CaptainOrange

Really churning out the pages with my flight leaving tomorrow. I hope to have some really great photos in the coming week. Until then... The coffee quest continues. Hats off to DieHard Chuck and @dieharddice --  https://www.dieharddice.com #RollthediceTuesday #papameo

Strange Angles in the Peterson Bldg. Not quite the Mendel Okay, the bit about the "lady's chamber" was an outright fabrication, but you're here... so that's good. Before I get into the pictures, a quick update on my stair running. This week I've bested my records at both the 5T and 10T times (where T=11 floors up and down). 5T stands at 15m08s and 10T is 32m30s. 10T took me about 55 minutes the first time. On with the photos... Picked a freakishly cold day to do some more stair explorations. Neither my trusty, if aging, Pentax K-x, nor my trusty, if aging, body had an easy time with the -30C wind chill. After getting politely kicked out of the Agri-Food Canada Research building (I had been inside looking at maps for several minutes without "checking in" at the security desk),  Found +Kent Pollard ,s  Peterson Bldg . I must say, the staff was a whole lot nicer there. A bit off the beaten path but, the stairs were unusual as prom...

Alert! Feelings laden paragraphs ahead. If you are hear to read about me being a mad scientist or climbing something, turn around and go back to the site with the fluffy kittens doing what fluffy kittens do. I've been thinking about The Quest for a long time -- something like 21 years now. I've found that as time passes, it has become increasingly hard to hold to some of my own ideals. How do I continue to strive, to seek, to find year after year? One thing that has really bothered me lately is that activities that I once enjoyed have stopped filling me up. I feel bored. I don't care. This doesn't matter. It started out being a seasonal depressive thing (which I do believe contributes to the severity), but this last year, there were elements that stayed with me all summer. I thought it was a failing in my person -- that somehow I had changed for the worse and couldn't make myself feel the way I felt when I was twenty. This kind of thinking has never seemed like ...

The clothes-line that I installed this spring was a great success. There was a certain art to finding enough sun this year, but we managed to run our 70s era dryer only a precious few times during the summer and fall. You might have noticed that it's gotten rather cold outside. Cold enough that hanging our laundry on our spiffy new outdoor line has become impossible. Happy Days of Summer... Sniff Now that we've gotten used to not running the clothes dryer, I just had to find a way to continue the energy savings during the winter. We already had a stand model that we've used off and on since we were married. It looked like this thing on the right. Well... almost. Ours was rusted in several places, two of the bars had fallen off due to failed welds and the piece that bridges the lower middle part had mysteriously gone missing. So, yeah... it falls down a lot--especially when you have two cats. Clothes don't dry too well on a concrete floor. a clever disguise Afte...

Even when what's old is new I'm still behind the times. I watched a news piece on CBC a couple of years ago which talked about how clothes lines (and the installation there of) were booming. When we moved into our current house--8 years ago, for those counting--there was some existing infrastructure for having a clothes line, but it was incomplete and with me running the dayhome at the time it didn't seem like the most attractive idea on the planet. I took the pulleys and used them on the play structure so the kids could haul water, bricks and their lunches up to the top of the fort. only the finest materials Yesterday, with some deck screws, concrete, an auger, a little new lumber and the existing pulleys--stolen back from the fort--I built the family a state of the art clothes dryer. I just need to paint some fancy alpha-numeric. I'm thinking of "Z-3000" or something to jazz it up. Location, location... It's highly customized, as you can see. Thi...

Sometime last year, Dad went to turn on his Playstation 3 and was greeted by the infamous Yellow Light Of Death. It's tough to find a good description of what the YLOD is, but this forum thread is somewhat comprehensive. Essentially, the PS3 does nothing but show a single LED. Apparently there are a number of possible causes. Dad had just bought a new game it was stuck in the Blue-Ray player and no amount of coaxing was getting it out. With a repair price of about $150CAD (+ shipping) Dad simply bought a new Playstation ($300). tiny ribbon cables galore I had some spare time a couple of weeks back and Dad had found a suitable heat-gun to attempt the, by now, common "re-flow" repair. We watched this very good YouTube video (which is in two parts ) and took the plunge. If it failed I was planning to at least crack the Blue-Ray drive to get the game which was M.I.A. Death by a million screws. One of the biggest challenges in this process is remembering where a...

On the 6th of March, Anwyn celebrated her 10th and Chantelle her 29th ;) Grandma Gale took the whole clan to Scrap It in Sutherland to celebrate and make cards. I used my new Pentax k-x to record the event... Scrap It!

I watched " I am Legend (imdb)" again last night, so the above quote comes from Bob Marley, through Will Smith, me, and onto you... With Christmas guests all but a memory and my famous post-birthday-blues (2006 post) setting in, I've embarked on a number of projects to keep myself busy. Todays tidbit is on my grow-table. In the fall of 2008 a theatre friend gave us a grow-table that her father had made for her 30 or more years ago. It had been sitting unused for more than a decade and she was trying to find a good home for it. Mission accomplished. We used it to start our garden seedlings last spring, but I thought I would try a few things earlier this year. I grabbed some soil, perlite, and plant food and got busy. In November, garlic was really cheap. It made sense at the time to buy one of those big bags with a dozen bulbs of garlic in it. By making a lot of pizza I managed to get through most of it, but some of the bulbs began sprouting towards Christmas. ...

Perhaps there is a school you can attend that will teach you how to find perfect gifts for your friends. I haven't been there, but I know someone who should be lecturing. From the hands of the man who brought me lock-picks, Swiss army knives and countless... Liquid Metal ... dangerous (previous blog entry) Prince Rupert's Drops ... adventures !(another old post) I give you Shape Lock , which is a brand name for something more generally known as "friendly plastics" or polycaprolactone (wikipedia). We had loads of fun with it the first day, but had to keep it on a shelf for a few days to allow me to speak directly to other humans. Even then concentration was difficult. My mind raced constantly thinking of cool uses for this stuff. Eventually, when the Christmas hubbub was dying down, I settled on a project that I've wanted to attempt for a long time -- making a custom attachment for my Gorilla Pod . Before we go any further, if at any time you find yo...

I'm driving myself mad. It's kijiji's fault really -- too much free stuff. Add that to my very flexible schedule and you have an exhausting combination. On the right are the straw bales that I brought from out of town to mulch the garden with. I didn't want to make two trips, so I wound up with waaay too much. Should have taken Wendy's advice there :( I've also been hauling a lot of rocks which are getting put to use for some nice front yard landscaping. Many are still in "storage" until I have time to do some more sod removal. All this might be somewhat diverting if I weren't continuing to attempt all the new food production things that I've learned recently. Casualties are mounting. Yesterday I killed millions of bacteria when I messed up making yogurt. When will the insanity end? Wendy told me to stop doing extra shit and start behaving like a human being towards my children. Do you think she is trying to tell me something?

My eyes struggle to open. I've been up a little too late... again. What's my excuse lately? Let's recap on my sleep excuses -- starting from the beginning of summer: -- Cinderella (-- no, not the band, but a fine selection in video... land) Perhaps not the band, after all, but rather the play that I was in. You may have heard me talking/whining about it? I didn't post my show pictures? Well you should really trust me when I say that if you weren't in the show, you probably don't have a strong interest in seeing them. Since there may be those of you who don't listen, or who have lots of time on their hands to sift through pictures of people that they haven't met... here is the link to the album . -- Erin, Colin, James and Brad helped me and Wen and the girls build a fence. It was... educational. Jodi and Brad were my scapegoats for the next couple of weeks. Jodi kept me out to all hours playing pool and even when Brad wasn't directly keeping me...

Brad and Jodi were up visiting for a couple of weeks. We managed a trip to the Narrows out at Waskesiu. Click below to see the photos with my oh-so-witty commentary. Waskesiu Later, Brad and I managed to melt glass with my new oxi-acetylene torch and to manufacture 1 Prince Rupert's Drop (Wikipedia.com) at a bargain price of about $100 *ouch* Prince Rupert's Drops

There is an inevitable conflict between finding the time to do really cool things in your spare time and then managing to tell everyone who might be interested about it. When you take the time to make a fire in excess of 660.32 °C (1220.58 °F) (wikipedia) and tell me about it the same day, you can berate me soundly. Below is a link to the best of the pictures with a few comments. Liquid Metal (linky link linkerton) Here is a short video of some of the second pour that we did. --edit January 13, 2013. Sorry. Discovered video is gone. Google! I didn't migrate it to youtube. I may add it later after I re-upload it. Mike--

Some of you may recall a little dramatic flick I was in surrounding events in the Winter War (wikipedia). James Klenz has done another piece covering the same conflict but with a serious comic twist. The trailer is only 35 seconds, which I deem to be too short. I hope I am invited to a screening. It looks like a hoot. Jim, if you can hear me, post more details for your adoring public. I have a readership of somewhere in the ball park of three.

A couple of weeks ago my tech-fingers got itchy. I really wanted a new cell phone, but couldn't afford the $$. Well, a change is as good as a rest, so... since Saskatchewan finally got phone# portability in March (yaaa!) I decided to break out Liz's broken sim-card Treo 600 phone and try to fix it up. The Screen had lines running through it as a result of repeated dropping, I believe, and the volume button was broken. A loose video cable was responsible for the screen problems and A piece of tissue paper strategically wedged solved the problem nicely. As for the volume control, the problem was obvious, but not as easy to fix. Goop to the rescue. Not the easiest stuff to work with. I find it a bit messy, but it is oh, so flexible. I have used it to fix quite a few broken plastic parts, but none so small as this. I was really impressed with the results. As a sad footnote to this whole affair, our new cat recently sent the fully functional Treo sailing off of my night-side...

I've been informed by a few people that, once again, I have been remiss in my blogging duties. Apparently, (and this is a big surprise) those of you who only get information about me from this location, aren't getting the whole picture! I'll at least try to bring you up to date, for the moment. I've been taking voice lessons for about six weeks now. It has been a wonderful experience. Goes to show how you can do something for your whole life and still not really know how to do it. The sounds coming out of my mouth, now only vaguely resemble those of two months ago. So, anyone who attended (or wanted to attend) Leora's recital last year will get to see me (and likely Wendy) in it this year. This last Tuesday I auditioned and was cast in a play. The Mousetrap , by Agatha Christie. I'm not putting a link to the play synopsis in case anyone who wants to see it wishes to be surprised. It is a murder mystery, after all. I'll be working with Gateway Players for the...

I've been in the doledrums, what with the rain and all. Course it all started a few weeks back. LJ and her whole family got sick with the stomach flu. Since yours truly looks after her tots, my whole family was sick in a long and horrible progression of spewing bodily fluids. Ick! Moving on, then... I recently tried my hand at some household plumbing. We were having some really irritating problems with noisy pipes. After a round of internet reading and diagnostic testing, I had a go at fixing it, completly without sucess. I tried something different and that worked, but in the process, I discovered a leaking shut off valve in my basement. Fresh from my triumph over the squeaky pipes, I decided that now that I have more hours at home, this plumbing stuff is exactly what I should be doing to help make ends meet! I'm not a plumber. I feel, in general, that I am quite handy. I build a lot of things for the house and fix more than I can build. Me and pipes did not form a lasting fr...

Quest New Year was a rousing success for me. I can't speak for everyone else, though it seems as though a good time was had by all. I managed to get to our meeting spot in record time (which for me was 6:45pm). That gave me time to wait for a good table, do some last minute reading and set up the pool from which participants collected this years Quest branded gift of slate coffee coasters hand carved with the Q symbol. I had a really tough time hanging on to them until new years as I made them well before Christmas. As I had planned, they were snagged b y the Questers as they arrived (after 8pm) at the table. Me, Dave, Geof, James, and Vin. There were some good books picked for this year. As I recollect however, there was almost no discussion about last years picks. Without Vin's early prescence, there was just no one to jumpstart the HoL discussion. Other than that, there was plenty of fun discussion of goals for the year (mostly mine) although James, Dave and Geof all seemed...