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.

Time to Flood

 Temperatures FINALLY dropping to a decent -8 to -15c at night... Got a bit of snow last night. Figured this was my chance to get the rink going (finally).  I snowplowed the 5" of snow out of the rink and put the liner down... Started flooding at approx 1:30pm today... So far, so good...

5C and...

Not falling very quickly.  In fact, it'll be into December before the nights will be cold enough for me to even begin thinking about flooding.

 The other day I was outside doing yardwork in shorts and a t-shirt.

 It's the end of November.

 Gah.

2009-2010 Edition

 It was a beautiful +10C type of day on Saturday, so I put up the main framework for the rink... Only took about an hour and a half and it was complete.  I still have to drive a few 2x4 stakes down along the 2x12s for added support... Probably do that today.

 I've been having difficulties with Home Depot and the liner I've been buying every year.  Seems like the first time I called them (I've been visiting the store every 3 or 4 days to see if they've come in) they stated they weren't carrying them anymore.    Then I called Jay in the Soo to check his store - voila.  They had 9.  I called our store back and, "Oh yes, we just don't have any and we don't know if we're going to get any" was the tale I was told this time.

 Jay has offered to pick me up one in the Soo and throw it on the Greyhound to get to me.

Grr.

 Of course, it's still way above zero here... barely gets below 0 at night yet.   Crappy summer, but it's carrying over to the fall.