Hank’s 4 months old! Here’s how our week went

Hank’s 4 months old today! And 34 pounds!

He’s lost his first puppy teeth in the past week. Several now, top and bottom, which are replaced with adult teeth by the next day.

He’s now got all his puppy boosters and rabies vaccine. His next vet visit will be his neuter surgery. We’re likely going to do this in January, in his sixth month.

Besides a vet visit this week, we also had a plumber stop by. Here you need a water bleeder in place from October until May. This runs constant cold water to keep your pipes and drains from freezing. The one in this house is in the back laundry room, on the laundry water supply. It is insanely loud and had such bad condensation it was making a mess. Our plumber tweaked it for us, which fixed how it works, but if anything, it is louder now. So Jeff’s wrapped it all in a few layers of foam pipe cover to muffle the sound and stop the condensation. Guess we’ll just have to put up with the noise this winter until we dream up another option.

The first winter in a new house is always an adventure. We’re working on mastering when to keep the woodstove stoked, and when we let the oil monitor backup kick-in instead. It’s really all about heating in cycles, mostly between 60-80F. The nature of heating with wood is the cycles. It’ll be too hot for a bit, then too cool, but the house ends up at a pretty decent balance without burning much wood at all. Unlike our big Napoleon woodstove in Nova Scotia, this stove doesn’t need to be packed tight for a long burn, and actually puts out a remarkable amount of heat with just 3 splits in it.

The snow is piling up outside already, and the temperature is dropping. By Wednesday we’re forecast to be -28°C at night.
Last night’s time change means it is light earlier in the morning, but it’ll be dark sooner in the afternoon, which means we will have to save the dog park outings until the weekend, or venture out with our head lamps. Soon the sun won’t hit town directly at all, so the time change isn’t that significant.
Our town’s dog park has the most incredible view. It is at the north end of town, at the base of the Moosehide Slide, giving a nice view of the Yukon River, both up and down the river, and of Dawson City. It’s a nice, fenced, 1.25 acres with rocks, trees, and agility equipment. We meet Hank’s brother there a few times a week to tire them out. Hank’s sister joined us this week! She is smaller than Hank and his brother, but looks so much like Hank it is easy to mix them up! Hank’s on top here. She may be smaller, but can put both of her brothers in their place!Having a husky puppy means exercise! It is best to walk him in the morning, before work, but sometimes I’m just not up that early. Ideally I get up at 6:30, get the fire started, and then take him for a walk, but it’s tough to get up so early!

Here are a few quick pictures during our lunch time walk on Friday. The ferry came out of the river earlier this week. The flowing ice chunks are getting thicker now. With that nice iced area already starting to form just down river, I’m hopeful we’ll have a good ice road across the river, going straight across, this winter. If you remember last winter, an ice dam up the river prevented the ice chunks from flowing and sealing up, and the ice road that went in was long and went way up stream, and was never official, or maybe even that safe, haha, if you can ever call driving on the river safe. Snowmobiles have been out and about for a few weeks. People are scrambling to get wood for the winter. Most people have a place to stay now, or they’ve already travelled south.It’s that time of year where the tourists are all gone and the locals come back out. When you go to a restaurant, you know half the people, and even if you don’t, everyone is friendly, jovial, and easy to talk to. I still think people that live here are happier than people I’ve ever met anywhere, but Jeff thinks just the happy people go out and do stuff. Either way, no complaints here. I’m just grateful to never hear people whining about wintery weather. We love it 🙂