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Weblog -January 2011
Tuesday (Dec 26/11): when we arrived at Bedrock we discovered that there was almost no snow in the woods and no ice on the lake (not exactly a winter wonderland). However it was just beginning to snow as we drove the last few miles and I knew that my quest to find the meteorite was in big trouble. As soon as I could get away I went for a walk around the point just in case a meteorite the size of a small car had crash landed. I didn’t find anything and the snow started to come down harder. By the next morning there was around 4 inches of snow on the ground and I knew that my hope of finding the meteorite was over for a while. This is what is going to happen: for the rest of my life I will “keep my eye out” for a piece of that damn thing –but I will never find it. It is supposed to be black in colour, metallic and perhaps broken up into pieces the size of golf balls or even smaller.
Wednesday: We did have a “winter wonderland” on Wednesday and the main event for the day was receiving a delivery of lumber with which we will construct a new floating dock. Construction will start down by the lake in the near future.
Thursday: On Thursday the lake froze over. The temperature had gone down to around -15 degrees overnight and in the morning there was fog rising like crazy from the middle of the lake. (It was already frozen close to shore –and fog-free). In a couple of hours the fog dissipated and there was the barest of skim coats all the way across to the other side.
Lindsay and Ryan arrived for a short visit. We had a long game of Sequence in which the girls kicked our butts. Our guests also made a heroic effort on the jigsaw puzzle that Kathy has started started. It is half done now.
I’ve been spending a lot of time under the cottage installing a new water heater. Changing the location of the water heater will allow me to shut down the plumbing system inside the cottage. Everything will be allowed to freeze except a small enclosure around the pump, pressure tanks and hot water heater. The enclosure won’t cost much to heat and when we want to come up in the winter we will be able to turn on the heat in the cottage with the freeze alarm (and have the place warm upon arrival.
Friday: I was surprised to spot a dead dear out on the ice this morning. The carcass was down in the narrows perhaps a kilometre away from Bedrock. There are two ways that dear die out on the ice. One way is to fall through and drown. The other is to spread-eagle on slick ice and break a leg. This dear apparently spread-eagled because the whole carcass is on top of the ice. Of course this makes it an especially good treat for the scavengers because the meat is so accessible.
There were a great many birds around the carcass and I watched the festivities for a while through my new binoculars. The scene was a long way off to view without a telescope but after a while I realized there were two species of birds around the dead dear. Six big vultures were taking turns feeding and perhaps eight or ten crows were hanging around hoping for a few scraps. Once, all of the birds flew away individually or in small groups but when I looked later they were all back.
I picked up the binoculars every half hour or so to see what was going on and around noon the scene changed dramatically. All of a sudden, the 6 vultures were replaced by two eagles –one feeding and the other patiently waiting. They changed up every few minutes. There were still a bunch of crows (a murder?) hanging about too.
Saturday: This morning there were 4 eagles rather than only two. However, the carcass was greatly diminished overnight and I suspect that this means the coyotes found the prize and were working away on it overnight.
We had Ian and Anke for lunch today and watched a DVD movie to celebrate New Year’s Eve. We turned off the lights around 11pm.
Sunday: (New Year’s Day): I can’t see any trace of the deer carcass and there are no scavengers hanging around. The ice looks like it would be OK to walk or skate on but we have not seen anybody out there, the temperature is +4 degrees and it is raining (so our confidence in the condition of the ice is substantially diminished). The ‘winter wonderland’ has disappeared.
I know that very cold weather is on the way and I am wondering if there could be perfect conditions for skating on the lake be in a couple of days. The hard freeze needs to happen in calm conditions (or the ice will be ripply). As well, it cannot snow –that would wreak everything.
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All 3 of our daughters have taken planes to far away places. Lindsay went to Whistler with Ryan’s extended family, Amy is in Mexico with Pete and another couple and Kaylee is with Eddie’s family in Florida. It must be nice.
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January 7/12 (Bedrock)
I came to Bedrock alone for an overnight stay. When I leave we will be heating only the plumbing enclosure rather than the whole cottage. Before we come back I will turn on the heat from Toronto.
Stony Lake has an inch of wet snow on top of the ice so it is a little difficult to assess the conditions for walking or snowmobiling. I have not seen any snowmobilers out but there was a guy skating on a small patch that he had cleared down Northey’s Bay. As well, a girl rode by on a bicycle –WHAT A GREAT IDEA. When I move up I will make sure I have studded tires for my mountain bike. Riding around on the ice would be almost as much fun as skating.
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I reached the 5 million meter mark on my Concept 2. I did it on the first day back after a 3 week layoff. I will update my Virtual Row in the near future.
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I still can’t get over what one of the men I work with told me at our little Christmas party. When he was 14 his father decided he was big enough to plough the fields of their farm. This would be no big deal for a kid in Canada but Jimmy is from the Azores and he had to do it with a hand plough and two bulls (beasts of burden).
Jimmy was lucky though. His father let him use the well trained bulls rather than the rookie team. He was also lucky to get off that island and come to Canada. His prospects in the Azores were dismal.
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January 11/12
Report #5 on my Virtual Rowing Trip
Reaching the 5 million meter mark on the Concept 2 had me wondering how far I had gotten on my virtual row. As in the past, I downloaded my weekly mileage from my online logbook at the Concept 2 Website and put it on a spreadsheet. Then I went to Google Earth and calculated the elapsed distances to various key points along the way. I put that information on the same spreadsheet and cross referenced the data. This is how the trip unfolds: On March 31/2011 I reached Havana, Cuba and 2 months later on May 31 I got to the extreme west end of the island. I rowed across ---- and made it to Cancun, Mexico on August 3. By Aug 29 I was at the island of Cozumel. The map does not clearly show the border between Mexico and Belize but on November 10th I left the coast of Belize and set out for Honduras where I arrived on November 22nd. I’ll be in Honduras for a while.
In the image below the red line shows my progress to date. The black line shows my intended route.
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January 16/12
This year should be a good year for me according to my Chinese friend Patrick. That is because it will soon be the Year of the Dragon. I was born in the Year of the Water Dragon (1952) and 2012 is the next Year of the Water Dragon. I have lived for one complete cycle of 60 years.
Patrick tells me that Chinese parents often try to have a baby born in the Year of the Dragon because the baby will be particularly intelligent and successful. I agree with that.
Patrick also tells me that I should have a chicken icon in my possession or perhaps hanging from my rear view mirror. I am not sure where I will get one.
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I finished my first Christmas book. “Life” the Keith Richards autobiography was great. I didn’t realize that Richards was the main guy responsible for most of the great Rolling Stones songs –despite the fact that he was addicted to heroin for 10 years. It was fascinating to read about the way the band came together, how they survived so long, Richard’s relationship with Mick Jagger, his trial in Toronto and truth about some of the fantastic rumours that have swirled around Richards (like the one that he snorted his father’s ashes and the one that he used to go to Switzerland to get his blood exchanged when he had to dry out). Great book!
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January 25/12
Kathy and I went to Bedrock last weekend and got a great start on our new floating dock. I stole dad's idea from 30 years ago and am building it on top of the ice. Dad simply tied his dock to the shore and waited for the ice to go out but he was around to keep an eye on things. We will pull our dock out when we are done and push it into the water in the spring.
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January 30/12
My Dragon Years between 1952 and 2012:
In 1964 I watched the Beatles first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. I was in Grade 5 and had my first male teacher –who I just loved. I had not yet discovered girls. (Things were much simpler in those days). 1964 marked my first complete summer at Stony Lake and was the year I learned to drive the motorboat.
In 1976 I was working at my first full time job after graduating from university the year before. I was training for a management job at the Bank of Nova Scotia in Sarnia where the branch manager was found to be stealing money. Banking was a really bad choice of careers for me and I was miserable. I had a girlfriend but she lived far away.
In 1988 I had been married to Kathy for 7 years but we only had two daughters. I had constructed a sleeping cabin and gazebo but Bedrock (the cottage itself) was not even on the horizon. I participated in the Stony Lake Triathlon (paddling, cycling and running) with my brother Roger. I did the mile swim in 19:35 and I entered 3 running races. Although my best running days were long behind me I ran a 10k in 40:08, a 15k in 61:30 and a half marathon in 92:30.
In 2000 Lindsay was still in high school. I participated in my first two inline skating races on rec skates and wearing basketball shorts. Bedrock was completely finished.
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As I was rowing away on my Concept 2 today I was wondering how much I have slowed down since I got started three and a half years ago. I looked up my yearly mileages and times and did the arithmetic. In the first couple of years I averaged about 4:16 per kilometer. In the last couple of years I am doing around 4:22. Since I am not going to compete –at least for a while- I will be slowing down even more. It has taken me 15 days and 16 hours to go about 5,220 kilometers so far.
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Kathy wants pot lights in the living room so this is the state of the living room ceiling:
The "knob and tube" wiring is not actually in use. It cost me 32 bucks just to dump the old plaster and lath that made up the the original ceiling.
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January 31/12
End of the Month Fitness Report
I rowed 20 times for a total of 230 k. My weight stayed about even (173).
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Kathy and I spent Saturday night at Bedrock but decided to come back to the city to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday night. We have a tradition of ordering pizza and wings and drinking some beer (I drink the beer) during the Super Bowl.
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At Bedrock we finished the wooden portion of dock and dragged it off the ice onto the shore. I still have to install the swimming ladder, ramp hardware, cleats and a bumper strip.
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Today I started work on the drywall phase of the living room ceiling.
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February 9/12
The dynamics of sharing a bed with my lovely wife have changed considerably. In the past we would fight (in a nice way) for possession of the covers. On occasion I would wake up freezing in the dark to discover that all the covers were on Kathy’s side of the bed. Usually when I tried to regain my share I would find that Kathy had wrapped herself up in the covers and I would end up dragging her toward me along with my share of the covers.
But things have changed. Now Kathy is likely to throw the covers off herself in the middle of the night am I am often aware that a bundle of lose covers has accumulated in the space between us. Often in the course of the night the covers will begin to cascade over me and start to gather on the floor on my side of the bed. Sometimes, but not very often, Kathy will wake up cold and accuse me of stealing all the sheets. No, I say “you’ve been giving them to me all night!”
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I started up a “Blogspot” account to see if what it would be like to blog in that format instead of here at my own website. In the long term it does not make sense for me to maintain my website because it is costing me some money and because the information is getting old. Having a ‘free’ blog would solve the money issue and allow me to record my thoughts on various subjects but I am reluctant to do away with eight years of old posts. I am going to maintain two blogs for now while I figure out what to do.
Check out the new format here:
http://sk8toronto.blogspot.com/
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February 11/12 (Bedrock)
From the bedroom window I saw something moving on the ice near Breeze Island –perhaps 500 meters away. It was a long way off but it didn’t seem to be a machine or a person so I ran downstairs to get the binoculars. From the bay window I had a pretty good look at a coyote (or perhaps a wolf) dragging something along the ice. He was travelling at a decent pace and there were two or 3 crows harassing him. After a while, the coyote dragged the object onto the shore and into the woods.
Kathy and I walked across the ice to the last spot we saw him a couple of hours later. We followed the drag marks in the snow and found the bones and hide of a deer’s leg. A foot was intact so we know it could not have been anything else. It was very cold out in the wind so we did not look for the main part of the carcass.
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Today I spent some time trying to light a fire with ice. The possibility was mentioned in the Toronto Star and I went online to review the basics. The trick is to make a magnifying glass with ice and then use it to light a fire.
I decided to try to make the lens with some ice from the lake. There are lots of big blocks of ice on the shore at Bedrock because they always lower the lake level after freeze-up. The problem is that the quality of the ice is poor. There are lots of air bubbles (in fact, you can see different layers separated by a concentration of air bubbles).
Anyway, I took the clearest piece I could find and 'whittled' away for quite a while. As the sun was getting very low in the sky around 4:30 I was getting the 'lens' to the point where I thought I might as well try it.
I decided to try to burn a hole in the back of my hand but I have to admit that I could not even feel any heat. There were a few things wrong: I did not spend enough time shaping the lens, the sun was very low in the sky and (most importantly) the quality of the ice was sub standard. The picture below is interesting because it shows something that I did not see with my eyes. To me the true focal point was small, well defined but very week. To the camera it was large and bright. In any case, the accuracy of the lense was poor. This was due to poor (or very poor) optics and too many impurities in the ice (mostly air bubbles).
I am going to have to look at this enterprise as a medium term project. I have to find a way to get better quality ice. Some better tools for shaping the lens would also be helpful. And, although a simple sphere of ice will (apparently) light a fire, I would like to see if I can “grind” a double sided parabolic lens that will be a little more efficient. More research needs to be done.
The original block of ice:
Cut down a bit:
Attempt #1:
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And, the dock is finished to the point where we could drag it off the ice. We will roll it back in the spring.
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February 19/12
I have somehow avoided a trip to the Caribbean to an 'all inclusive' resort. It would have been my first, unless you count our honeymoon in Aruba -31 years ago. And technically it was not an all inclusive because there were no free meals and drinks.
Amy had convinced us to go Punta Cana but then she could not get the time off work. Now we have decided to do a little car trip during March Break. First, we will visit Lindsay in New Haven and then we will head south. We have not booked anything yet but I expect we will end up at Myrtle Beach. The trip is only a few weeks away so I will be turning my attention to some of the details in the near future. I want to have some sort of adventure rather than sit around a pool or beach for the whole time.
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Fire with Ice
I have been doing a lot of research and thinking about lighting a fire with ice. I have watched some interesting You Tube videos. One pair of videos goes on for a long time and shows a guy shaping an ice sphere with primitive tools (it’s a survivalist thing). In the end he manages to light a piece of charcoal but cannot ignite tinder that he gathered in the woods. Another guy makes something that looks more like a magnifying glass and lights a fire (but it was not very convincing).
I also found a couple of websites which explore the challenge of lighting a fire with ice. The best one introduces the idea of using an ice sphere and demonstrates a slick way to make the sphere. There is no video but I do believe the guy was able to light fires with his ice spheres.
I decided to get into the ‘physics’ of the exercise and did a little reading on the refraction of light rays, lens making, and so on. I decided that I wanted to ‘draw’ a diagram of what would happen to the light rays as they traveled through an ice sphere. Assuming 1.3 as the index of refraction I traced (by computer) several pathways that rays of light would follow. For each different pathway I had to calculate two different angles of refraction (the sin of the angle of refraction is proportional to the sin of the angle of incidence –which constantly changes because of the curved surface). To make things more difficult (for me) Excel trig functions employ radians rather than degrees.
To make a long and complicated story a little shorter I proved to myself that an ice sphere would work perfectly to focus rays of light into a very small area. I even managed to plot the results and produce a picture of what happens when the sun’s rays encounter a theoretical sphere of ice (see below). Working through the math has somehow made me realize (more clearly than before) that the ice has to have a minimum of flaws and the optical surfaces have to be reasonably accurate. If not, the light will scatter and not gather properly at the focal point.
I occurs to me now that lots of other shapes would focus enough energy to light a fire. The figure below and on the left could be carved from a slab of ice. The one on the right could be carved from an icicle. They would do an equally good job.
Unfortunately, this winter has been very poor for the creation of clear ice and it is quickly running out. I might not get a chance to light my fire until next year.