The adventures of Haleynook of the North

A log of my workdays as of late:

Dec 20th - Near the end of the day a power outage follows an exploding sound at work. Power comes back on right before everyone goes home.
Dec 21st - Arrive at work to find no heat. Temperature: 55 degrees. Survival methods include space heaters and blankets. Sent home at noon due to cold.
Dec 27th (after the break) - Temperature at work now only 40 degrees. Not only is heat not working, but freezing air has been blowing during the break. VERY tempted to unwrap the blanket that is in the back of my car intended to be a gift, but resist temptation. Heating unit replaced, sent home at noon with guarantee of heat tomorrow.
Dec 28th - No heat, but no freezing air. Diagnosis is now a broken circuit, can only be replaced by turning off power to the whole building, which can't be done until the weekend. Sent home at noon again.
Dec 31st - No heat, but a bearable 60 degrees. Maybe my skin is just getting thicker. Still, sent home at noon instead of 3 as scheduled.
Jan 2nd - No heat. Able to create a cocoon of warmth in my office by cranking the space heater, wrapping up in blanket, and keeping the door closed. Manage to stay at work a full 8 hours for the first time in a long time.
Jan 3rd - No heat, AND a high speed chase ended with a car taking out the fire hydrant in front of our building, so no bathroom for an hour or so in the morning. Director of the agency sends everyone to Chili's for lunch to thaw out, and everyone sent home at 4 instead of 5 so they can get accurate readings of the temperature in the building. At the end of the day they have replaced every imaginable part to the heating unit and still can't figure out what is wrong.
Jan 4th - Boss calls to instruct me to "work from home" today, because heat won't be on at all. Spend the day doing pretty much what I would've done in the office - puppy-guarding the email inbox and answering business-related emails.

...Who knows what Monday will bring?

Speaking of cold, I went snowshoeing with some friends today. Because of the short hours of daylight in the winter I rarely see the light of day these days now that I work full-time (my office has no window), so it felt terriffic to be outside and active and communing with nature. And by communing with nature I mean interrupting the nap of a baby moose because it chose to sleep right in our pathway, and being very fortunate that Mom moose didn't come tearing through the woods to eat us. I wanted to take pictures of these events, but alas...

But good news! My new year's eve celebration consisted of an evening full of gambling with fake money at my cousins' house, which also included a Texas Hold-em tournament. I was hesitant to play because among the 12 other players in the tournament there were 5 or 6 seasoned veterans of the game and I had only ever watched it played. However, after about two and a half hours of intense poker playing later, my ace and king beat my cousin's ace and queen and I won the entire tournament. My adult male cousins pretended to be gracious about it, but I could tell they were a bit put out because they had been talking up their mad poker skills all night.

My prize (which I didn't know existed until about 5 minutes before I won the whole thing) was a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy, which I've decided will go toward the purchasing of a new camera when I get a little more money saved up. Visuals will return to my blog that much sooner, thanks to some lucky hands, a few smart plays, and sad hours of watching Celebrity Poker Showdown while I was unemployed this summer.