Coca Cola is at it Again
November 20, 2007
I watched an interesting program about Coca Cola and their unethical ways last night. I posted here on the forum. What are your thoughts? Can they get away with this behavior because they’re so rich or quite frankly cause a lot of people are just plain addicted to Coke?
Random Arctic Memories
November 20, 2007
I once lived in the Arctic. It’s not something I aspired to and it’s not something that I enjoyed for the most part. It’s just one of those things that few people on earth can say, and therefore is one fact about me that’s a bit out of the ordinary.
This is the time of year, heading into the holiday season, when I think about the Arctic most.
How could I not?
I mean we lived a hop, skip and jump away from a place called Reindeer Point. A place where real reindeer roamed. I have to say, they looked nothing like Santa’s herd. Not a red nose in the bunch. Almost disappointing after all the holiday specials I grew up on. Not that I expected to them to fly, I just didn’t expect them to look so mundane.
I didn’t expect them to be so tasty either.
Caribou, which is what wild reindeer are called in the northern regions of Canada, are a traditional game animal. I know it sounds almost as bad as eating Bambi or Thumper, but I have to admit eating caribou was a highlight of arctic life.
Eating whale blubber and seal meat, on the other hand, were lowlights. The whale was slimy and the seal tasted like liver. They won’t be making my top ten list of delicacies in this lifetime. They’re an acquired taste I’d prefer not to acquire.
I remember one day when the boys (I only had two then, one just about 3 and the other 10 months old) and I went outside. It was cold and it was dark and I was bored. So I sniffed the air and asked if they could smell the cookies.
“Cookies?” my three year old asked, as I knew he would.
“Why, of course! Santa doesn’t live that far from here and I can smell the cookies Mrs. Claus is baking. Can’t you?”
I don’t know why I did that. I wasn’t really big into the Santa thing, but we lived as close to the North Pole as we were ever going to get if I had anything to say about it.
We spent the rest of our walk to I forget where, our noses up just sniffing and sniffing the air. Hoping to catch a whiff of gingerbread in the Arctic Breeze.
If anyone saw us, they’d have thought we were nuts. They would’ve been right.
Who can stay sane when the sun goes down one day and doesn’t come up again for nearly two whole months? When you’ve got an hour or two of natural light - an eerie, creepy twilight - around lunchtime, something has gotta give.
I have to admit. It was nice to see all the houses lit up. You do get much better mileage out of lights and decorations when they’re visible and sparkling for 23 hours a day. It seems a lot more people decorated up there. I don’t know if it’s because they liked Christmas so much or they just needed something cheerful to stave off the gloom of living in the dark for so long. After all, the sun wasn’t due to rise until nearly a month after Christmas.
I remember my first trip out of town. It was mid-December and the ice road had just opened the previous week. It was the only way out of town. The rest of the year it’s pretty much a fly-in community, unless you happen to have a boat. So we went, just over three hours through the pitch dark on a frozen over river. I tried to ignore everything I’d ever read about global warming and the fact that studies had shown the ice was 14% thinner than it had been and the story I’d read the week before about a tanker truck going through the ice. That almost made it easier not to freak out when I thought I heard cracking beneath the tires.
Ah yes, Arctic Memories…
Santa and his elves can keep it to themselves.
