The start of summer

The boss has helpfully informed me that we are in the tiny, tiny window of the year in which the weather is nice enough to be outside without a jacket but the bugs haven't arrived yet - and, even more helpfully, that they will be arriving any minute so whatever business I have with the outdoors I should take care of this weekend.

Today we got a full 12 degrees above zero and a whole day of cloudless sunshine. I took a walk over to Apex, a sister town about a kilometer outside Iqaluit, and down to the rocky beach on the other side. I have to say, as much as I love living in a city like Toronto - and I can't imagine myself being happy living any other way at the moment - it really is great to get out of it for a while. It's easy to imagine the air out here pulling the tar up out of my lungs.

It's getting green here, and there are odds and ends ground-cover flowers growing up out of the rock base. With the waters moving and the bay ice shoving off the beaches in shards, it's starting to get downright pretty up here.

This was taken looking out at the bay from the bridge into Apex. Iqaluit is up and on the other side of the hill on the right, and Apex spreads off to the left.

Some of the original Hudson's Bay Company buildings are still there. I think I remember someone telling me that this is the oldest one in Canada. The fine print on the front lists the date of incorporation as 1670.

As I mentioned, the ice is breaking up. That black dot on the upper-right-hand side of this photo is actually an Ice Breaker. There are two making their way around the bay right now. They don't even look like they're moving, but they must be (for example, they weren't here two days ago).

I went down to the beach for a while to check out the ice. You don't get a good sense of the size from this photo because I couldn't find anything to put in the frame for scale, but each of the blocks is about 2ft tall; those chunks that stick up are a little shorter than I am.

Pretty cool, right?

I'm bringing back my hiking boots in July.