The Government of Nunavut Condom Archive

I was doing some spring cleaning in my office, and came across a safe-sex stash of the novelty condoms that the Government of Nunavut has released in the past couple of years.  I wrote about one of these back in March 2010, around when they first started coming out.

This is probably almost the full set of groan-inducing but amusing messages:

There's at least one missing though... I remember back in 2010 the next one due for release was the Mother's Day condom.  Not sure if Father's Day was honoured too, but it probably was!

Skiing on Jones Sound

I've been cross-country skiing out on the frozen ocean almost every day since April 1.  At first the temperatures were in the -20's celsius, but it's gotten progressively warmer, and today it was a blistering -3!  The season will end once it goes above 0 if we don't get any new snow on top of what we have, so I want to get out as often as possible.

First I head out on a diagonal, towards some iceberg stumps.  That is Devon Island lining the horizon:

Looking back towards the town.  When I ski, I am probably visible from at least 80% of the households of Grise Fiord at any given time.  Since this is a hunting culture where people are highly attuned to any movement out on the ice, suffice to say that everybody sees me.  "You were out a bit later than usual yesterday."  If there's an emergency, people can quickly locate me.

Here I have turned west, that's the Greenlander mountain straight ahead:

Interesting track here- like a bird dragging something maybe?

The seagulls have been back for a couple of weeks, here are a bunch of tracks:

Someone shot a wolf out here around a month ago, this is all that is left of it now:

One of the dog teams out on the ice.  That's the south cape of Ellesmere Island in the background:

It's a breathtaking but repetitive trail, but it's almost never windy and the sunshine is relentless at this time of year, I think it was only cloudy on one or two of the days I have skied.  I just counted it up- I have skied 37 out of the past 43 days.  Of the days I missed, 3 were because I was busy with overtime, and 3 were early in April where a few days were just too cold.  It may go into the plus temperatures this week, so that will give sticky snow that might end the season for me, but you never know.  I've been pretty pleased to have had over 6 weeks of almost perfect skiing, it's more than I bargained for when I brought my skis with me this time.