Hillarious Halloween Hula Hooping

Well it's a been a while since posting, so I really should get on this. Mostly I've been pretty busy with the school. The library is shaping up, with all the books moved to the proper spots. I still have a lot of books to empty out of my office, but that entails adding call numbers and book covers. I'm going to wait until our part-time library tech can give a lesson, so I can learn from an expert. The student organizer sessions went fairly well and have hopefully motivated some students to get on top of their school work, although I'm sure I wouldn't have been one of them. The next big project is to sort through the electronic resources available to the school. A list of websites as possible resources is utterly useless unless there's some sort of evaluation and synopsis. Who has time to go through all of them to find out what's there? Apparently I do.

I managed to luck into a part-time job that fits my schedule and actually interests me as well. A community-based project aimed at promoting healthier eating habits is being run in Inuvik (www.healthyfoodsnorth.ca if you want to check it out). Basically I run interventions (that's right just like trying to get people to kick the smack) in grocery stores, where we have a featured product that we have encouraged the store to stock. Hopefully by providing people with a sample of the product in an easy recipe we can influence them at the purchasing level. It seems like a worthwhile project with quite a bit of formative research and community input, which could potentially positively affect obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases that are prevalent here in the north as in other First Nations communities (I've been writing an abstract for the project, can you tell?).

Fun-wise Halloween was pretty big deals here with at least half a dozen major community parties happening. I teamed up with two friends to bring a global perspective to Halloween costuming. I was the equator, while the two girls were the North and South Pole. Brilliant. Unfortunately brilliance doesn't win you 2 round-trip flights to Edmonton at the Mad Trapper. A hula hoop hanging from suspenders is a really fun dance prop however. I got my first winter taste of cross-country skiing on the Inuvik trails this weekend too. Definitely a fun way to be outside on an Inuvik winter afternoon. I better enjoy the sunlight while it lasts, as we're down to about 6hrs of daylight, with 1 hour disappearing every week. So by mid December it'll be the dreaded 30 days and nights ...