A trip to the mall - Grise Fiord style...
The morning started slowly with breakfast and we eased into work by having "Christmas". Everyone brought out the packages of outreach materials that we had collected from the Canadian Space Agency and Environment Canada as well as the stickers and activity materials that we need for next week. We opened up and emptied all of the boxes to see what we had. It is a good thing that we are the only people staying at the hotel now because the lounge is a huge mess covered in all of our outreach stuff.
Avalon had loaned us a key to the school so we could use the computer lab over the weekend. We needed to go to school to do a little internet searching for the talks we will be doing and to check our e-mail. We also needed to book plane tickets for Jeff and Tobias to travel from Ottawa to Toronto.
As a break from our planning, we took a walk out to the Grise Fiord "Canadian Tire". Before you think that Grise is bigger than I have let on so far, the local people refer to the dump as the "Canadian Tire" or "Home Depot" because you can often find a part that you need for a stove, snow machine or other piece of equipment out there in the line of discarded machinery. We went out that way to look for an iglu that we thought someone said was past the dump. As far as we could see, there was no iglu. The walk was nice but a bit chilly (-28 C). On the way home, we stopped in at the Co-op to check it out. I found a nice hat made by a local artist. I also found some similar yarn so I could knit myself a pair of overmitts to match the new hat. It was a typical Saturday at the Co-op, it was busy with the line up extending well past the end of the extra long counter and also we ran into most of the people and kids that we knew in town.
Melissa made blueberry pie for dinner which was a great hit. We spent the evening devouring it and drinking tea. We also did a test run of spectroscope construction in preparation for working with the Junior class. The spectroscopes are made out of a toilet paper tube, a slit cut into a piece of cardboard and a slide containing a transmission diffraction grating. After we all built our spectroscopes, we spent quite a while staring at the different light sources in the hotel. There were some nice compact fluorescent bulbs with a beautiful discrete spectrum as well as the continuum spectra from the incandescent bulbs. A little after dinner two of the girls from the kindergarten class stopped by. They wanted to take a break from playing outside and come in for a while to get warm. They talked to us about school and what they like to do. Sometimes it feels like we are the circus that has come to town and everyone knows where to find us.
Best regards,
Kaley.