Welcome to Salluit

Wow!  I thought that the internet in Repulse Bay was bad.  I got my modem on Friday, and only actually got up and running today.  Anyway... the views up here are awesome!  I'm planning on adding one picture each day, just to keep you coming back for more.

This just so happens to be taken from inside the house, from the kitchen window, looking mostly due south.  As you can plainly see, the view is a little better than the flat, bare rock of Repulse Bay.

The couple that we are working with here are pretty good, and the store is awesome.  I have sold four ATVs in our first five days here.  Our sales were up 70% last week over the same time last year!  The executive VP called this morning to see if he could figure out what's going on up here.  Apparently the manager that was here last, was a real jerk and the locals are just starving for someone to be the slightest bit cooperative.  The biggest difference with the customers, is that almost nobody is buying with credit.  Obviously there is lots of money to go around, and lots of the locals are actually employed.  Three out of the four ATVs that I sold were straight cash.  The only down side so far... our house.  This place is a total dive!  Not only just compared to our last place (which was actually pretty nice), but to any place that I've actually been in at all.  The floors are so slanted, that the interior doors have to be tied to a hook if you want to keep them open.  No kidding!  I have a pair of folded pants in front of the folding closet door in our room, because even that will slide shut on it's own.  Anyway, even though there's so much to say, and so much has happened since I last wrote, that instead of rambling on indefinitely, I'll call it quits for today.

Stay tuned.

Vive la Montreal

I don't even know what that means, or if I used the right le, la, les, whatever (who cares).
We got in to Montreal today, where everyone seemed to be helpful, except that they all gave us very bad information.  It took us over an hour to get to our hotel, which was less than ten minutes away.  The hotel was supposed to be renown for it's gourmet food, which was very high priced and average at best.  The sports channel seems very odd.  We don't get any sportsnet channels, but we do get TSN and their sister french station RDS.  As it turns out though, RDS is doing a french rebroadcast of the sportsnet Jay's game.

Yesterday we flew from Repulse Bay to Rankin Inlet, had a three hour layover, and then flew to Winnipeg.  We had a very nice evening at Fran's sister Rose's house.  Most of our families showed up, and we appreciated it a lot.  This morning we flew from Winnipeg to Montreal, where we'll have to get up about 5:00 local time to catch our flight to Salluit.  I'm assuming that we must be on some sort of small, slow, uncomfortable plane tomorrow.  After all, we're not even leaving the province, and we are scheduled for a five hour flight.  That, together with the fact that the Trudeau airport isn't exactly familiar to us, and judging by the amount of good advice that we got today, should make for a very long and interesting day tomorrow.  At least we'll get our first view of our new home, town, place of work, and neighbours.  Should be fun!

P.S. - as I'm typing this, the Yankees just finished hitting three home runs in one inning, taking a six - nothing lead in the game.  You don't have to be able to speak french to be able to tell that it's not going well.

Stay tuned.

The Final Countdown

It's only about 20 hours till we shake the Repulse Bay dust off of our shoes, and head on out for bigger and better things.  Yesterday, the second of our new replacements, together with his family, arrived at the airport.  He seemed a lot more interested in looking after the store properly.  I spent some time with him this morning, and am a little more secure that he won't let the whole thing fall apart after I'm gone.  As soon as I'm done this, I'll be returning my modem, and preparing for the three day journey ahead of us.  We're looking forward to spending a couple of hours with any family members that can make it for our brief lay-over in Winnipeg.  I'm not sure if we'll be able to get internet during our trip, in order to keep everyone updated, but I hope so.  It should be a couple of eventful days.
I'm told that the whole town of Salluit has been set up as a wireless hot-spot, and all you need to do is head on down to the hamlet office, and pick up a modem.  I think that's pretty much what we have here in Repulse Bay.  That's why I need to return my modem as soon as I'm done with this, so that I can get me deposit back.

P.S. - of course with my first Sunday afternoon off in several months, the Jays game is in a rain delay, there is no NASCAR race, they're showing a taped tennis final from several years ago instead of today's match (for a reason that I haven't figured out yet), and I only watch the last day of golf if there is a Canadian in the hunt.  Pre-season football means nothing to me, so pretty much... I guess I'll shave, shower, and maybe have a nap.  At this point I think that I'm just ready for our plane to arrive already.  Once you've done everything that you need to do and are ready to go, you just want to get it done already, instead of waiting around for the inevitable.

Stay tuned.

Saving the World?

Last week I noticed two sets of rockers in the news, trying to save the world.  "Biff Naked" was trying to get a Canada wide boycott on products from other countries that contain the furs of cats and dogs.  She wasn't able to list any products that contained this fur, and said that you have to do DNA tests to see what kind of furs are contained.  Are you kidding me?  That would cost hundreds of dollars to test mostly 5-50 dollar items from China.  Not going to happen!
Then there's "Blurred Vision", who's musical hero is Roger Waters (not that I want to read too much into the fact that their name, combined with Pink Floyd music, doesn't exactly command a lot of respect).  They have done a rendition of Brick in the Wall, where they say "Hey Ayatollah, leave them kids alone".  I'm not sure why people always talk about this stuff.  Has any song ever actually changed the world?  Did John Lennon's "give peace a chance", or Band Aid's "We are the world", or any of this other crap actually change the world?  I don't think so.  Get a grip people!

I spent about two hours with my new recruit at the store this morning.  Then after quite a few annoying questions where the answer always was "just read the support documents that we have prepared", combined with his outright refusing to read any of them, I just had to leave him.  If you don't actually want to follow the prep work that was painstakingly done, then you're on your own.  So, we have the afternoon off together, where we can enjoy many hours of cleaning and last minute preparations necessary to facilitate the fact that will be in the air and never coming back, in less than 48 hours.  There will be no P.S., since the ballgame doesn't start for another five hours.

Stay tuned.

Purely Potatoes

Really?  Has it come to this?  Are we that lazy that in order to make ourselves mashed potatoes, we need to buy pre-pealed, pre-cut potatoes?  Get a life!

We only needed to spend a few minutes with our new guy after the store opened this morning to realize that there actually were some pretty good reasons why he wasn't about to get his own store.  He had almost zero people skills with the customers, and no rapport whatsoever.  He was so uptight about all of the rules that he had learned, that the fact that we were there to sell product and make money was totally lost on him.  Oh well... that was our last Friday, with only two days left.  By the way - that just so happened to be the biggest day that we've had since coming up here last September.  Even with my lack of technical knowledge in regards to running the store, we have been steadily winning over the members of the community, and slowly increasing sales.  I guess we might be ready for our own store after all.

P.S. (I guess that I should state that my P.S. actually stands for Pro Sports) - Today was the first Blue Jays game that wasn't on sportsnet one, and I got to see them totally blow up the Red Sox.  Fantastic game!  If only they could come up with some consistency, they could almost become a contender.  And, on a related note: the whole idea of this new sportsnet one channel is totally annoying me!  Up here on the arctic circle, my cable is not everything that it might be cracked up to be in the south.  The sportsnet channel that I get, is sportsnet west, while the guide that I get only shows me what's on sportsnet east (which rarely lines up with my actual channel).  I've contacted both my own provider, as well as their ultimate provider to get this rectified.  Obviously only falling on deaf ears.  Now all the games are being shown on a brand new channel.  What do think the chances are of this new fangled channel making onto my programming up here?  Absolutely none.  I contacted sportnet about this as well, without a reply.  Although it may not have helped that I wrote them a fairly scathing email and told them that they were definitely not going to continue enjoying my viewership, if all they were going to show me was air racing.

That's it.  Stay tuned.

Scrubbing Bubbles

One thing that they forgot to mention on the scrubbing bubbles commercials, this stuff works great on toilets!  When we got back from vacation, our cleaning lady was gone from the store.  We were thinking that we'd just wait till James got back, but obviously that never happened.  So, in the mean time, I was doing all of the cleaning.  I suppose you can imaging how gross a public bathroom can get in just a short amount of time.  As luck would have it, I had a bottle of scrubbing bubbles that I was writing off with a broken nozzle, and thought hey, why not.  I soaked the toilet down with the spray (which actually smells very nice), and the next morning... the toilet was pretty clean.  Now, I've been spraying down the toilet every other night, and haven't cleaned the toilet since.  That's enough of that Martha Stewart moment!

The first of our replacement dudes showed up today (the end of the arctic circle keeps getting closer).  He seemed pretty intelligent, and I almost felt bad telling him our end of the story.  As it turns out, he has been with the company for three years.  For the first two years he worked at a store in Northern Saskatchewan, and then with some guidance from his manager, he applied for the Manager in Training (MIT) program.  He has now spent the last year in the MIT program in another store.  We only spent a few minutes with him between when his flight came in, and when the store closed, which was lots enough time to know that he knew way more of the ins and outs of the Nothern Store system than we do.  Which begs the question: knowing that several of the top guys that we have talked to put in several years prior to getting their first store, we see a guy like this that looks so much more prepared, why are we getting a store when all we asked for was a change of scenery?  I guess ours is not to ask, but rather to just go where we are being lead.

P.S. - I just finished watching the Bomber game... I can't believe that they are so terrible.  They totally should have been able to take over after Calvillo left the game, and did show a little spark, but then just fizzled out.  It was almost like they didn't even want to win.  Something's going to have to change!

Stay tuned.