Life has been incredibly hectic for me over the past three weeks. Between the Curator leaving and me assuming many of the duties normally ascribed to him, the Gallery going into change-over, five visiting artists, Rick visiting from Toronto, and the Canada Winter Games taking place, I've been one Hell of a busy bee. My average day at work has been 9.5 hours in length and, boy, have I felt that.

Visiting with Rick was really nice. I was somewhat trepidatious (is that a word?) prior to his arrival, having not spent any real amount of time with him since, well, since before the break-up. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all went. I could have lived without people referring to him as "the other boyfriend", but that's Whitehorse for you. He was a real trouper, too, being dragged to functions and soirées and the like. It was too bad that the weather was almost utterly unco-operative. Rather than the blue skies we normally have and the typical end of February temperatures in the area of -8C, we had heavy overcast, snow, icefog, and God help us all, temperatures that did not go above -25C any day of his visit. There was one very beautiful day, the day before his leaving, when we were able to see for miles in the clear, bright day, so we drove up to Braeburn, which is an hour north of Whitehorse, ate soup and bought a giant cinnamon bun. (I ate that bun for three days !)

In that time, I was also tootling visiting artists all around the countryside and bonding (or not, as the case may be) with them. A nice highlight was travelling with Brian Jungen and Craig Leblanc to Bean North up the Tahkini Road and enjoying the best coffee in the Yukon by a warm, airtight wood-burning stove, in a cabin in the woods. Lovely and very civilised. I look forward to being able to take my mom there when she visits here in the summer. Another high point was making friends with Shuvinai Ashoona, a delightful Inuit artist from Cape Dorset, and her chaperon, Michele. Shuvinai has some form of disorder, which I was told was schizophrenia, but I am not so sure. She sounds rather like an extremely high-functioning autistic in some ways. Anyway, she has trouble communicating because she speaks in metaphors and mixes her word use. Sometimes she is completely lucid, sometimes the metaphors make perfect sense (like when their luggage arrived a day late and she said, "The world is made of clothes !"), but other times she was impossible to understand. That said, I really clicked with her and we hugged and kissed (nose-kissing, Inuit style !!!) lots when it was time for her and Michele to depart.

Today, I have a day off and my cats are celebrating. They have been alternating between curling up and sleeping with me and wrestling with/chasing each other. They're so silly when they're happy. Adopting them was by far the best thing I could have done since arriving here. Which reminds me, as of February 24th, I have been here a year ! That makes me an official "sourdough", which strikes me as not that exciting, but it is something of a landmark. That's one year far away from home, one year really being an adult, one year struggling with demons and loneliness, one year learning a lot about myself, one year... well, you get the idea. Regardless, having the boys in my life since May has made 9 of those 12 months much better than they would have been without.