love and cold

let's start w/ the love :)

namely, this beautiful bouquet from my hubby :)
i absolutely love gerbera daisies! and right now they are reminding me of the warm summer days that i spend tending after the flowers in the Town of Bridgewater with my wonderful friend Wanda :)
they are also reminding me of how blessed i am to have such an amazing, patient, understanding, and o so loving husband :) thanx so much baby!

now on to the cold...
let's just say that once i get out in it, the excitement and smile soon turn into a look of sheer terror lol :) it is truly miserable outside!
but i am very thankful for this amazing coat that my hubby got me :) does a pretty swell job of keeping about 50% of me all nice and cozy :)

this past saturday dave and i took a trailer load of flooring supplies up to pikangikum for a job that he and Jeff Yutzy are working on today.

for those of you who don't know, pikangikum is a reservation that is NORTH of red lake...as if we aren't far enough north already!!! i about froze.
anyways, it's a 2 hr. drive. In the winter you can drive to it because the lakes are frozen over and the roads that go through muskeg are nice and solid and very bumpy instead of squishy and mushy. in the non-winter months you can only fly into pikangikum.

so we drove...

and drove...
and drove. yep, pretty much looked like this the whole way.
it's actually pretty scary driving on these roads because you have no idea where the edge is, and if your tire slips off the edge, the snow can just pull you in. it's not so bad as long as no one is in sight, but when you cross paths w/ an oncoming vehicle, it feels pretty treacherous.
on the way home we were going around a corner and another vehicle was coming our way, and def. going a little too fast for the conditions at hand. she was on our side of the road, and over-corrected, and ended up in the ditch. so we spent about an hour (along w/ about 3 other vehicles that stopped) pulling, pushing, and digging her out of the ditch. well, actually, my hubby and some other guys did that. i stayed all bundled up in the truck :)

here we are coming off the winter road onto the lake that you have to cross to get to pikangikum.

do you see the little saplings in the middle of the frozen lake? no, they are not growing there. people chop them down and put them up on the lake to mark the ice road :)

pikangikum

notice all the graffiti?

there were very few buildings that didn't have graffiti on them

pikangikum doesn't have running water...thus outhouses...brrrrr! i think i would probably get dehydrated and skinny if i lived up there because i would do just about anything i could to avoid going out into a freezing little outhouse to go to the bathroom!

so that's my latest little arctic tundra adventure :)