Category Archives: around home

around home, Canada, friends, snow

Trying out the new foot appendages

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After the eating, working & driving too much of the previous week it has been nice to be at home & a lot more active over the last few days.  Especially as the weekend was free to go skiing finally.  Thursday I got to try out my rock shoes for the first time at the bouldering gym (“gime, what’s a gime?”).  At least after a couple hours of that I didn’t have any really sore muscles over the next few days.

The weather forecast over the weekend was for (relative) warmth & clear skies, so I was keen to finally see if I could remember how to ski.  After a reasonable sleep in Saturday morning (much needed after [perhaps too-] generously babysitting Finn on Friday night so Megan & Alex could go see Harry Potter – Finn screamed most of the three & a half hours) & Megan being unable to join me I headed up to Sunshine alone.  I must never get to Sunshine so late on a weekend – it’s not fun having to walk even half the length of the parking lot.

The early season snow wasn’t great but it was nice to try out my skis & have a little refresher on what was a stunning day.  There was no wind & I think the mercury sat around -10 to -5ºC, so it wasn’t unpleasant on the chairlifts.  I hit the new Strawberry lift first (sucker for little traditions like that) – it’s a huge improvement on the old one, much faster & now a quad-chair.  I got quite a few runs in there, off Wawa & down from Jack Rabbit to the mid-gondola station before meeting another Aussie (a friend of Alex & Megan’s whom I’d been for one G8 ride with some months ago), Joel, his girlfriend, Kristy & their colleague, Anya/Anja/????, for lunch .

After a leisurely lunch (the poutine was average, as was the service) & getting to know everyone a bit (not to mention many Fort Mac stories – always one of the hazards of sitting with a group of people that all work together) we were off up for quite a few runs down from Standish.  It was nice to be skiing with a group, as although it’s nice to ski at your own pace & not have to wait around when you are alone, it gets a bit boring after a while & skiing with others better than you helps improve your own skiing – much like biking & many other things I suspect.   The views from the top of the Angel chair across the meadows to Mt Assiniboine were spectacular & rather a lot whiter than last time I was out this way.

After a rather rocky ski-out, what better way to treat bodies that have forgotten the aches of a day’s skiing than a good soak in the Banff hot springs?  We couldn’t think of one, so that was where we headed & it was great.  The day finished with a few beers & snacks at the Drake (somehow I’ve managed to avoid it over the previous seven months) – good yam fries (yams in this country are what we call kumara or sweet potatoes back home, not those tiny little red twisted vegetables).

Sunday dawned an even better day.  James (a workmate from Lafarge) & I were heading up the Spray Valley for an easy ski-tour to Chester Lake to start off the touring season.  The -20ºC at the parking lot didn’t really seem that bad & with the skins on & climbing up the trail it wasn’t long before the jacket was off.  We climbed for about 75 minutes before I was hungry (surprised I lasted that long) so we had lunch in the sun.  Getting past the annoying flats parts on the way back, the skins were off & we had a pretty cruisy run down to truck passing many others on their way up to enjoy the glorious day.  Thankfully not much of note happened this time – last time I was up here was the second & last of my shoulder dislocations.   There was snow, could do with more, & the views were good.

around home, travel, UK

Damn you Air Canada & referrals

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In the end I wasn’t successful in convincing Air Canada to shift my return flight back a few months.  So now I’m going back to London for a massive three-day visit, at not inconsiderable expense, at the end of February.  About the only good part of this is that I’ll get to see good friends & family – some of whom I probably wouldn’t see for some years otherwise.

Now that I actually have the odd visitor, the Stats Tracker (that’s what that funny little symbol is down  under the Twitter feed) has some little things of interest.  Apparently someone in Houston is using Netscape 4 – I don’t think I’ve seen Netscape since I was in Bangkok in 1996.  The best one so far is that someone stumbled on this post by googling “piranha fire dept saw”.  I’m not sure what I’m more surprised by – that that search term got to my blog or that someone actually searched for that.  But my little blog & its related search terms don’t really compare to what this occurrence reminded me of.

around home, Canada, snow

Winter yells “Hello!” finally, orbitals & Loops

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Just for a change, the week’s weather forecast in the valley has actually been mostly correct.  It’s been cold & doesn’t seem to have stopped snowing much at all.  After all this time, it’s nice to finally make winter’s acquaintance.  I think it’s been, on the whole, colder & with more snowfall than the entire five week period I was here over January & early February.  The biggest downside so far is having to get up ten minutes earlier to make sure I get to work on time after scraping/brushing all the snow off the car, warming the car up & driving a little slower than normal.  Being at work all week, I haven’t had the opportunity to get any decent photos during daylight, but here’s a few I snapped late this afternoon.

I don’t think we’ll be using our lawn chairs again for a while.

Don’t leave your bike outside.

 Looking across the tracks to Lady Mac at dusk, with a clear sky for the first time in a week.

This week at work we’ve been shovelling a fair bit of snow each morning off the path ways – another first for me.  With two concurrent kiln shuts coming to an end, there has been a fair bit going on.  I seem to have spent the last couple of days sorting & then adding steel mill balls(big steel marbles really) to the mills.  It’s a far cry from my process engineering degree in some ways, but it has everything to do with a unit operation so it’s vaguely related if you think hard enough.  The balls roll all over the place (I haven’t managed to spill too many so far), but throwing the first few in to each wheelbarrow they roll all over the place & then bounce off each other in interesting ways.  Should I be worried that all I can think of are s, p, d & f orbitals, then van der Waals forces, & finally when there are a few more balls in the barrow – crystalline structures?

Next week I’m being sent to another Lafarge plant in Kamloops for the week to do another conveyor survey.  Apparently, the Kamloops plant is a baby one – so it shouldn’t take me too long & I won’t have to climb quite as many stairs or ladders.  I’m excited to have a week out of the Bow Valley & the prospect of catching up with Krysta & Steve again in Kelowna at the end of the week.  It does unfortunately mean that’ll be two weekends’ delay to the first ski of the season for me.  But I seem to have found another back-country ski buddy for the rest of the winter (Alex & I unfortunately do not have corresponding days off, any trips Megan & I do will be constrained somewhat by the Finn factor) – one of the other temps at work.  We’re an interesting bunch of temps – one is earning some money before entering police school, one is a heavy diesel mechanic, one has operated various plants up north Alberta (oil territory), one wants a millwright apprenticeship, a few want to stay on at Lafarge permanently & then there’s me – a process engineer with supervision experience on a work visa who will leave in May for some great mountain-biking.

around home, bikes, Canada, MTB

It’s always surprising just how quickly fitness fades

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Only one month ago was the previous long weekend (don’t despair – there’s another public holiday this week, Remembrance Day) & between stuffing myself with turkey & other Thanksgiving goodness I managed four good rides – including that epic Jumpingpound/Cox Hill combo.  Most of that fitness seems to have gone.  Maybe it was the cooler air, but my lungs were screaming as I climbed up to the top of the Prospector loop this afternoon.  I was annoyed at having to sit in the granny ring for much of the climbing – but pleased to clear that tricky steep bit just before the climb flattens out in the middle.

After turning at the top, it wasn’t long before a big grin was back on my face.  I wasn’t riding particularly well, but that trail is just so much fun I couldn’t help smiling.  Quickly I had a little bit more flow back in my riding.  As I was by myself, I avoided most of the more difficult trail features (some of them seem to have changed a bit – one I looked at & just couldn’t believe I’d managed to talk myself in to riding off/down it, let alone not crashed & burned) & simply enjoyed being out in the sunshine with a bone dry trail under wheel (I was going to write tyre, but now my spelling is getting confused & I couldn’t decide if tire was better or not).

This little ride was also notable for the groups I met.  Near the start I came across two guys carrying rather large crossbows who were quite keen on knowing if I had ever seen any sheep up this way.  I hadn’t, I thought sheep lived on golf courses in New Zealand.  As I rolled on to the biggest feature at the top I was mobbed by a pack of eight dogs – the two guys with them tried calling them off with some degree of success.  Still, it was somewhat unnerving to have a dog running up my escape ramp (I’m never going to attempt that gap) to the right.  After the Pennsylvanian & Kenyan dog attack incidents, I’m not all that keen on packs of barking dogs – but I escaped unharmed.

Back home Megan, Finnian & I went exploring the riverside walking path upstream as far as it would go in the relative warmth (I still think it should be a lot less than 10ºC in early November).  Megan for some reason had a hankering for poutine & I’m not one to discourage such things, so we grabbed some of that artery-clogging-pleasure on the way back.  After stumbling on that video this morning, I’ve just wasted too much time watching trail videos of rides I did in California & Utah last year.  This skiing caper best be good (when it arrives) or else I’m going to go spare in anticipation.