Absence makes the internet bill come due — I did not plan for that particular lesson.
Our internet up here is prepaid monthly. You pay at the office, when the office is open, which you determine by watching for the light in the window. There is no posted schedule. Last week we miscalculated. We literally ran across the hamlet when we spotted the light on. Paid in cash. Came home.
Worth it.
New Year’s Eve was something I won’t forget. The church service runs in Inuktitut, so we stayed home. But the parade that followed is open to everyone, and we watched from a window. Skidoos. ATVs. Trucks with improbable passenger counts. The parade doesn’t circle once — it goes around and around, each pass picking up more vehicles. We counted about 40 at the start. By the end, closer to 100. My daughter watched the video and said it looked like regular traffic in the south. The numbers, maybe. The energy was entirely different.
The blizzards here are their own thing. Wind that changes the math entirely — visibility drops, temperature drops further, and you don’t fight it. You settle in, you wait, and you find something useful to do with the time.
I’ve always been better in a storm than in a lull. Urgency and unpredictability bring out a kind of focus in me that calm stretches don’t. I used to think everyone was like this. They’re not, as it turns out. It’s one of the things I’ve learned to recognize about how I work.