Category: Home Life

Climate change – in the southern Yukon the most noticeable effect has been warmer winters with less sun and more snow. Yesterday morning, the business of the day started at 08:50 with plowing the driveway (and ended 9 hours later when we got home from the kitchen reno job)....

For the past week, we’ve had 2 moose coming through the property on their rounds, and on Christmas Eve they bedded down for the night less than 100 feet from our bedroom window. We haven’t seen them yet, but the next-door neighbour says it’s a cow and 2-year-old calf....

Today is “hump day” – from this point on we’ll be getting more and more sun each day. The sun will eventually come up at 10:10 today and at 3:48 it leaves our sky. This has been a surprisingly easy winter for both Cathy and I for some reason...

We’ve found the practical limits of using the wood furnace as our sole heat source for the house. It’s -38°C this morning (that’s -36.4°F), and we had to turn on the oil furnace to get comfortable. That’s about the limit for the cabin as well – which is a...

The warm spell we’ve got happening right now seemed like a good time to put our first Christmas lights up on the house. “Warm” is relative, though – it’s been getting up to about -10°C, which still makes for cold fingers when you’re trying to work with little gutter...

The sky yesterday morning was wonderful for a few minutes – these pastels are winter-only colours. Yesterday was a cleaning-up day, starting with clearing the snow that’s fallen the past few days. Not a lot but if you let it build up it gets tough to move. I thought...

With the temperature forecast to dive to far-below-normal in the next few days, much of yesterday was spent doing some pre-winter maintenance around the house. The “must-do” job was the semi-annual water change and cleaning of the hot tub. It’s a pretty simple process – drain, scrub it down...

Winter can come now – I have 2 years’ worth of firewood in the yard, one year stacked and dry, and both cars are in the slightly-heated garage. The power outages that are becoming a regular occurrence are a minor nuisance, but the house will stay warm and we...

As colourful as our property is right now, yesterday was a good opportunity for a Fall Colours Tour. We decided to head west along the Alaska Highway for a change, and Burwash Landing would make a good turn-around location. It was a long day – we put just over...

Despite the fact that it was a long weekend and Whitehorse was pretty much a ghost town, the garage sale was a success, and very little had to go to the landfill. A few hundred pounds of paper (mostly photography magazines ) went to Raven Recycling, there’s a small...