ice weather

I poured about a dozen tall ice-cream buckets of water on the pool area. This only managed to wet down about half of the depression left by the pool. This will take a lot more water than I had thought. It wet through the snow and slushed up on the mud. I am hoping that it will freeze up overnight and allow my second and subsequent coats to fill in the area a bit more evenly.


If this doesn't work as I thought, I will stop without doing the entire area. I can now see why they usually flood the rinks with a hose. If this does works, maybe next year I will bring a hose inside to thaw the ice and use that to flood the rink.

That is, as long as the use of the rink outweighs the annoyance in making the rink.

snow fun

The weather held until last week. We have had a beautiful November so far and then got hit by a blanket of snow - 42 cm of snow in fact. Our entire snowfall last winter was only 80 cm. (For those of you who don’t understand metric, we had about two and a half feet of snow last winter and have already received a foot and a half so far.
Even though most of it has fallen in a little over a week, it hasn’t been too bad. It has been the light, fluffy snow that is easy to shovel instead of the wet, sticky that is a pain to shovel (but great for snowmen). It has come down in dumps of less than 10 cm a day – which means it didn’t overwhelm us. As long as we shoveled, we were able to keep on top of it.

My daughter has started building her ice-slide in the front yard. She did one last year as well. A three or four foot rise was enough to slide her the length of the front yard. She even had a few bends and a landing area.

Also, after the first dusting of snow, I moved the pool to the side and put away the other tarp. This will hopefully allow us to create a small rink in the depression in the back. Then, when my daughter feels that she must skate, we can just send her out back instead of going to the park every time. I’ve been toying with making one for a few years so we’ll see how it turns out and how much trouble it is.

Pre-Christmas

Just like that we are now in pre-Christmas. Halloween was as busy as usual with the costumes and decorations, and then the undecorating.

Then we had to set up the lights before the snow comes. We set up the Christmas tree last weekend – it’s a bit early but we’re getting pretty booked up for Christmas already and have to find the time when we can.

I hate to start any big projects during this time – as they usually need a fair amount of space and everything is all cozy right now. I still want to try to paint something this year and maybe work away at assembling the 40K bits I’ve bought so that I could potentially paint them as well. I also want to try using the Hotz western town files to put together some 1/35 scale buildings but that’s a bit more involved.

Lego boxes - gang aft agley

With a bit of cleaning, I had a bunch of Logo boxes to use. The Lego boxes have a nice small corrugated cardboard that makes them great for projects. I was going to use them as the basis for the upsized western buildings based on the Whitewash City set.

Unfortunately I was going to wait until after the Halloween projects were done before starting any new projects. My wife (the same one who pushes me to start my costume projects much earlier in the year) gets twitchy if stuff gets left around for any length of time - which is the other reason I wait until the last moment (the main reason is the kids don't make up their minds until almost the last moment).

Quick ending – she crumpled up most of the nice big boxes into the recycling on October 29th. Not even folded so I was only able to salvage two smaller boxes. We’ll see if I can still make use of them.

figure painting total - Oct

With all the costume work, nothing was painted. I did get more bits and completed more models.

40K Ork Trukk (in bits) – 1
40K Ork Battlewagon (in bits) – 1
40K Ork Deff Dread (in bits) – 2

Oct figures bought – 4, figures painted – 0
Running total 2010 – figures bought 94, figures painted 0