Going Underground

I will start this post with a warning:

There are no pictures of Caleb in this post

If you are looking for pictures of Caleb, please move to the next post.

Yesterday, the Underground staff at the mine invited all of the bean counters out to the site to tour the underground (it gives us context on the nature of the beans we count). Myself and three of my co-workers went out to site and took a tour of the Underground mine and the Open Pit mine.

For those of you who I haven't spoken to about this before, the Diavik Diamond mine is currently undergoing a transition from mining all of the diamonds out of two big pits in the ground to mining the diamonds out of tunnels underground. The transition is pretty exciting for the mine because it extends the life of the mine from 2013 to 2020 and beyond (the pits are almost all mined out).

Here is a giant picture of what the mine looks like. Click the picture to get the full sized version, but I caution you that the picture is huge.



Once we got underground, the mine managers took us around to see all of the equipment and some of the infrastructure. It is pretty impressive the amount of work they have done. The tunnels are drilled into solid granite, so the mine is quite stable; however, one of the biggest challenges of the mine is that the ore is all under a lake. As a result, it feels like it is constantly raining when you are underground. In order to prevent the mine from flooding, there are some very large pumping stations and a very large water treatment plant that could provide water to a city of a few hundred thousand people.

We also saw a few of the pieces of underground heavy equipment. This is a picture of me pretending to drive one of the big shovels.


We then took a tour of the Open Pit and saw some of the large shovels and haul trucks.

For reference, the tires on the truck below are twice as tall as I am.


After that, it was time to hang up our hard hats and head back to Yellowknife.


Anyways, this is a bit of a short post, as I am on my way out.

Merry Christmas.

Moving Day!!

Well, we are now nicely settled into our new apartment. The move went very smoothly and Caleb was a real trooper. On Friday he helped mommy to move all the closet stuff over. He loved to crawl around in big circles in the empty apartment. On Saturday we started to move all the really big stuff and though he was a little confused... he adapted really well. He has already gotten the hang of our new layout and has spent the last few days exploring all the new nooks and crannies of our apartment. This will likely be our last post until after Christmas as Caleb and I are leaving on Monday for Alberta. (Hooray!!)

Caleb eating real food! Yeah right. Actually it's an onion that he discovered in the drawer while I was cooking. He played with it for a long time. But I don't think he ever really tasted it.

Caleb checking out our new kitchen cupboards. For those of you who have been to our old apartment, you know that the cabinets were not so lovely and made of metal. Our new ones are too but the cabinet doors are white instead of the horrible fake wood... and they have handles. Which our old ones didn't... making them especially Caleb-proof. He couldn't open them at all. He was very pleased to discover that he could open our new ones and spent many happy moments opening them, banging them shut and then opening them again. The cupboards have been rearranged so that everything Caleb can reach is okay (i.e. pots or tupperware). This is necessary because the cupboard base is metal so we can't attach any child proofing.

We walked around Niven Lake with our friends Nikki, Curtis and their baby Winnie. Here is Winnie all bundled up, being carried by Curtis.

And Caleb all bundled up getting a ride with Byron.

Caleb really enjoyed playing on the dolly we had borrowed to help with the move.

But not as much as he loves the camera. Shortly after the first picture, he flung himself off in his typical Caleb fashion (with little regard for personal safety) in a desperate attempt to get to the camera before mommy put it out of reach. Despite his best efforts he was too slow.

Our favorite part of the new apartment... the dining room.

And last but not least... a video. Now I didn't have a long clip of something interesting so I put together a bunch of shorter clips. Enjoy!