Settling in....

And life begins to feel normal again….

…normal in terms of having a bit of a routine established……as a typical creature of habit I find satisfaction in the simple aspects of sleeping (almost) a full night; waking without the alarm and taking a few minutes to review my day starting with what I will eat for breakfast, what clothes I’ll wear including hat, scarf, gloves or mitts and coat, and eventually reminding myself of the time I need to leave the house so that I won’t have to run for the bus…..four weeks ago today I left a job and organization I loved and respected….three weeks ago Lauren and I arrived in Yellowknife, hopeful, excited, relieved and pretty much without any expectation of what life in Yellowknife would hold for us….and I’m happy to report that all is well!!

However, some updates and observations of the last two weeks are overdue and will therefore now commence:

·                              Recap of our accommodations: when we arrived we were temporarily housed in a housekeeping suite apartment – 10^th floor of the Coast Fraser Hotel. We grew quite attached to it for many reasons including it was downtown and easily walkable to work and essential amenities. It was a nice size space and as we faced east I loved being able to see the beginning of the sunrise as I readied for work. I’ve always loved wide open views and the ‘big sky’ venue common with the prairies and our location offered a similar vantage point with the NE part of the city as well as Great Slave Lake. As it got closer to the day in which we would move into our apartment which was located in another part of the city, we started wondering if it was going to work for us as well as having the downtown location. Also, I’d spoken to another new employee at our orientation and she said she had decided against moving into the apartment building we were contemplating as she’d found it to be noisy with the constant smell of pot. We went as far as contacting another property management company for availability in the downtown area. Joyce not only showed us the available apartment but also took us for a bit of a drive around town, including the originally planned apartment. The apartment she had available was okay – certainly clean, but on the 4^th floor (walk-up) and the building itself was not as convenient as we’d preferred. Eventually we were able to see the first apartment I’d chosen while still in Ontario and though we hadn’t quite figured out the travel and bus situation it still seemed to be the better option…..

·                             So, ten days ago, while I went to work, Lauren came to the apartment and let the movers in and when I arrived home I entered a space that seemed way too small for the stuff we’d brought. Well, a similar dilemma I’d experienced mid-year when we moved into the apartment in Barrie from a 5 bedroom house so I knew that everything would find its place eventually, it would just be a matter of planning and innovation and efficiency….it’s so tricky actually and time consuming….so much easier to move into a large space where you can just drop the extra stuff into one room and plan to get at it eventually (which we all know never really happens…!!!)

·                             It took me a full week to get things into place…..and can now sit back and appreciate the apartment, I really love it and do not want to move for a long, long time. It has been recently freshened and updated; paint, flooring, new appliances – speaking of which washer and dryer is in-suite. 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom, open kitchen with great counter and cupboard space. A reasonable storage room which also co-locates the washer / dryer……and it is toasty warm and requires very infrequent turning up the thermostat……speaking of which, strangely enough the thermostat is ‘opposite’ to what I’ve experienced in Ontario, though I couldn’t tell you if it is an Ontario thing or what……opposite in terms of reading the thermostat from left to right – the left is the hottest and the right is the coldest temperature setting….so if I want the heat to be turned down, I’m sliding the adjuster to the right….hmmmm…..very interesting. So consider this picture the typical and then reverse the numbers.

·                             The bus stop is at most a one minute walk from the apartment and overall time spent from start to finish of leaving the apartment to walking into my office is 15 minutes tops. We are walking distance to the Loblaw affiliate (okay, I would call it Zehrs if I was in Barrie, but here it is called the Independence) grocery store, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Staples, Walmart etc…..however, we did make an assumption last Sunday when we arrived at the bus shelter to go downtown to the Shoppers Drug Mart (it was the redemption weekend)and after about 15 minutes of shivering decided to look at the schedule to discover there was no Sunday running of the bus…..oops! “Taxi!!”