A Synopsis so far...

As I write this, it is 1:37 on a Sunday morning. It is the first time I've seen darkness since this time last week, when I woke up in the middle of the night. Even now, I can see across the Mackenzie river, which is several kilometers wide. It's like after dusk. Just dark enough for streetlights to come on.
It's been a long week. We're now settled into our house, but it took every evening this week to get it into a livable state. Let me take you back to Monday night.

Nicole's boss picked us up at about 2 in the afternoon. She had warned us that the hot water heater might be out of commission. So together we agreed that we would ask to stay in the hotel one extra night, until they got it working. But when she arrived at 2 and told us everything was in order except for heating oil, we decided to move in.

As you walk in the house, you first go through a crowded, cluttered, and dirty porch. From the porch you step into the living room. The walls are painted that shade of light green that was invented in the 1970s. The molding is a slightly darker version of the same cheap and nasty green. Our carpet is a blend of reds, oranges, and browns. The tile in the kitchen and bedrooms is white. There is no attic in the house, so the ceiling rises to a ten-foot peak in the middle of the living room. This high ceiling is one of the house's saving graces. It's other saving grace is the woodstove that is in the center of everything. Although, like everything else in the house, the woodstove has seen better days. It once had a glass window in the door. That has been replaced with a piece of steel.

When we first came in, the walls were adorned with scary pictures of Jesus. The kind you often see in the homes of old people. There is one that changes from Jesus to Mary depending on the angle at which you look at it. We also found a set of rosary beads hanging in every room, including the bathroom and two porches. But the best pieces of Catholic paraphernalia are the two statues that sit atop our kitchen cupboards: one of Jesus, the other of Mary, forever looking down their noses at us, reminding us that we are sinners. We took every bit of this down (with the exception of the statues) and hid it in a back room.

The kitchen is off the back of the living room. It was filthy on the day we moved in. Even today, after hours of scrubbing, soaking, and javexing, I wouldn't feel comfortable using the word clean. There was a wonderful layer of chocolate syrup (I'm assuming it was chocolate) that spilled down the back of the fridge and settled on the bottom. The cupboards have now been scrubbed and lined with cardboard.

Our first night in the house was cold. I lit a fire in the woodstove to keep us warm in the evening, but with only seven sticks of wood in the porch, it was out long before we went to bed. Nicole refused to sleep on the one mattress that was in the house, so she took the couch. I braved the mattress. At about 3 in the morning, I woke up. The house was freezing. I was frozen. But I knew it was still above zero, because I could hear the drip, drip, drip of what I thought was a leaky faucet. I tried to ignore it, but between the cold and the noise, I couldn't take it. When I checked the tap, I realized it was actually a slow leak in a valve under the bathroom sink.

It's still not entirely dark outside. Time for bed. I'll finish this in the morning.