Home at last. Who decided on that French translation?

What a lovely day to return to the Territory. I should’ve been back late last night, but a sudden soggy snow squall in Ottawa stranded the airplane on the runway for five hours. The Air Canada staff made the wait almost bearable — with free drinks, good humour, and frequent women’s hockey gold medal updates — and also booked me on this morning’s flight north and even put me up in an airport hotel in Vancouver for the night. Quite a feat considering the matter of that trifling sporting event going on down there at the moment.

Now its time to relax for a couple of days, and then re-start the year from scratch.

Many thanks to those who passed along condolences to Carole and me. Much appreciated.

A point in favour of small northern homes over larger southern ones: no hot water tap is ever that far from the water heater.

I guess I’m homesick, as I’ve been virtually wandering through Google’s Street View map of Whitehorse since discovering it yesterday. But it does have its eccentricities.

For example, try “driving” north on 2nd Avenue from Main Street. When you pass the little alleyway between the TD and Thredz, suddenly you’re transported to the alley between the Burns building and Horwoods. Just push through and you’ll be delivered back to 2nd again.

Something similar happens further on down 2nd: just as you come to And Again on the right, you’re redirected to the dumpsters behind the Roadhouse.

Same deal going north on 3rd from Lambert. Halfway to Elliot you seem to be thrown into a tree behind the Log Cabin Church.

At the very least, the Street View camera vehicle seems to have done a thorough job: running up and down every back alley that is, or isn’t, on a map. Now they just need to stitch them together at the correct coordinates.

Apparently some other Canadian towns are now on Street View as well, including Inuvik.

Quirky though it may be, I’ve been using Street View extensively while down south to locate landmarks for navigating through these congested and forbidding cities. It’ll be a relief to come home to little traffic, to angle parking, and to a street map that fits comfortably into a single human head (with the possible exception of those weird-o twisty streets in the middle of Riverdale).

I’ve been Outside for the past six weeks (still in lovely, yet soggy, Ottawa), but just noticed that Google’s Street View for Whitehorse has been enabled:

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Scene of a recent, suspicious fire, or so a little birdy tells me.

Unlike many, I’m averse to writing about personal matters on my blog. For the most part, I stick to jargoned wisecrackery.

I’ve been in Toronto for the past two weeks to be with my father, as has my brother, Iain, who flew in from Korea. My father, Henry “Hank” Rogers, died last night as Iain, his spouse Dennis, and I stood around his bed in the living room of his Scarborough home.

We are well prepared for the flurried activity that will occupy us throughout the coming week. Following that, the schedule is less certain.