Baby its cold out here!

I realize that my last post was a little scattered - satallite internet is unreliable and I just wanted to get something up! Plus, I may have been a little crazy after a few days of work.

For those of you who don't see me on a regular basis, I finally started a "real" job at the begining of January as a future geophysicist. For the first two weeks I mostly did safety training and perfected my office wardrobe. Then for the past 9 days or so I've been in Fort MacMurray collecting data for an exploration project. Its a far cry from office work, but I'm enjoying it (mostly).

My work involves all things that make field work good and bad - quads (good), cold weather (bad), equipment troubles (normal) and lots of work hours (good and bad). Lately things have been more on the cold side with a string of -40 days. Quads won't start, equipment has been breaking and my quad helmet frosts up into a giant snowball. I refuse to take it off when its this cold, so I just wear it everywhere in the field. Several pictures have been taken of me by our co-op student so when I return to the south you'll all get to see what my crew has to stare at all day. Production has been low (I shot the same 2000m for the past 3 days) but my co-workers are a blast and its not all bad.

I'm living in a camp slightly north of town - its wonderful to have someone cooking my breakfast, making freshly baked goodies for lunch and serving me a hot dinner when I return from 12 hours in the cold. My room is actually quite nice with its closet, desk and single bed. Its a lot like res, if res had been filled with male rig workers. After the cookies, the highlight is the home made soups and fancy herbal teas!

The downside of remote work is that I do miss my "home" (husband and dog) and wish the weather would just warm up (-20 please). But, I'll be home in less than a week for a break (yay) and will be ready to deal with it all over again!

Today I wanted to be fat. Not just chubby bunny fat but arctic polar bear fat. Its got to be warmer than winter nomex and would have been greatly appreciated today. It was cold, not just -20 cold but in the mid -30s with a wind chill.

My job lately has been to stand near the measuring equipment and keep it going. A typical hour is: drive to new location, do jumping jacks to restore feeling to fingers, try to connect box to cable, do more jumping jackes, get box connected and press start, run up and down line planting blue distance flags, do a few more jumping jacks, un-hook system. Repeat for 10 hours a day. Not that it takes much running or jumping to warm up once you put on full winter nomex, winter boots and a quad helmet. But man, its exhausting!

The Snowman

Using the lake as a source, I rolled 3 very misshapen snow balls. Jon did the heavy lifting, but my back still ached. Clearly I'm out of practice...
My wonky rolling required a lot of reshaping with snow. I also had to fight off three dogs from peeing on Mr. Snowman.
Brinkley got over his fear of snow people enough to "help" me with the decorations (he is a service breed).
He then decided that the pinecone buttons weren't really needed on the snow man and he ate the ones he could reach.

First Activity of 2008!

After a relativly un-eventful return to Calgary we decided that we had to do something before I started work and the looong vacation came to end. The snow is not great but there is enough in K-country to make it feel like winter and allow for snowshoeing. We repeated the loop we'd done a couple years ago but it was still quite beautiful and the exercise did us good.

The terraine was rough. Ok, its Andrew just messing around...

The gang enjoying the outdoors.

"I've got too many balls and not enough tree"