We just received some beautiful prints and a book in the mail from Scott Malin. Thanks Scott! Scott is also a musician, you can check him out playing bass with Great Aunt Ida and The Secret Three, two great Canadian bands.

This is our temporary sign for the store. Eventually we'll make a much bigger one. We bought the wooden letters at a craft store. When Tyler first put it together the "Z" was missing so he made one out of styrofoam. The first time he put it up some of the letters quickly blew off . Somehow he managed to find them in the snow, in the dark. When he took it down to repair it the remaining letters fell off...except for the foam Z! Now he has the letters attached by both nails and glue. It's windy out here.

This new t-shirt design (available in our shop) references a sign in Bruno. The sign was one of the first things I noticed when we arrived here last May.

I would have posted this information sooner but I've been sick with some sort of crazy stomach flu. We've been approved! Finally! In the end all we had to do was hang a curtain separating our washroom from the rest of our house. A curtain! The floor plan says it was stamped on January 5th but we didn't get it until a few days ago. In the same envelope was my FoodSafe certificate for a course I took on the 17th. It says that it’s been approved "subject to letter". The letter states, "the four seats noted for waiting are not to be used for seating unless a public washroom is provided". Whatever! The next step is the actual inspection. Tyler wants to refinish the floors first; hopefully he can get it done quickly.

Rupert and I had a stare down the other day.

We're still waiting to hear from the Saskatoon Health Region. In the meantime I've taken a part time job in Bruno helping cast railway model kits out of resin for the good folks at Pacific Mountain Scale Shops. I have never worked with resin before. I steered clear of the sculpture department at Emily Carr when I was in school. This will be an interesting learning experience (hopefully I can keep up). Check out the cute little port-a-potties in the top photo!

I received a surprise package for the shop yesterday that contained several copies of the CD Let the Record Show by Ghostrain (Luke Gustafson). I had never heard of Ghostrain before but Tyler and I gave it a listen and we really liked it! The CD is very nicely packaged in a silkscreened gatefold. Our favorite track was "Heart Ache: 4 Miles". Thanks Luke!

Rupert is back! He survived. I haven't been able to get a photo of him because all of our windows are now either covered in frost or blocked by large snowdrifts. He clearly has a warm place to sleep somewhere because he definitely wasn't in the shelter we built him during the blizzard. Tyler revamped the entryway so that it curves right around the corner of our house in hopes of keeping snow from blowing inside. Yesterday when Tyler left for work at 5:30am he noticed Rupert came out of his shelter (with Tyler was at a safe distance) and drowsily began stretching. He still won't come inside our house even though it's -30. He's a mysterious creature.

Some more blizzard footage (this time of our backyard). Tyler made a futile attempt at shoveling snow. His aim was to make a path so that Rupert could get to his shelter if he needed to. Rupert was nowhere in sight and within hours the path Tyler cleared was completely covered.

Here's some video footage I took of the blizzard. I shot it out of our storefront door which looks onto Main Street, Bruno.

We experienced a completely insane blizzard today. The photos don't do it justice. I must say I'm terribly worried about Rupert. I tried to coax him in the other day but he refused to come closer than 10 feet of me. As soon as I closed the door he ran up to eat the food I left and then he was off again.

I recently purchased this wooden mailbox from local craftsman Alois Helgert. It's another item we will hopefully be selling in the shop, when we open...

This is the final floor plan we sent to the supervisor of "safe communities" at the Saskatoon Health Region. She's the one stopping us from opening. We need her to stamp it and officially reject it on paper before we take further action.

Our espresso equipment arrived. Normally I would be ecstatic but now it's an event tinged with sadness. I think I'll go over there right now and make myself a sad little latté.

The holidays are over and it's back to business! We recently received a couple of very generous packages from Vancouver full of items for the shop. Jason McLean, artist extraordinaire, sent several of his own books as well as generously gathering together books by other Vancouver artists such as Mark Delong, Mark Connery, Owen Plummer, Aaron Rosner, J. Kennedy & Jonathan Petersen, The Lions, Andrew Dick, S.P. Ehman, Jaret Penner and many others. We also received an animation on DVD by Barry Doupe and music by Nil Bells and Tim Olive & Fritz Welch. We've been told there's more on the way. Wow. Thanks Jason.

As far as the bathroom fiasco...we have a plan. Stay tuned!