Archive for November, 2004

Toboganning

My roommate (flatmate in Kiwi speak) and I went tobogganing. Of course those crazy Canadian kids decided it would be a good idea to build a nice ramp exactly where the natural flow of the hill goes so you end up going backwards at full speed over a ridiculously steep jump! We had a scary fast purple flying saucer style sled and a suicidal magic carpet to risk our lives and limbs on. We had lots of fun though, albeit we were the oldest kids on the hill :P

Ryan Hellyer on a sled

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Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

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 :)

Me (Ryan Hellyer) watering my new rink

Getting the ice surface is no easy task. I tried just 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.

Our font yard ice rink

 

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.

Skyline from the Calgary Zoo