Yurt living
Carrie posted in What's happening on October 13th, 2009
Thanksgiving came and went quickly it seems. The long weekend was a welcomed break.  I mean, 3 weeks of this full-time job thing and I’m beat. Slept late and did some puttering, then dinner at a University friends’…place. It’s a yurt. Yeah like, Mongolian engineering at its finest. I’m talking 1 room circular tent made out of yak wool. Well, theirs is a little more modern (not many yaks around these parts).
Actually the yurt is quite cozy. We had 10 people all sitting in there (on log stumps for stools) and even had to open the door because it got too warm with the wood stove running. My friends are borrowing land for their yurt and have built the platform and set it up, this Thanksgiving being the Christening of the first night in the yurt. They have electricity (”we’re going hungry but we got tunes!”) but no running water and a good trek to the outhouse. Together, with the dog, the happy couple will spend the entire winter. Good luck with that.
We also tried to pit-bake a chicken. You dig a pit and line it with stones, then light a fire to heat up the stones. Lay sticks across (like an oven rack) and sprucebows and then the chicken on that. Cover the chicken with a burlap sack and heap on the dirt. The rocks are supposed to cook the chicken, as you may have guessed, but we apparently need more practice at ours. It was quite funny when we checked on the chicken’s progress only to find it somewhat warm. Quickly Jarod and Laird grabbed the chicken before anyone noticed and scurried off into the yurt to boil it! Later Jarod jokingly complained that dinner was delayed because my potatoes took so long to bake in the fire. It was a great boiled Thanksgiving chicken though.
It was a fun night of reminiscing on school (there were 10 Lakehead Grads there of various years) and talking about the upcoming mushing race circuit and who was running what. The whole thing was very…organic.
On Sunday night we had dinner with the gang. We even had a big enough table for everyone to sit, so we decided to dress up all fancy and make a night of it. We had so much food (and a vat of mulled wine) but finished it all. During intermission, between dinner and dessert, we played road hockey on the street. We could barely see the tennis ball in the streetlamps and we used someone’s winter tires as goal posts. It made dessert that much more deserved.
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