On May 3rd, we had our last snowfall of the spring. Today, September 23rd, we had our first of the autumn. For those keeping score, that’s 144 snow-free days this year. Not too shabby.

I was perusing the Whitehorse Craigslist real estate listings the other day and came across a real gem in the housing for rent section.

I must first caution that younger readers or those with a sensitive disposition may wish to skip the following paragraph.

CAD400 whitehorse is a (whitehorse)

“whithehorse is a shit hole , i was up there for a couple of months, how can you people live in such a hell hole… wasteland…and the people wow what a bunch of inbreeds, dumb fucks,,,,, clean up what u people call a city…really thats not a city…..dirty little town …fuck u dont even have a kfc….hahahaha,,,sad bunch of indians walking around thinking there something speicial…….. cheers from vancouver island , the best place on earth.”

Leaving aside the matter that this listing omits many of the details one would expect to find in a rental classified — location, size, appliances — the brusque and grammatically-liberated language is unlikely to invite many inquiries.

I do agree with the poster in a least one respect: the lack of a functioning KFC is distressing. Doesn’t seem to be negatively impacting housing prices though.

Not everyone loves our little city in the valley. Personally, I would prefer bigger trees, more precipitation, and the death penalty for ATV drivers. Come to think of it, Vancouver Island can claim at least two out of those three. Maybe that listing writer was onto something.

I’ve given up playing along with the majority consensus: sunny and warm do not a beautiful day make. As far as I’m concerned, you can all take your sun and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

Fortunately, if I can just survive until the middle of this coming week, it’ll be my turn to mindlessly blather about what wonderful weather we’re having. See how you like it.

CBC's forecast for the week.

And to confirm the good news:

The Weather Network's concurring forecast

I’m not going to explain my meteorological preferences other than to say, yet once more, that you’re wrong and I’m right.

Carole just got back from racing in yesterday’s 18th annual Kluane Chilkat International Bike Relay. No results are posted yet (she rode leg 8 for team enDURANce enDURANce — complete with 80s apparel), but she was curious just how long the full course is from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Haines, Alaska. Both common sense and the relay website will tell you it’s about 240km all told, but I typed it into a search bar and Google Maps responded with this astounding figure:

That seemed a little longer than I remembered. A glance at the suggested route explained the discrepancy:

What Google Maps missed was a little highway called the Haines Road that leads almost directly from point A to point B. A minor detail, really. Hardly worth bothering about.

The question is: is this the “one more,” or is the “one more” yet to come?

…but I’m not, and unfortunately, “Occidental-oriented” is an ornamented accident.

Put much more simply, Carole and I took the Yukon Orienteering Association‘s “Learn to ‘O’ Clinic” yesterday, ostensibly so that we could devote even more of our time to being lost in the woods.

The day was spent learning to read the highly-detailed orienteering topographical maps, and then scrambling about out back of the College with said maps. Learning to find bearings with the compass was also helpful, but at our level the maps are far more useful.

The YOA holds meets every second Wednesday, and we’re planning to attempt the more casual routes: the ones with fewer crossed contour lines, and with controls (checkpoints) conveniently located near trails.

Carole and I are excited to be attending our my first Dawson City Music Festival this July: the tickets and room are bought and booked.

We then checked out the proposed slate of bands, and if you should happen to open all of the links on that page at once, something like the following will burst forth from your speakers:

Twenty-eight ungodly seconds of the 2010 DCMF (630KB MP3)

Listening to ‘em all at once is a real time-saver.

Or, if you respond better to an overload of visual stimuli, here are all of the bands’ glamour shots stacked one on top of another. Try to spot your faves:

This sort of thing would be much more common if the concept of time did not exist.

Oh, and why is it that every band has a MySpace page? I though the trend-setters had long ago moved to Facebook. Although, judging by some of the bands’ websites, “trend-setting” is far from the correct term when it comes to Internet presence.

"If spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change."

"Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done."

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

With apologies to Lewis Grizzard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Matthew Arnold, and Rainer Maria Rilke, respectively.

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).