*Grrrrrr*

 So it was nice and cold on Saturday morning...  I stopped in at Home Depot to see if the liners were in for the rink... Luckily enough, they were...  but they'd raised the price of the 40x60 to $149 this year!  Freakin scammers!

 Got it home, and Hannah helped me put it down... Got the water running....  It filled and filled and filled...  I had a feeling that it was leaking somewhere, but there was no evidence of it anywhere.  

 Left it filling overnight.   Woke up this morning, and it was at  the same level... Checked again, and the area by the cement path was submerged in 5" of water...

And it's snowing now, with the rink 1/4 filled...  and I"m leaving for work reasons for a week in a few hours.

 NOT the start I wanted to have.  :S

Side boards

Are up!  (No picutres - I think you've seen enough of that!)

 Chainlink fence along that side is up as well and secured...

 I'm not going to make the same mistake that I did last year - Putting up the end boards BEFORE laying the liner... That just caused all sorts of problems trying to do it that way.

 So I'll go back to my regular way of base boards, then liner and filling it up - once frozen THEN I'll put up the boards...

 Temps still +10 some days here, so it may be a couple more weeks


 - k

New "boards"

 So my (ex) girlfriend has a dog named Bella that she brought into the home as a 'surprise' when we were first living together.

Odds are, I'll be keeping her when she moves...  And I'm getting tired of putting her on the chain everytime, so I figured I'd put up a chain link fence...  Which, coincidentally will run right along side my rink... kind of giving the once side of it a new "board" to keep players and pucks on the ice...

 Just a thought.

The Rain commeth...

 It's March 10th, and it's pouring rain...  

 The rink has been dead for a couple weeks now and in fact, before coming to work I poked holes in the liner to start the draining process...

 Soon the boards will come down and be stored for another summer... until a chilly November day comes along and spurs me to put them back up....

 Goodbye HIA, see you in the fall.

Hockey Day in Canada!

 Rink needs a fair bit of work before Saturday's annual game... Going to be hard between working midnights...  will see.

 Hockey Day @ Kev's house starts around 2:30 and runs into the night.... BYOB!  Fire pit, boot hockey, xbox hockey, tv hockey... gonna fire up the BBQ and cook some burgers.

 Let me know if yer interested!

Boards are up (mostly) and first skate

 Thanks to the boys coming by on a warm Tuesday night, the end boards went up with only slight difficulties.  A couple of days later, the kids too to the rink for a few hours of bliss and exercise.  Good times.

 Over Christmas it rained... Yes, rain.  In Northern Ontario at the end of December.  Combine that with snow and the entire city was a disaster. 

 The kind of snow where you have no problem paying the local pre-teens to come out and shovel for $5/hour.

 I had enough fun with doing the driveway that I decided to hold off on the rink.  I recall back to the  year prior where I attempted to clean the rink off after such a weather predicament...  It wasn't pretty.  So this year I vowed to let everything harden, then clean it off.... Unfortunately, the weather has since dipped into the -30C category - too cold to do anything.

 New Years afternoon I'm going to attempt to snowblow the rink and get a couple of floods down - in an attempt to get it semi-smooth for a friendly skate over the weekend.  

 Will see how that goes....

 

On Frozen Pond

 I wanted cold, and we sure got it.  Past week of  -10C days and -30C nights...  The ice is solid alright - but it's been too cold to put up the boards...

 Maybe next week when it warms up a bit.

 Boy, rink owners are a fussy bunch.