Ice skating at the Olympic Plaza in Calgary, Canada.
Front yard rink
Well what else do you do when it’s -15 degrees outside and you have an itch to play hockey? The idea of the rink came about one day when my roommate (flatmate) Gregor and I were sitting round talking about how his old roommate had built a rink in their backyard. So I was like “dammit, I’m buildin’ us a rink today!”, so I googled as many things as I could on rink building to figure out the best plan of attack. You can build them by building a snow wall and spraying water directly on to the ground, but this apparently messes up the lawn and takes longer to freeze, so I headed to Walmart and picked up a rink liner for $10 (big sheet of plastic) and filled it up with water. A day and a bit later and we had a fully functioning ice rink in our front yard 🙂
Getting the ice surface smooth is no easy task. I tried leaving hose on it for a while, but it just created a nice big lump on one side of the rink 🙁 Buckets of hot water did the trick, but it took quite a few to cover it.
Anna visits :)
Anna Williams came to visit me in Calgary 🙂 Unfortunately she wont let me put any photos of her online 🙁 But here’s a photo of the beautiful sunset we experienced while walking back from the Calgary zoo.
Chemistry Halloween
Halloween party with chemists in Calgary.
Calgary Hitmen
Mike Boyle took me to see a Western Hockey League (WHL) game featuring the Calgary Hitmen at the Saddledome in Calgary. The game was very exciting, lots of big hits, lots of skill and a WAY higher level of hockey than I’d seen before. Unfortunately the NHL lockout was on at the time so I couldn’t see any NHL games so this was the next best thing.
Halloween pumpkins
I carved my very first halloween pumpkin 🙂 They sell specially grown pumpkins for the purpose over here. I was very stoked with my effort and proudly displayed on my front door step.
After going to a halloween party with a bunch of fellow chemists, I realised that mine wasn’t quite in the same league as the locals efforts …
