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.

Christmas morning: brew coffee, open presents, call umpteen relatives down south.

Apparently others keep the same schedule as “all of our circuits are busy” was all we heard from the telephone yesterday morning.

So, we cranked up Skype on the computer (we have a $30/year Skype Out plan which lets us call any US or Canada phone number) and subsequently paid NorthwesTel a grand total of $0 for about two hours’ worth of holiday chatter. The Ottawa call suffered from considerable delay and echo, but the other calls were as clear as a regular phone.

From this, I can make two observations:

1. We need a computer that’s as easy to turn on as a telephone. (Or Skype To Go for Canada.)
2. All we want from the telcos is for them to ship our bits. If they won’t drop their ridiculous and complex plans, we’ll just move to ones-and-zeros traffic until they’ve no choice.

(If I’m ever to become a better writer, I’m going to have to abandon this fascination with alliteration. Oops.)

Thursday’s addendum to our ongoing saga of multiple power outages fried my stereo receiver: a wayward bird was able to take down practically the entire city’s electrical supply. At first, the pre-blackout spike seemed to reprogram the AM tuner so that it couldn’t pick up the standard frequencies: instead of tuning to 560, 570, and 580 kHz, it insisted on stopping on 556, 573, and 584 kHz. That made CBC Radio One Whitehorse a little more fuzzy than usual. After cycling the power, the radio recalled its traditional decimal tuning points, but the signal is now so distorted that it’s unlistenable. The CD player’s audio output is still fine though, so the damage seems to have been restricted to the radio component.

A similar outage from last year — caused by an inquisitive squirrel as I recall — incapacitated one of my surge protectors.

The icy 2006 blackout burned out another protector and also boat-anchored a computer.

Thankfully, my many surge protectors are often willing to sacrifice themselves for Yukon Electrical/Energy‘s habitual failings, except, apparently, when the protectors determine that they’re actually more expensive than the devices they “protect.” I guess that’s a good thing.

Yet at some point, one of these spikes is going to blow something truly expensive, perhaps on the premises of a local business: Boston Pizza suffered a host of outage-caused damages earlier this year. I’m sure that there’s some six-point type somewhere that indemnifies the utilities from my piddling damages, but a big enough circuit blast might inspire litigation from a larger upset customer. It’s not as though these two utilities can claim years of steady and uninterrupted supply and distribution in their defence.

…remarked Jim Robb upon hearing that I had just passed the ten year mark in our cozy out-of-the-way territory. Strange, I had thought that only a single solid winter earned one the Sourdough rank — and I can remember a couple of doozies over the past decade; especially that two weeks of minus forty about five years ago that, if nothing else, helped to educate the Alaskans about degrees centigrade.

No time to reminisce though. I’m far too eager to see what the next ten will bring.

It’s been just shy of a decade since I first rolled into the territory. That’s a decade of Outsiders asking “why’d you go way up there anyway?” I have many canned replies: pace, wilderness, community, challenge, atmosphere, and getting as far away as possible from you inquisitive buggers.

But I think there’s one secret reason that newcomers prefer not to acknowledge: “The Yukon” is a frickin’ cool name.

First off, anything that begins with “the” is awesome: The Hague, The Hulk, The Who.

Then there’s the word “Yukon”; a word imbued with mystery, remoteness, treasure, the feral soul of the uncivil adventurer, and, well, cold.

Any name like that is gold to marketers. But “Yukon” is inevitably misused for products that have no earthly relationship with our triangular territory.

For example, while visiting Ontario this summer, I ran across a display of “Yukon Oak” flooring at a Home Depot in Timmins. It seems to be a blondish shade of regular oak.

Dear plank purchaser: don’t be deceived. There are no oaks in the Yukon. There aren’t even trees large enough to pretend to be oaks.

A hasty googling suggests that “Yukon Oak” only exists within the realm of laminate flooring.

And who among us has not smirked at a coffee shop down south advertising its Yukon or Klondike blend?

To be sure, there are at least two excellent coffee roasting companies in the Yukon. But their raw beans are shipped from very, very far away. For some durned reason, coffee plants don’t take to our mountainsides.

Funny, he never asks for a second cup of Kluane Koffee at home!

Let’s not forget the Alaska Klondike Coffee Company, which packages two misdirections into its Missouri-headquartered title.

Then there’s the GMC Yukon Denali enviro-nuker. Leaving aside the pesky detail that Denali is actually in Alaska, there is no component, part, or accessory of this pavement pounder that is designed, manufactured, or assembled in the Yukon.

There are, it must be said, a fair number of these luxuriously appointed cinder-blocks trundling about the territory. Strange that we don’t see them sharing the Alaska highway with Ford Oshawas, Chrysler Michigans, or Toyota Woodstocks. I guess those names just aren’t tongue-rolling material.

There’s no shortage of these products that just ain’t Yukon. More to follow…

(Carole, the dog, and I logged a good 15,484 kilometres in the truck this summer driving down to Ontario to visit the folks. For the record, the itinerary went like this: Whitehorse -> Timmins -> Ottawa -> Toronto -> Ottawa -> Timmins -> Ottawa -> Toronto -> St. John’s (jet-assisted) -> Toronto -> Ottawa -> Whitehorse. The little red Ford performed like a champ throughout, with only a broken coolant thermostat — meaning a backroads excursion from Kingston to Ottawa with the heat on full to lighten the radiator’s load — to mar the trip.)

Shortly after I first came to the Territory, a friend wrote to say that he’d be in Edmonton on business the following week and was thinking of driving up one afternoon for a quick visit. I gave him a geographic and temporal lecture the likes of which he will not soon forget.

It can be difficult for Outsiders to comprehend the distances involved. I usually give a stock answer of “five days” when asked how long it takes to travel from southern Ontario to the Yukon. But that leaves open an interpretation of a workweek of easy driving with plenty of stops to photograph oversized monuments and queue for cheese factory tours.

So, on the return leg of this summer’s two-month circuit (made solo, as Carole had already flown back to prepare for the school year), I kept note of the odometer reading at various points along the way. Assuming that you begin your trip from our nation’s capital and take the most direct route, your five days will be spent as follows:

1. 866km to Pancake Bay, Ontario, nestled between the Soo and Wawa. I recommend a night at Smith’s Motel & Chicken Shack (no, really). Unfortunately, the poor dog exploded during the night in the back of the truck.
2. 986km to Dryden, still in blasted Ontario. I might’ve at least made it to Kenora if I hadn’t been elbow-deep in dog ejecta for half of the morning. While staying in Dryden, I suggest the Hide Away Motel, conveniently located near many fine stores carrying cleaning products.
3. 1,299km to North Battleford, Saskatchewan. The prairies really do fly by, largely due to straight, flat, four-lane divided highways and a limit of 110kph. However, I cannot endorse the Hitching Post Motel perched atop the Battlefords’ one and only hill.
4. 978km to mile zero of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. After that, just 87km more to Fort St. John where I have made it a tradition to bed down at the Best Western Coachman Inn.
5. From there, it’s 902 radio-less kilometres to Watson Lake, the Gateway to the Yukon, followed by a 446km dash home to Whitehorse.

If I did my sums right, that comes out to 5,564 kilometres in total, or at least 14 hours per day of hard driving. Google Maps tallies a mere 5,445km for the same trip, but that doesn’t include scouting trips for Tim Hortons or the three U-turns required to make it through Saskatoon.

Of course, the destination merits the distance. It’s good to be home.

As we wait for NorthwesTel’s (edit: actually, Bell Canada’s) weary and underappreciated fibre-optic cable repair team to splice together the line cut near Dawson Creek yesterday, following the cut at Smith River Monday, and the cut at Marsh Lake last Wednesday, it’s natural to wonder why these buried lines are so irresistible to backhoe operators.

I think we can trace the problem to the following three poorly-conceived NorthwesTel plans:

1. Sheathing the lines in a camouflage-pattern covering to hide them from the post-9/11 terrorists that jihad all up and down the Alaska Highway.
2. Magnetizing the fibres to better contain the awesome power of the electromagnetic forces coursing through the glass strands at light speed, rendering the cable highly attractive to steel-toothed buckets.
3. Carefully denoting the buried cable at strategic spots with large X marks and guarding each with a flapping skull and crossbones pennant, alerting everyone in the area to the precious communications treasure that lies beneath.

Well, what else could explain it?

Seriously? Let me get this straight: upon viewing the title “No Furnace Day” your brain saw fit to order your hand and finger muscles to perform the complicated orchestration of a mouse click, all so that it could satisfy its “No Furnace Day” curiousity.

And now that your brain has realized its mistake, your appendages are frantically grasping for the back button.

Too late! There’s still time for your brain to absorb this: “all told the furnace ran for 235 days this past winter, 12 less than the previous year.”

Goodbye.

Cold air descends, and cold weather also seems to pour down from the higher atmosphere. It nestles in the low spots, squirms around a little to get comfortable, and then locks in tight for the duration.

A cold snap focusses the out-of-home priorities and schedules. Errands and visits must be strung like beads on a short thread.

As a concept, spontaneity loses meaning below minus twenty. The block heater has seen to that; all impulses are tempered by a four-hour lead time.

That is the discipline of the plug.

That is an excerpt from an actual conversation held with a plumbing and heating contractor. I will likely soon forget the circumstances of yesterday’s telephone call, but those sentence fragments deserve to live on.

The following won’t be news to anyone supporting an older laptop in the suggested position: computers are hot. And not “hot” in the way marketing departments or Paris Hilton mean. No, they’re just hot. Damned hot.

And that which gets too hot needs cooling. You wouldn’t think that would be difficult to accomplish in this region, and in this season, but from a concrete-enveloped tomb in the basement of a large building, geography and weather don’t play a role.

Long story short, the requested A/C unit arrived at the exact moment that it was no longer needed.

Now if only I could find a way to ship all of this coal to Newcastle.