Babies, Chocolate, And Oodles of Snow

I woke up this morning from a wonderful dream (something about a castle made of trampolines) to my roommate yelling in my ear about how she had slept in and hadn’t set the alarm and “Alexandra! It’s past 8:00!”

Since I get picked up at 8:00 for work, I was understandably alarmed, and I vaulted myself out of bed (not advisable when you sleep on the top bunk), and raced down the hallway. I was just settling into a sizable panic when someone informed me that, in high school terms, there was a snow day. “Them Days” was closed due to massive amounts of snow. And when I say massive, I don’t mean just snow up to your knees. I mean snow up to your waist. Snow up to your neck. Tons of snow. Oodles of snow.

So I went back to bed and slept for a good three hours more.

Upon waking for the second time that day, which was a substantially more pleasant experience than the first time, I was informed that I needed to get ready because I was getting picked up to go to “Them Days” for the afternoon. So in an hour or so, I found myself in front of the building, shovel in hand, trying to make a dent in the snow covering the steps and the wheelchair ramp. Even with three of us, we couldn’t do much more than to clear enough of a path to get to the door. If anyone with a wheelchair felt like today was the day to make an excursion to “Them Days”, I’m afraid to say that they would not be able to get in.

It almost seems like the world is against us sending out the new issue!

At the start of the week, we received the new issue, 35.4, from our publisher, and we are in the process of trying to get everything ready for them to be released. It’s been a very hectic week so far! I missed work due to being ill on Tuesday, and today we had an entire winter’s worth of snow from my hometown dumped on us, but we are not deterred.

On Wednesday, we spent most of the day stuffing envelopes and organizing things with the new edition.

Note the large box of chocolate sitting on the table. Never let it be said that the people at “Them Days” don’t know how to inspire their workers to work harder!

Our current editor and administrator, Tara and Patricia, are both fairly new to this because they are filling in for the usual people while they are away on maternity leave. Since this is the first time that this team of people has gone through the “mailing out the new issue” process, Aimee and Melanie, the usual editor and administrator, came in to help us out and give us some pointers on what to do!

And with them they brought two guests; our littlest volunteers.

We got to meet Beatrix,

and Carson.

But our work here is not done yet! Hopefully we will be able to have the new issue ready for sale soon. And to help that process along the way, I need to get off this computer and start actually doing something productive.

Live long and prosper,

Alexandra

The New Kid On The Blog

Hello to everyone out there!

My name is Alexandra, and I am the new Katimavictim–I mean, the new Katimavik volunteer for “Them Days”! This is my second day on the job and already I have proved my vast ineptitude by not understanding how to work a cassette player and by not being able to log onto the blog. Well, since I forgot to make a New Year’s resolution, I can make one now: I resolve to improve and to do my absolute best while working here for the next three months!

As I’m sure anyone with a calendar can tell, I have the privelege of being here in Labrador in the wintertime. The sight of lots of snow is not all that unusual to me, but I have to admit that snow drifts around three times my height are a new thing. However, it’s not an unwelcome thing: Goose Bay is frankly quite gorgeous, what with all of the trees and those mountain-things masquerading as enormous hills.

I come from a little town called Zurich. When I tell people this, they usually get a crease in their brow and a strange expression on their face.

“You live in Switzerland?” they’ll say.

I do not live in Switzerland, much to my dismay. No, the Zurich that I come from is in Ontario. No one seems to have ever heard of it. Apparently, there’s also a Paris, Ontario, and I’m sure that that one causes lots of confusion too.

Zurich, Ontario is a tiny village where the most interesting things are the bowling alley, the library, and the proximity to the lake. From my house, which is actually on a farm outside of the town itself, it is only five kilometres to Lake Huron, close enough for me to bike there. Being near the lake gives us a lot of snow in wintertime, but never quite to the levels of Goose Bay. I grew up with a backyard filled with trees perfect for a scrawny little girl to climb, numerous cars abandoned on the lawn to become home to overgrown plants, and two abandoned sheds that were once home to farm animals but became clubhouses and fortresses to me and my siblings. The village may be a little boring, but that adjective could never be attributed to my house and my home.

I hope that I can find some interesting things to blog about throughout my stay here so that I don’t completely bore the people who might read this. As I am interested in journalism, it is exciting for me to get an opportunity to work in a magazine and see how they run things here! But right now I have to get back to digitizing a cassette tape, so I will see you all another time!

Live long and prosper,

Alexandra

Oops.

I just realized that it has been something like a month since I last properly updated this thing, but I can assure you that I have an excuse, or at the very least, an explanation.

I’ll break it up into sections in order to better explain what, within their respective weeks, distracted me from doing the individual weekly updates that I had been keeping up with up until October 28th.

First missed week: My bad. I was planning to do it at the end of the day on Thursday but ended up doing some mopping and transcribing of an interview instead. I didn’t worry about it too much though, because I expected to be able to get it done at work the following day. That wasn’t going to happen though, because unlike my home province of Ontario, Remembrance Day is a statutory holiday. I didn’t end up going to work the next day and I planned for the blog entry to roll over to the following Monday.

Second missed week: Slightly less my bad. All of the blog entries I’ve done in the past were written while digitizing cassettes with Audacity in the background. The problem is that the Audacity computer I usually use was in unavailable to me as Sarah was putting together the next issue of Them Days, a process that can only be done with software exclusive to the computer I’m usually digitizing cassettes on. Instead of doing the cassette tapes I spent my time typing up some primary documents, cutting out newspaper articles for the archives and transcribing an interview; a process which took me the full week. Without the usual downtime that comes with digitizing cassette tapes it totally slipped my mind that I had not one, but two blog updates I should probably do. I only remembered once the weekend had begun, and decided that I’d have to give a good recap of my busy week on the Monday.

Third missed week: Totally not my bad. I was supposed to be on house manager duty the following week, but because of a bunch of issues in the old schedule I was shifted back a week in order to accommodate the fixes. Looking after a tiny house with eleven young adults living in it is surprisingly time-consuming, so blog entries didn’t really enter my mind over the course of the entire week.

See? It was just a series of unfortunate circumstances totally beyond my control and now that I’ve explained myself I’m in the clear. Clean slate.

Well, I’m glad to have that off my chest, and I’ll be sure to update again with a more orthodox entry by the end of the week.

- Gerard

Good Morning!

Good Monday Morning, Labradorians far and wide!

I’m sorry I haven’t updated lately. I get a one track mind when I’m working on the latest issue, and I neglected my blogging responsibilities!

Melanie has gone on maternity leave and we now have Patricia as our administrator. She is very sweet, hard working, and a gem to work with. Stop by and welcome her to Them Days! I’m sure she’d appreciate it.

I have pictures to post, but I will do that later on this week (including Halloween and some around the office shots)

We are without Gerard this week, since he is house manager. Whatever will I do without him?

Hope you’re having a large Labrador day!

Happy Trails

Sarah

Closed for Rememberance Day

Them Days will be closed on Friday, November 11th as it is Rememberance Day.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

- Them Days Staff

66 down, something like 800 to go!

As would-be readers of this blog may already know, my main job as a volunteer here at Them Days is to digitize all the old cassette tapes we keep in the archives so that they may be enjoyed by future generations. What I neglected to mention in previous posts is that the process of digitizing a single cassette tape very rarely takes less than half an hour, and frequently takes over an hour, as the process of recording the tapes onto the computer is as simple as plugging a cassette player into the microphone jack and playing the entire tape.

Therefore, I’m basically at the mercy of the tapes here, and the length of my tasks depends on factors beyond my control, which is slightly daunting. Nonetheless, I’m still enjoying myself, as I’m not expected to complete the entire digitizing task and considering the time it takes for an individual cassette to be copied over, you won’t catch me sneezing at a number like 66 in this context. Also, the novelty of operating a cassette player hasn’t worn off quite yet.

That’s pretty much all I have to say in regards to that subject, so I’m going to go ahead and sign off.

- Gerard

Technology is Hard

When I started my volunteer placement at Them Days I was well aware of the fact that I was going to be learning a lot of new things as I carried out my daily responsibilities. I assumed that the majority of these new discoveries would deal with Labrador’s history, the magazine writing process, office work and other things that are obviously present on the surface of Them Days. While I have already learned a lot about all of the previously mentioned subjects, I have also gained an unexpected amount of insight into the technology that I have needed to use on a day-to-day basis.

For example, yesterday I managed to figure out how to make it so that I could digitize s tapes using the program “Audacity” without recording all of the computer g noise, removing my previous need to constantly mute and un-mute the computer whenever I turned a tape over. This is a welcome change, as on my first day of digitizing I accidentally added some less than historical music into the background of a few interviews, requiring me to redo them. The process of fixing my problem only required me to move a few cables around and flip a few virtual switches, but I’m still proud with myself for being able to figure it out without any online tutorials. Go me!

Another lesson in technology that I have learned while volunteering at Them Days is how to fix a cassette tape with a butter knife when it gets disemboweled by a disgruntled s player. I can thank Sarah Michaud, a child of the 80′s for this lesson, and I respect her strength in carrying out a process that no doubt brought back traumatic flashbacks to the horror that is cassette tapes. I’m the kind of person that appreciates the nostalgic value of things, but I still take pleasure in knowing that after I get the historical goodies from all these old tapes onto good, pure CDs, the tapes will slowly deteriorate and eventually be gone, sparing future generations from having to painstakingly pull all the tape back into a cassette whenever it decides to try to destroy its contents.

That’s all I have to say about that.

- Gerard

Goose Bay Adventure

Another exciting update from Gerard!

Due to our usual place of work being occupied by some other official business practices, Sarah and I took on the job of going out this afternoon to pick up a few things for the office. Specifically, garbage bags and pencil sharpeners.We were able to find the garbage bags pretty easily at Northmart, but the seemingly simple task of acquiring a common product like a pack of pencil sharpeners is deceptively difficult in Goose Bay.

The first store we entered, falsely hoping to buy pencil sharpeners, was the dollar store in the H&R, as it has an entire aisle dedicated to school supplies as well as being slightly larger than the other dollar store in Goose Bay. Unfortunately for us, the H&R dollar store apparently doesn’t consider pencil sharpeners to be of the same tier as other school supplies, and therefore doesn’t sell them.

The next step of our quest to obtain pencil sharpeners took the two of us to the local Northmart. As I said earlier, this is where we got the garbage bags; and why wouldn’t we? After all, Northmart has incredible selection and is stocked with virtually every household product that a human being or even domesticated animal could ask for. Unless, of course, there are human beings or domesticated animals out there who might ask for pencil sharpeners. Just like the dollar store in the H&R, Northmart has a section dedicated entirely to school supplies, and just like the dollar store in the H&R, Northmart chooses not to include pencil sharpeners in this section, or anywhere else in the store.

Feeling disheartened, Sarah and I went to the other dollar store in Goose Bay, but our hopes weren’t incredibly high. After all, it only made sense for this dollar store to be as vacant of pencil sharpeners as the previous one, seeing as dollar stores tend to have pretty much the same stock no matter where you go. Why would this one be any different? I have no idea why, but it was. Sarah and I were able to finally track down the pencil sharpeners at what seemed to bean unlikely establishment.

It took most of the afternoon, but we finally got them, which is fantastic, because anyone who has ever tried to use one of the pencils at Them Days can back me up when I say that this facility was, up until now, in dire need of some pencil sharpeners.

Until next time,

- Gerard

Job Description?

Hello again.

Now would probably be a good time for me to give some insight into what I actually do here. Yaaay!

For the most part, I spend my days digitizing the dusty old cassette tapes that Them Days keeps in the back corner of the archives. The task itself is a little bit mindless, but I understand its importance, as I have unfortunately had to take note of a few of the older tapes which have already begun to deteriorate. The recordings on the tapes are to be moved onto “100 year discs,” which Sarah just told me have some sort of epic anti scratch coating on them. This means that when the enormous task of moving all of those old interviews, journal readings, musical recordings and other pieces of audio is complete, they will be usable by history enthusiasts such as myself that will be alive in the 22nd century. Not to mention the fact that many cassettes worth of sound can be stored on just one disc, greatly reducing the amount of space that all these recordings will take up; allowing for even more history to be stored in the archives. Yay for more history!

But, digitizing cassettes isn’t the only thing I’m good for around here. I’ve also been known to check over the new shipments of magazines and calendars for printing errors, type up  new submissions for the next issue of Them Days, get the mail, sweep, clean up mysteriously large stains on the bathroom floor and do pretty much anything else that someone in the office needs help with.

That’s all for now, but you can expect more updates next week as I hack my way through the 824 tapes we have in the back.

- Gerard

The pictures work again!

I’m sure you’ve all been wondering just WHERE all the lovely pictures I usually post have gone to. Well, I messed something up in Photoshop and couldn’t figure out how to get the settings back to normal. Today, I fixed it (with NO help from Aimee…for the first time…ever…I feel so proud )and I’ve got a back log of pictures to show off!

Justine looking through Issue 35.3! We miss you, Justine!

Bill Rompkey stopped in to get his new copy of Them Days! He was nice enough to pose for a photo

On the 1st we held Culture Days at Them Days and it was such a hit! Even though the weather was NOT cooperative, we had a few dozen people stop in throughout the day. We were offering Them Days cover style photos for $10 a picture, and many groups took us up on our offer!

Welcome!

No event is complete without a Labrador tent!

Yummy treats! I ate mine with cheese whiz, and this gave away my "Not originally from Labrador" status, haha!

The lovely Melanie

Melanie's son, Brody, and myself. The boy was HYPER

Mary Abbass serenading us with her lovely melodies

Getting into the swing of things

I had a great time. Thank you to everyone who stopped in and to everyone who helped out throughout the day!

Until next time, Happy Trails!

~Sarah