We’re in the process of making a backyard ice rink.

It’s not going so well.

There are two methods of making a home ice rink. The first involves laying out a plastic liner the size of the rink and then filling it with water and letting it freeze. We made a rink a few years ago using this method, and it worked well. It used a tremendous amount of water, and a leak in the liner meant that the ice filled most of the backyard right up to the house. We spent time chipping the ice out and carrying it to the front in the spring to keep the water off our foundation.

The second method is to stomp the snow down in a nice flat area and then wet it into slush, let it freeze, add more water, let it freeze and so on until the ice is built up. That’s what I tried this year.

I made the snow as flat as I could manage and started flooding. I spent 3 hours hosing water into the snow, and the snow kept sucking it up for a lot longer than I thought it would before it was wet slush as it was supposed to be.

As it turns out “as flat as I could manage” is nowhere near flat enough, and nowhere near level enough. The water runs to a few areas that are obviously low spots and pools there. I have been out for at least 3 hour long flooding sessions, and much of the surface isn’t built up at all, because the low areas aren’t filled yet. This means that much of the surface is still lumpy.

With the liner method, all the time is put in up front, a day to fill the big pool. But when it freezes it’s pretty much done. I liked that.

This rink is going to need at least 3 more flooding sessions to get it smooth enough to skate on properly. It will likely take the same amount of time that filling the liner would, but it’s spread in 1 hour blocks over the course of a few weeks.

Next year, I’m using a liner.

[EDIT: I did use a liner the next year. See article here.

I’ve looked for a while to find a program to use to organize and view and edit my digital photos.

I quite liked the slick interface of Picasa by Google, but the feature that is touted as its strength is one I hated: the ability to have virtual albums without rearranging the files on disk. I like having the files rearranged on disk into directories and subdirectories. I don’t have the time or desire to tag every image with the names of every person in the picture and the location and all of that so I can call up every image of MrsPages in one fell swoop. If you do, this program is for you. You take the pictures off your camera and leave them where they sit. Picasa lets you organize them, and keeps track of which picture belong together, so you never have to reorganize the files on your hard drive.

I want my photos to be divided into subdirectories by year, then by month, then by event:

I want to be able to automatically browse them that way. I had a hard time getting Picasa to even show me a directory structure, because it was so “friendly” that it wanted to keep me away from all that.

I now use (and love) Faststone Image Viewer. It doesn’t have “albums”, it just lets me look through my carefully named folders on disk. It has some great features for doing touch-ups, cropping, resizing and other basic (and not-so-basic) photo operations. A great viewer, powerful editor, and it’s FREE.

As a bonus, it comes with a fabulous batch editor. You can take an entire directory of photos and resize them (for upload to a website for example) and add watermarks or text. Check out the galleries on the Manitoba Living History website to see that in action.

Faststone is easy to use, very powerful, and lets me work the way I want to work. What more can you ask?

Okay, not quite, but my passport did arrive.

Opinions are mixed on whether or not I managed to pull off the “don’t look like a terrorist in your photo” thing.

My wife is a history nut. Anything to do with history instantly has her attention. She’d teach nothing but history to the kids and let them figure the rest out on their own if she could, so when we saw some members of the Manitoba Living History Society at a local event, we knew we’d have to get involved.

The area around the Red River was settled by the Selkirk Settlers from Scotland and Ireland in 1812. The MLHS tries to re-enact that period in dress and trades and skills. The kids have a blast dressing in their “history clothes” and playing the games that the kids of the days would have played.

We’re only scratching the surface of the possibilities. We’re busy enough that just getting all seven of us appropriately dressed and able to attend basic day-long events has taken a few years. We’re always on the lookout at the GoodWill for shoes and clothes that could easily be modified. I’m hoping to get into some period woodworking, clothmaking on our loom and perhaps even pounding out a few nails on the blacksmith’s forge.

It’s funny, I realized that with all of my modern wage-earning skills, I wouldn’t even know how to go to the bathroom in 1812. For all of my education, I’d be useful only as a manual labourer. Picking up these skills will be a family project.

We’ll be blogging more on this as we get to various events, but for now you can go look at the pictures from last year’s weekend long “in period” campout. The absolute best roast I have ever eaten was served that night: fresh bison roast, marinated overnight in beer, cooked slowly over a campfire all day turning on a spit. Absolutely amazing.

Of course, the company, the fun, the learning, the work, it was all wonderful….

But that roast bison… Yum. If that’s what the past was like, I’m all for it.

–MrPages

I applied for my passport last week. I got to the Passport Office midmorning, expecting to wait a short while and be home for lunch. I was sadly mistaken.

Some background: As of the 23rd of January, 2007, anyone traveling into the United States by air, regardless of where they are coming from, will require a passport. Until now, Canadians didn’t need a passport to travel to the States at all. We’ve always considered getting passports, but with seven of us it would be a costly venture, and they expire, so we’d like to wait until we’re actually planning some sort of trip.

Anyway, back to the passport office. There were over a hundred people in line. TV news crews were filming a story (“And, coming up after the commercial, some idiots wait until the last minute.”). A smiling commissionaire was handing out tickets with numbers on them. My ticket was an order of magnitude off the one on the NOW SERVING board.

I wanted to yell “But I’m not waiting until the last minute! I’m not flying until March! All of you goofballs that ARE waiting until the last minute are gumming up the system so that I have to be here now!”. I looked for the “Not waiting until last minute, really!” line, hoping it would be much shorter and would involve beverages and snacks but alas, it was not to be. The commissionaire thought it was a good idea, though.

The line was so long they had to snake it around the room and double it back on itself a few times, so I caught snippets of conversations from just about everyone there. The Passport Office people should seriously consider hiring most of the people from my lineup, because they all seemed to know exactly how to make the process work much more quickly and efficiently.

Mid-afternoon, after four and a half hours shuffling around the room in some sort of demented slow motion bunny-hop, I handed the lady behind the counter my application, my pair of “trying hard not to look like a terrorist” photos, my debit card and my best attempt at a smile after standing four and a half hours in line 2 weeks after knee surgery.

4 paper clips, 2 rubber stamps, a manila folder, a “Have a nice afternoon” and a debit receipt later, I was free to go see if my car was towed.

When I’m Prime Minister, boy, there’s going to be some changes. I hope I’ll be able to find all those people from the line to advise me.

–MrPages