Canadian work hazards – hammers and sub-zero accounting

Life in Edmonton is going great in general, with nothing too exciting to report other than that we head off on our trip to Churchill this weekend to see the polar bears.

Justin has finished work this week after completing the garage he has been building. He and his co-worker have been quite pleased with themselves on building the garage from scratch with essentially no building experience and a boss who has even less experience (and hinders far more than he helps!). They have had a few compliments on the quality of their work from the external roofers and others, so it looks like a job well done. And ‘garage’ is a bit of an understatement, given that it is a massive two storey building which the guy’s neighbour mistook for a new house being built! Since we are on holidays next week he hasn’t been able to tee anything else up, but hopefully one of his potential leads will follow through to a new job when we get back from Churchill.

Justin has also discovered the similarities between thumbs and tomatoes in the last couple of weeks, by giving his a good whack with a hammer. Apparently it did basically what a tomato would do... ie spurted everywhere! A couple of days later, once it had nearly stopped bleeding, he thought he’d hit it again for good measure, and then proceeded to do so almost every couple of days since. If the nail wasn’t going to fall off from the first blow, it certainly is now!

My work, on the other hand, has been facing sub-zero temperatures due to some work being done on the surrounding gas lines, meaning that the heat is turned off for a few hours. At the time we were advised of this, the temperatures were up around 18 degrees so it didn’t seem like too big a deal – especially since it was only 2 weeks ago yesterday that the temperature was 34 degrees here. As it has turned out, the outside temperatures today have been hovering around -4 degrees and we have had our first snow of the year! Luckily though, the gas stayed on for most of the morning, and the building got warm enough that even once the heating was off and it cooled down a bit it still wasn’t anything too extreme. Instead, the greatest health issue of the day turned out to be leaving the office for lunch with some girls at work, so that we could escape the gas smell that was filling the building, and eating waaaay too much for lunch and consequently feeling bloated and disgusting for the afternoon!

The temperatures are set to continue at or below zero for the next few days, so the snow might stick around for a little bit. And then we will be off to Churchill where we will be just about buried in snow and temperatures down into the negative double-digits! Can’t wait! ;-)