Late Night Visitor

Checked the images on my game camera and found this one from last week...

Fathers Day

I went out to Nordegg for the Father's Day weekend.... by myself.  The girls all stayed home to work on some stuff around the house.  I went out to the cottage and worked out there.  I am amazed at how quiet it is out there, even on weekends.  The weather was a little unsettled and there was a heavy rain shower on Saturday, but Sunday was beautiful, and I really enjoyed the time by myself.  None of our friends and neighbors were out.  In fact there was probably only three or four other groups out there along the entire length of Tamarack Trail.  I sat outside on Sunday morning, having my coffee and there was nothing but the sounds of the birds.

Mostly I just worked in the cottage.  I put up some tongue and groove pine paneling on the high vaulted ceiling.  I started work on the casing around some of the windows on the main floor.  I spread some gravel around by our fire pit.  And, I assembled some adirondack chairs that we bought recently.  I also put some walnut trim around the stairway, and vacuumed some of the carpet.  There was a fair bit of mud and dirt tracked in to the cottage due to the recent wet weather so I swept out the main floor area as well.

Scott of Shunda Creek Contracting has been doing some work out at our place in recent days.  The rough grading has been done at our property and some gravel spread around to minimize the mud.  Weeping tile was put in around the garage.  And the sewer line was put in, and the septic tank insulated and backfilled.

The next couple of times that I head out there I need to carry on with the interior finishing.  As soon as that high ceiling is done, then we can get rid of the scaffold and carry on with other interior work.

Birthday Gift

On my 55th Birthday back in April, the girls got me a gift card from Long and McQuade.  This is a music store that sells all types of instruments.  I topped up the gift card and ordered another guitar for my collection.  This is a Fender 60'S Stratocaster with Pao Ferro Fingerboard, in Lake Placid Blue, with a hard case.  It came in at around $1300 all in... including shipping and taxes. The guitar was on back order for a while but was finally delivered to me yesterday.  I didn't have much time to play it yet as I had a hockey game last night after work.  But when I got home later in the evening I tuned it and played if for a while.  This brings my collection up to three guitars.  I'd still like to get a few more over the next couple of years but I'm good for now...

Renegades

My Renegades hockey team is doing really well this summer.  We are eight games in to the 18 game regular season.  One was postponed due to a power outage, and will be rescheduled later.  We have played seven games so far and have a perfect record of 7-0.  Last night we beat the second place team called the Hat Trick Swayzes by a score of 9-3.  The game was much closer than the score indicates.  At around the mid point of the second period we were holding onto a slim one goal lead with the score at 4-3.  We scored five unanswered goals to coast to the victory but several of them were late in the game, once it was out of hand, and the other guys had sort of given up.  Earlier games were all mostly really close.  We had a 14-2 blowout victory to start the season against a team that ended up moving down.  Since then we have won three one goal games, one 3-1 victory, one 5-2 victory, and then the game last night.  I hope we stay in this division as the games have been really competitive and I think we are playing against evenly matched opponents.

Frustration

I arrived out at Nordegg last Saturday at about noon.  I had a load of stuff with me including some wood trim, a log splitter and a bunch of other supplies.  I also had my snowmobile, which is being stored in our garage out there.  After I arrived I plugged in the fridge, unloaded the groceries and a few supplies, and got to work.  I moved the scaffold into proper position and started insulating the high ceiling above our kitchen.  The girls arrived a little later, in our second vehicle, with a bunch more stuff.  By the time they arrived I had finished insulating most of one side of the ceiling and began to put up some vapor barrier.  By late afternoon I set up the chop saw and the compressor and started to cut the pine panelling for the ceiling, as well as some casing for around the windows.  I became annoyed at the fact that I had no tape available to seal the vapor barrier seams.  I was positive that I had left some out there, but it seems to have disappeared since we did the other vapor barrier a few weeks ago.  I ended up borrowing a roll from our general contractor but that wasted half an hour as we had to run around and pick it up.  Then I struggled with getting the tongue and groove paneling to fit together properly.  Finally I gave up on this for the day, thoroughly annoyed and moved on to some casing around the dining room window.  That worked out pretty well and the lacquered 1x4 pine that I am using looks pretty rustic and fits in nicely.  By this time the day was winding down so we got the barbecue going and began to prepare supper.

The girls set up a DVD player and watched some movies in the evening.  It really cooled off and we had to have some electric heaters going to keep the chill out.  Later that evening it began to rain.  It rained all night and by morning there had been about an inch of it.  By mid morning the temperature dropped and it began to turn to snow.  It rained and snowed pretty much all day Sunday.  I was out there last year, on the last day of summer and we got dumped on by about 16 inches of wet snow.  I guess we should expect that as we approach the first day of summer, more snow would be in order.  Perhaps I jinxed it by moving my snowmobile...!

In any event it was too wet and too muddy to set up the saw and compressor outside.  Everywhere we went we were just getting wet and tracking mud all over the place.  Even more frustrated than the day before, I gave up and we just packed everything away.  By the time we were done it was about 2:00 in the afternoon.  Unable to do any work we just hit the road for home.

As we headed back east over the ridge by Saunders, the snow got quite heavy and there as actually a bit of accumulation in the ditches.  This snapshot was taken with my phone, out the front windshield of the truck, as we were driving over the ridge.  

A little bit got accomplished on the weekend, but not nearly what I was expecting.  Hopefully next time I head out there, conditions are better and I can get something done.

Another Old One

I continue to have no time for photography, so when I do find myself with a few minutes to spare, which isn't very often, I dig back through some of the scans of my negatives.  I have had no time to shoot anything new, and no time to get into the darkroom and process anything.  But I was quite active shooting in late 2017, and quite busy processing film in early 2018.  This is one of the negatives that I processed, though the film was actually exposed in May of 2016... over two years ago.  Like my recent post of the old gas pump, this was a shot taken on Bergger BPF-200.  My box of sheet film expired years ago and the last few remaining sheets were exposed over the past two years, and processed in early 2018.  This was some found stuff in the living room of an abandoned house in Two Hills County.  Makes me want to get out shooting again, and to get back to the darkroom.  Maybe in a couple of months, once the cottage construction is a little further along, I'll be able to return to my passion...

Painting Complete... sort of....

Margarit and I went out to Nordegg for the weekend.  The girls decided to stay home on their own.  We had carpet installed in the three bedrooms, the living room and on the stairway.  That was completed last week along with some vinyl flooring in the bathroom.  It looks good and we are happy with it.  We worked on finishing up the interior painting in the kitchen and family room / dinette.  All the other rooms are already painted.  This part was kind of slow going because of all the high walls.  I think I must have climbed up and down the scaffold at least 30 times this weekend.  We almost finished all the painting, but ran out of one color of paint.  We have the lower portion of one wall left to do in the kitchen, and will head out with a little more paint next time, to finish up.  Next time we go out I have to focus on getting the insulation and pine paneling done on the vaulted ceiling.  Once that is done we will be able to get rid of the scaffolding.  And, once the scaffolding is down then we can deal with the rest of the flooring and the interior finishing on the main level.  These are a couple of panoramic shots I took with my phone...

Pathetic

Well... today is the first of June... and this evening, I hauled our Christmas tree to the shop and put it in the dumpster.  It was evicted from the living room early in January.  It laid out on the front lawn most of the winter, eventually disappearing under a snowdrift.  When spring finally arrived it re-emerged for a while.  One day, maybe when we were packing up to head to the Springfest, my Mom was visiting and dragged it into the back yard, leaving it on the patio.  I think she was rather disgusted with me.  It rested there on the patio for a while and finally tonight, I got rid of it.  The way I see it there was still plenty of time.... it's almost three weeks until the first day of summer !!!

Merry Christmas...!