I can't quite get a handle on the exact population here perhaps because it is always changing. I'll take an average and say around 70,000 in the city and then that can increase some say by 10,000 others say 20,000 due to people living in camps out in the oilsands.

The weather changed drastically after we had a few days of rain, the temperature went from the high 30's to the low 20's. On one rainy afternoon we took a trip to the Oilsands Discovery Centre. It's a museum set up by the Alberta government and some private investors who I assume would be oil companies in particular Suncor and Syncrude. There's a website which I'll put a link to in the sidebar. It has links page to interesting and educational sites across Alberta.

We were only on our third exhibit when Hannah was all of sudden mysteriously covered in a black tar like substance. She had it all over her hands and on her brand new, pink rain jacket. Great! Off we went to the Information Desk for help. The woman behind the desk got a bottle of baby oil and worked on her for a few minutes until her hands were clean. "Will it come off her jacket?" I asked annoyed. She gave me the oil and water science lesson, and then a list of cleaning products that 'should' work. It turns out the substance on her hands was bitumen. Have you ever tried to get bitumen off a pink, nylon jacket? No, of course you haven't. It doesn't come off, so don't even bother trying. And, no, it's not supposed to be accessible in the museum either, so the staff had to go on a hunt armed with baby oil soaked cloths to find it.

What is bitumen, you ask? Good question. According to the definition on their website it's a heavy, carbon rich and extremely viscous oil. Geologists believe naturally occurring deposits of bitumen are formed from the remains of ancient, microscopic algae and other once-living things. These organisms died and their remains were deposited in the mud on the bottom of the ocean or lakes. Under a lot of heat and pressure of burial it is transformed into bitumen. Some guy in the 1880's claimed that Alberta had an unlimited supply of it. Well, we weren't using quite as much of it in the 1800's as we are now but there's a statistic that says we've only used 1% of what is actually available in the past 40 years. Nothing lasts forever though.

Once we were as cleaned up as we could get we resumed our self-directed tour of the museum. I tried to read and learn but the whole thing isn't geared toward keeping small children interested while adults read. There is a children's lab where they can play/learn and they run learning programs for kids all year. There's a huge focus on social and environmental responsibility but even with a committment to sustainable development, they admit that a lot of damage is done and that the environment can't be restored to its former state. No lies there. There is actually a complicated process of draining and moving the muskeg before they begin digging in order to help with land reclamation after they are done extracting the bitumen. It takes up to two years just to drain and it sounded like this is a fairly new process that they haven't been doing for long.

Art's plant is interesting in that the process which occurs to extract the bitumen from the gound is actually creating the energy to power the plant through a steam distillation process that is piped deep into the earth. There's a good diagram on the Long Lake website (in the links) which shows how it's done. This refers to their plant being energy efficient which they do tout.

So we got through the exhibits pretty quickly. The most exciting thing for Hannah was the dinosaur fossil found at one of the sites and the giant tires on the heavy hauler. We hung out at the play area just long enough for Josiah to manage to find some bitumen of his own. I noticed it on his hands but wasn't quick enough to grab him before they were stuffed into his mouth. Ugh! To avoid having it all over him I immediately grabbed him and immobilized his arms and headed for the Information Desk again with him struggling to get loose. His inability to move his arms and wipe the crud all over me triggered the scream reflex. The helpful and confused staff went to retrieve the baby oil yet again. We managed to get him cleaned up and his fascination with having his hands cleaned deactivated the scream reflex and managed to interfere with the tantrum reflex much to my relief. They asked me a lot of questions about the bitumen and how my children kept finding it and I was beginning to think they thought we had brought it in with us. We couldn't isolate the contaminated area as Josiah had been toddling around the play lab like baby Frankenstein with his arms outstretched and touching everything in sight. Consequently, they had to baby oil everything. We bought some postcards and some souvineirs and then we went downtown for our first meal out since we got here. The guys work long stressful days and by the time they get home they just have time and energy to eat and watch an hour of TV and go to bed. Lee has left to go home to BC for vacation so we thought we'd treat ourselves and then take a pizza home to daddy.