Food, Run, Tag and Internet

Today was a day of firsts. It was our first day with internet, our first day with real food, my first run and my first day playing tag outside with the kids for an hour and a half.

Today I took the plunge and went for my first run in Fort Hope. It was finally a sunny/semi-warm day and I felt like it was time for me to suck up my fear of ridicule. Let me just say that while Fort Hope is absolutely beautiful when one is one a morning run, I HATE running on gravel roads…It just sucks…My run was a nice way for me to realize that ‘far’ away in Fort Hope is no more than a kilometer. I kind of thought that there was more to the village then one could see, but no, there really isn’t. All roads lead back to one, and far is close in Fort Hope, so I’m going to have to be creative with my running routes!

Later in the morning we visited the nursing station (just to introduce ourselves) and then headed down to the cable office to get ourselves internet connected. We ended up paying $157 for our set up and first month of service and will pay another $47 for the month of August. It is rather expensive, but it’s worth it for us…Once we got the connection setup (and borrowed a wireless router from Bruce and Dave, the maintenance guys) we basically all just sat down and sucked in our internet ‘fix’. As much as we joke about our dependence on internet, it was definitely nice for us to find out what was going on in the world. I also had my first Skype experience and called home. It was great to talk to everyone and especially to catch my sister before she leaves for camp on Monday. My parents are going to have a rather quiet, empty Fearnall household at least for the month of July while Lyndsay is gone. The connection we have to the internet is still rather slow and intermitent so I apologize if I don’t respond to emails very quickly…

Another of today’s firsts was the food order we received from the Northern Store in Nakina. This was our first personal order of food so we were curious to find out what the inflated Northern cost would be. Surprisingly we didn’t find the bill to be too painful and it seems that we have enough food to last at least for a couple of weeks or so. We’re going to be big fans of macaroni noodles, rice and eggs over the next two months.The best thing about our food was that we didn’t even have to pick it up from the airport. A good portion of the town seemed to know that we had a shipment coming in and someone just picked it up and dropped it off for us.

As well, up until now we haven’t really had any sustained contact with the kids of Fort Hope (Eabametoong). We have been running camp registration and meeting tonnes of people, but we really haven’t had a chance to just play with the kids and get to know them. I had an opportunity tonight to play an intense game of tag for about an hour and a half (while getting eaten alive by blackflies and mosquitoes) with about 15 kids on the school playground. It was fun for me to finally start to get to know some of the kids in the community. It also jus further re-iterated to me that all kids love to have fun and just want some attention.

So, today was a day of firsts…Good firsts I suppose… (I would like to avoid having any bad firsts, but I’m sure things will happen) Tomorrow we are going to continue planning for camp and hopefully take our second stab at being radio hosts.

Alright, that’s all for me tonight…I was relatively concise tonight, maybe I’m getting better at this…

–Be kind to each other and don’t fall down…