Date: January 8, 2006
Weather: -28°C and partly cloudy
Sunrise: 13:26
Sunset: 14:37

We woke up late again this morning. Now that might have had something to do with the facts that we went to bed sometime after 3AM the night before, whatever the reason it is proving very difficult to get to bed early and get up early north of the Arctic Circle.

Lorie and I took Ripley for a walk around Boot Lake today. It takes between 45 minutes and an hour to do the walk, and the scenery is pretty good on parts of the trail. Today, it was a little bit colder than it has been and you could sure tell that if you spent any amount of time outside. I found that my face (the only exposed flesh) got really cold today, easily past the numb stage. The moisture in your breath causes frost to form on everything. It’s a different situation.

The Weather Office had the sun out today for over an hour. I’m not sure where one should have looked to see it, but it wasn’t anywhere I looked. I do have to admit though, it got really bright out today, almost bright enough to call it daylight. The brightness lasted a long time too.

A few words on this Blog…
Since I started tracking statistics for this blog (beginning of December 2005), I have received almost 1000 hits. That means that 1000 people have read the blog in about the last month. I have to say that I find that amazing. I started the Blog, as most of you know, to keep friends and family updated on our road trip across Canada, from Newfoundland to Inuvik. And it has served its purpose well. It has gone beyond its intended purpose, though; people are starting to find the Blog on their own and read it, I suppose, for either entertainment or information. I figured that I would get 15 or 20 of my friends and family reading this, not 1000!

I routinely get hits from pretty much all parts of Canada, as I would expect. What I never expected was to get hits from Mexico, Austria, the UK, Sweden, Australia, and the US. Here is a graph showing the distribution of hits for the last week or so.


I have purposefully kept this Blog as simple as possible. I don’t have a lot of fancy features in here – like links to pop culture items and commercial items, and such. I can do that if it’s what the readers want, but the Blog was started as a simple information exchange medium and, unless people want a change, it will stay that way. Marshall Mcluhan is credited with the famous quote "The Medium is the Message". Well I want what I have to say to be the message, and not the concept of blogging itself. I do have to admit though, this is a unique and convenient medium.

Work on my new Blog site, call “Inuvik Journal” is progressing nicely and I will soon start posting there rather than here. Don’t worry, I’ll give plenty of notice before I make the change. And I do intend to take more pictures once the sun starts coming out…I promise.

Stay tuned for more...

Cheers!