The Happy Holidays Begin!

Hello everyone!

Well, here we are almost two weeks later again, even when I vowed to write more often. I'm trying, but I'm beginning to wonder if I'm ever going to get any better at this!!

I've still been pretty busy with work, but I'm definitely finding it more manageable. I think part of it is that now I'm used to the clinic space, which makes things less overwhelming. I know where to find (most) things, and I'm just comfortable in the space. I'm also getting more and more comfortable with the work that I do here. Everything is coming together very nicely, and I'm still learning everyday. I've come so far when I look at how much I know now compared to what I knew when I first got here. It's very encouraging! I still have a long way to go though...

Things have also been very busy socially around here lately! We've got a great group of Nurses here right now...I know I mentioned earlier that we have a good bunch of new full-time and part-time Nurses. They've all been here for about a month now, and we've really been getting along very well. We had a spaghetti supper at our (Wes and my) apartment on Saturday night, and we go out for walks almost everyday. I'm really appreciating the consistency of the people (not having a whole new group of people to adjust to every week), and it makes it much better that they're all wonderful people to work and spend time with. We've been doing some fun things, that I will talk about in the next couple of paragraphs!

My friend/colleague Meagin and I went out last Wednesday night to play volleyball with some local community members at the high school, and it was a GREAT time! Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not especially athletic, but the group of people who were playing weren't really competitive, and it seemed that we weren't out of place at all. It was a really good time out, and it gave me a chance to meet some of the young people in the community who don't come into the clinic. Being a Nurse here, I tend to see the people who are sick or have health issues more often, so I get a different picture of the community. Getting out with active, healthy people outside of the Nursing Station was very refreshing. I'm really planning to look into doing a fitness class over at the school one night a week...I think there are lots of women who would have a lot of fun with something like that!

We went for a big long walk to a place called "Half-Kash" on Saturday afternoon. It's the original site that Kashechewan was supposed to be settled on, but for some reason they ended up settling here instead. Half-Kash is a beautiful place, about 1.5 hour walk from Kash. It's very peaceful and serene...there are WAY more trees and wildlife there, and it's right along the Albany River. The river was still flowing fairly quickly when we were there, but it was completely full of ice floats. (As a side note, the river is now completely frozen over...the ice floats all jammed together and backed up over the past couple of days. I even saw two silly people walking on it on Sunday!). To top it all off, Saturday was a beautiful day...sunny with the perfect amount of snow on the ground, not too windy and not horribly cold (about -5 to -8 C). It made for a very nice adventure!

It's beginning to look like Christmas around here too! Our lab organizer/cleaner Annie got a ton of sparkly decorations out last week, and they're now hanging all around the clinic. Happily, our apartment is starting to get decorated too. Our friend/colleague/next door neighbour Scott went out and cut down a WONDERFUL little Christmas tree for us on the weekend. He even saved a few of the metal lids from frozen juice cans and put strings through them to make decorations for it!! We've been using the colourful foil wrappers from Christmas chocolate balls to cover the metal lids, and they actually look like real decorations. I've also ordered a couple of little wee toques (a lady here crochets them) with Wes and my name on them that we can use for decorations (SHH, I haven't told Wes yet, it's a surprise!). I need to get out to the store to get a few candy canes, and get some popcorn stringed...then maybe some tinsel. A friend here says she has some oranges in her fridge that make good decorations when they're dried too. It's going to be a great Christmas project for the next couple of weeks! I will take lots of pictures so I can share it with everyone. Oh, speaking of that, I'm trying to set up a place online to post all the pictures I have...I'll keep everyone posted about that.

I've also been keeping busy with a course that I signed up for about a week or so ago. It's called "Pharmacotherapeutics"...all about prescribing medications and when to give certain ones, their effects, side effects, interactions, etc. It's a self-study course...there's required reading and then a quiz at the end of every section. There are 12 sections I think, so it'll keep me busy for awhile!

Anyways, I think that's all that is new right now. We're hopefully coming home for a visit in January....it's actually coming very quickly, so we'll have to start making plans to get together with everyone! Keep me posted!