Sealift

Our grocery Sealift catalogue arrived in the mail today. (We generally get mail twice a week on plane days, Wednesdays and Saturdays). If you'd like a challenge sometime, sit down and make a grocery order for as much of your drygoods that you'd use in a year. Oh, and you need to order everything in case lots, do you really want a case of Dijon mustard?

The sealift order is both challenging and exciting. I remember very well the stress I went through the first time I made an order. Just trying to figure out how much toilet paper I'd go through in a year, sent me into convulsions. I remember talking to a member when I was still in the south, who was over five years in the north, and still didn't use all the toilet paper from his first year. He just kept moving boxes of it to each new detachment he was transferred to.

Everyone has sealift stories, and fortunately my favourite is someone else's. A group of teachers from Qikitarjuaq (Broughten Island) were socializing and got on the subject of sealift. One of them said that on his last sealift order he had ordered 20 lbs of sugar. Everyone looked kind of puzzled and someone commented that 20 lbs really wasn't that unreasonable. He replied "Yeah, but they're in those little packets, do you have any idea how many it takes to make a cup of sugar?".

This year should prove to be challenging for us, as we have to figure out what all we need to order, not only for us, but for our clients at the B&B also.

There are few days as exciting as the arrival of the sealift ship ("my groceries are here! my groceries are here!") but it doesn't take long for the excitement to fade. After about three weeks you find yourself walking into the sealift pantry, looking at the same things sitting on the shelf, sighing and walking out, only to return in five or ten minutes and repeating the process.

Nothing about ordering groceries a year at a time prepared me for getting an entire house, right down to nails and glue, ordered and delivered by sealift

But that story will just have to wait.