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:

View Larger Map

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.