent readers! Last night we joined in on a potluck feast where there was turkey, potatoes, stuffing and pies and we all ate until bursting.

yum!

The people of Garden Hill seem to be divided on whether or not they celebrate thanksgiving. Some families do, likely because of the strong Christian associations the holiday has, and some families do not because it is not an Oji- Cree holiday.  In some ways, being here is like being back in Scotland where we took for granted that not everyone celebrates the same things we do.

Alex and I contributed apple pies to the potluck. I decided to dress them up a bit for the amusement of our host Rachel who is a math teacher. 

 before

after

After dinner we played a game called Werewolves which is you’ve played Mafia you’ll understand. We were first introduced to this game by our friend Tamara in Ontario and we have both been enjoying the opportunity to play it again here. 

Sheriff Lesley

 

We got back to our house around midnight and while we were getting ready for bed Alex heard someone calling for help outside and took off to go and see if he could help. Apparently some kids were playing in the woods (it’s not uncommon here for children to be out until 3 am on their own) and one girl became lost. In the end security was able to find her and get her home. 

Alex took off pretty quickly and though I got dressed and went outside intending to follow him I ended up hanging back when I realised he had the only key. While I waited for him outside I saw something out of the corner of my eye and looked up to witnessed my first ever aurora. It cut a dancing pale green line from one end of the sky to the other which occasionally would then become excited with purple flashed. It was by far one of the most bewilderingly beautiful things I have ever seen. I grabbed my camera but it did a poor job of recording the actual colours of the lights. Alex got back from the woods and assured me that the girl was alright so we stayed outside to watch the aurora until it died down. Apparently it’s most active in October and April so I anticipate a few more late nights over the next few days.

 

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And in case anyone is interested, here are the ingredients I used (roughly speaking) for the pies. I also don’t mix the apples with the filling, rather layer the two when I fill the pie because I find it's less messy and the results are the same. The trick with the pie crust is to keep the dough cold so the butter doesn't melt.

Crust

1 1/3 flour

¼ cup shortening

¼ unsalted butter

1tsp kosher or coarse gain salt

3 tblsp ice water

Filling

4-6 apples a mix of sweet and tart

Lemon juice

½ (ish?) brown sugar and white sugar

Tblsp flour

cinnamon

Pinch salt

Butter

Vanilla if it’s handy (it was not)

Egg wash  and white sugar for glaze

375F for 1 hour.

Parachutes, maps and snow.

All the leaves are gone and the sky is grey.

Apparently the further north you go, the shorter fall is. We had all of two weeks of autumn before the cold weather hit and all the leaves fell from the trees.  Its bleak and grey no without the yellow birch leaves. It already feels like November is here and yesterday we even got some snow!

The highschool... with snow.

Earlier this week we had a few warm days. Our friends Jen and Alex (yeah we know) have a fire pit outside of their house where we can have cookouts. Sometimes they are potlucks and sometimes it’s just burgers and tea. Either way it’s nice to share a meal with other people, outside and by the fire.

 
Alex has been working on flight with his grade six classes. This week they made parachutes. The challenge was to create a design that wouldn’t kill their dinosaur or safari animal passenger. Some were more successful than others. The triceratops will be sadly missed.

My class is working on world geography. Longitude and latitude are proving to be difficult concepts but it’s grade 7 and we have all year so it should be fine. We are making a large map of the world that we should be able to interact with for all 5 subjects.  Also the bright colours will make the classroom much prettier!