Our ship has come in, year 2

Most people in the north don't really get to have any say on when their sea lift order comes in. Smaller communities might only have one or two boats come to their community during the couple of months their harbour is ice free. It's different in Iqaluit, where there is a steady stream of boats from the time the ice lifts at the end of June, until about the middle of October.

So we opted to have our sealift order delivered in September. Taking the chance that we wouldn't run out of everything before the next order arrived. As it turns out, our timing was pretty good. The cupboards weren't bare, but there was certainly space to be found.

Sadly, while we like the new apartment, it's fairly apparent that the sealift room is smaller than the one we had in the other apartment. However, we had no way of knowing we were going to have a smaller apartment when we put in the sealift order last spring. Plus we were dealing with a different company for our order this year. So let's say the order and if it was all going to fit was going to be a surprise when it arrived.

It arrived today, when I wasn't feeling well. Surprise.



In case you were ever wondering what $3,000 worth of groceries looks like, here it is.

The initial reaction was that there was no way it was all going to fit. We had finally gotten the apartment in shape and now we were going to have boxes piled all over the place.

But apparently I underestimated Cathy's ability to pack stuff into every conceivable corner available. So all this stuff now has homes. There are still a few problems...a couple of boxes didn't show up so we have to check on the whereabouts of about 9 cases of soft drinks, some pasta and granola bars.

Oh, and we also discovered that some things we ordered were different than we thought. The cereal boxes are huge. The bottles of Tide are smaller than we had last year. Little nuisance things.

But hey, it's all here. The apartment is fine shape. All is good, I should think.