Heather is working in Tulita, which is at the confluence of the Mackenzie River and the Great Bear River about 600 kilometer northwest of Yellowknife. There is a weekly paper that comes out across the north called News North and Heather had her picture in it the other day. She is the weather girl at the airport and she also communicates with the pilots, letting them know the local weather conditions when they are planning on landing. It was great to see her picture in the paper and know that she is out there doing a good job. Way to go Heather.
Curling has been picking up. I am curling with the SENIOR ladies this year and we have the NWT playdowns in three weeks. Then 2 weeks after that if we are in the top 2 in the NWT we go to Whitehorse to play off to see who goes to the Nationals in Ottawa. We played really well last week, gearing up for the playoffs.
The weather has warmed up this weekend and it was quite nice outside today, just in the -teens so life it good. The store I am working at sponsored the Banff Mountain Film Festival this weekend so Barry and I spent Friday and Saturday night watching some awesome films from around the world. Cassidy and Elijah came over today and we made cranberry orange muffins with some local cranberries picked out at Moose Bay. It is so nice to have that tart taste of fall in your mouth in the dead of winter.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR
Barry took the "new" camera (the shock proof, water proof one that I haven't managed to destroy yet), down to the lake on New Year's Eve and put it on fireworks setting and took some pictures. He borrowed a tripod and took some lovely shots. We figured out that exactly 10 years ago at Y2K we were doing the same thing, standing out on the frozen ice watching the fireworks. I wonder what we will be doing 10 years from now. Barry will be 70, I will be 64, I wonder what life holds for us between now and then. Completing our circumnavigation is high on our list of things to do and it seems to work well for us to come back here and make money every couple of years,, as well as get lots of family visiting and renew our relationships with our growing grandchildren.
Speaking of them we have had some wonderful visits over the holidays. Elijah took this picture of Cassidy and I showing of our new Christmas earrings. I think he took a wonderful picture.
On Christmas Day after the gifts were opened the kids had fun playing around with the Nerf guns at the Divekys. We made one of their puzzles and had a game of Twister.
We had a lovely dinner with the Borkovik family. This is the couple that we ran into in a grocery store in New Zealand. It was very kind of them to include us at their table at Christmas. The next day we entered the traditional Boxing Day Bonspiel. It is for families and it is just 3, 4 end games, we curled at 10, 12 and 2 and then there is a pizza dinner and everyone gets a prize. Cassidy and Elijah had great fun and got the hang to the game, by the last game I had Cassidy yelling HURRY, HURRY HARDWe took some good pictures on Cassidy's new camera but they were accidentally deleted.
We had the kids come and sleep over just at the end of the holidays. They painted the shirts that Trish gave them for Christmas, we walked across the lake to Canadian Tire, we made a more complicated puzzle and the Nerf Guns came out again. It was great to have them and they seemed quite at home with us, the cat even came out and said hello to them. Last weekend I borrowed some rental snowshoes from the outdoor store I am working at and Elijah came out snowshoeing in the bush just behind Diveky's house. We just got a big dump of snow so it was quite a bit of fun. All in all it was a wonderful holiday season. I hope yours was as enjoyable as ours. It is too bad that the whole family couldn't get together, maybe we will have to plan for that one day.


I will leave you with a few more of those fireworks shots, they really are quite spectacular.