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...!

Summer Hockey

Summer Hockey season started for the Renegades back on May 9th.  This summer we are playing in Division 7, with five other teams.  There have been five games on our schedule so far, though one was postponed due to a power outage at the arena.  I thought I was going to miss that one as it was on the Friday evening that I had to head out to Jasper.  NowI should be able to take part in the make up game later this summer.  We are a perfect 4-0 so far and sit in first place in our division.  With the exception of the first game, which I missed, and which was a blow-out against a team that has since been moved into a lower division, all the games have been close.  It remains to be seen if we can maintain our winning streak.  The games generally get a little tougher as the season goes on.  The rust is blown off and with regular games, everyone's play improves.  Some of the weaker teams generally bring in some better spares as the season goes on.  There are two games coming up next week and the 18 game regular season will continue into July.

Annual Family Weekend in Jasper

Every spring, for over a dozen years, my family has set aside a weekend to get together.  Partly it is the annual shareholders meeting for our family holding company.  But it is also a sort of family reunion at the same time.  My brothers and their families, as well as me and my girls, and my Mom all head out together.  My Dad used to come along when he was still alive.  This has helped my girls to remain close to their cousins over the years, as well as to get some time with their aunts, uncles and grandparents.  We have traveled to various places in the past but in recent years we have always made Jasper our destination.

This time around we stayed at the Bungalows at Patricia Lake.  Margarit and Hailey were not able to join us this time as they stayed behind to deal with my mother-in-laws apartment.  Margarit's Mom is in the process of being moved to a long term care facility and can no longer stay in her independent living apartment.  Margarit's sister has driven up from her home in Washington State for a few days to help with the cleanup.  So the two younger girls and I were the only ones that made it out to Jasper this time.  I was up until past midnight on Thursday making enchiladas and preparing food and stuff for the weekend.  I had to work most of the day Friday, but managed to step out of the office a couple hours early, around 2:00PM.  By the time I got home and packed the girls and our stuff into the truck, we managed to hit the road around 3:30 or 4:00.  We arrived out at Jasper around 8:30, just shortly after all the others arrived.  We unpacked and settled down for the evening.

The next day we all had a big pancake breakfast together, and then held our shareholders meeting.  It took a few hours for my brothers and my Mom and I to address all of the things we needed to discuss.  By mid afternoon the kids were getting a little bored so we took them into town to the candy store, and for an ice cream.  Once they got their sugar fix they settled down a little.  By the time we got back up to the bungalows it was time to get started on preparations for our big Mexican pot luck dinner.  My enchiladas and Mexican rice went into the oven and I prepped a tex-mex salad and some re-fried beans.  The others set about making quesadillas and salads, guacamole, and a number of other dishes.  We all had a big feast and then just relaxed into the evening.  The guitars came out for a while.  The others played charades for a while... though I opted out as I just can't stand the stupid game....  We finally turned in around midnight.

The next morning most of the younger crowd slept in.  I was up  just slightly later than usual, at around 8:00AM.  We had breakfast and everyone packed up.  We checked out of the bungalows around 11:00 and headed out.  Wes and his family hit the road for their longer drive back to Calgary.  The rest of us wandered around town for a while, had another ice cream, and then made a stop out by Jasper Lake for a while.  Then it was that rather long and uneventful drive back to the city.  My Mom got a ride back with us, so we dropped her off at her place before heading home.  We arrived back at around 6:00 and got everything unpacked before Margarit got back home from working at her Mom's place.

New Image

Normally at this point in the year I have shot about 150 to 200 sheets of film.  So far this year, I've shot less than forty.  For viewers of my blog that are interested in my images, it's been pretty sparse.  Mostly I have been providing updates on the construction of my cottage.  And that is precisely the reason why I haven't been able to do much photographically.  In the short term, that probably won't change much but going into summer and fall I hope to have the construction project far enough along that I can back off the rigid schedule somewhat, and get back to making photographs.

I just realised that I haven't posted an image to my Flickr account for about a month-and-half.  This past spring I started putting images on Instagram... but nothing new there for a long time as well...!

So tonight I dug out this old scan... taken in April of 2017.

Last year I was using up a the remaining film in an old box of Bergger BPF-200 film.  I originally purchased this stuff back in the 1990's, as I was told that it was a traditional thick emulsion film, well suited to highly dilute development and other compensating techniques.  I wasn't particularly impressed with any of my results so the film sat in my freezer for nearly 20 years.  Last year I loaded the last few sheets and used it up.  This negative is one of the resulting images.  I don't know if it is any better than anything else I shot on newer stock, but will find out when I eventually develop some of last year's images.

This is an old abandoned gas pump in one of the ghost towns that we visited while filming the "Forgotten Prairie" documentary.  I like the way the willow has grown around and absorbed the pump nozzle.  Obviously this has been left untouched for a long time.

May Long Weekend

The May long weekend saw us headed back out to Nordegg.  This will be the drill through most of the summer as we have a lot of work to do out there this year.  The push is on to get everything finished up as much as possible through this summer, and then we can relax and enjoy the place, without too much additional work, after that.
We loaded up two trucks full of stuff, and a trailer and headed out to Nordegg for the May Long Weekend.  It was a bit of a battle to get our oldest daughter to come along as she is getting to the age where she prefers to stay home.  But we have lots of work to do out at the cottage, and she needs to be part of the family and help out.  We finally hit the road late Saturday morning.

The girls camped out in the garage, with their menagerie of rabbits, skinny pigs and dogs.  For those not familiar with "skinny pigs" they are a hairless version of the more traditional guinea pig.  The girls had foam mattresses spread out on the gravel floor in between all the cages.   We had a couple of small electric space heaters running to keep the chill out.  The girls were convinced that the paint fumes in the cottage would not be good for their beloved pets.

Modern latex paint doesn't smell nearly as badly as the old stuff used to.  Margarit and I stayed in the cottage all weekend, and last weekend as well, and didn't really notice much of a smell at all.  We worked all weekend long and now have most of the painting done.  We are ready for carpet installation in the bedrooms and living room.  Seems we work best when we have some sort of deadline.  With the exception of one high wall, and parts of two others, all of the rooms are now painted with two coats.  After the carpet is installed we will continue with the last of the painting, and then move on to interior trim, and wood panelling.

We collected some more flat stones to use for a section of floor beneath our wood stove.  The girls had a bucket of water and scrubbed all these stones.  We've set them aside and now have them ready for when we get to this part.  I also brought out some wood trim for window casings... but didn't get to those yet.  I did manage to install some walnut trim on the floor around the openings.  This includes the area around the stairwell, and at the open edge of the living room, overlooking the dinette.  This material needed to go in ahead of the new carpet.

It was mostly a working weekend with very little time for anything else.  The girls did get out a few times for an ATV ride, but that was about the extent of our leisure activities.  Seems things will continue on this basis for some time to come.  Looking back at the calender I see that I have worked for 43 of the last 45 days... with four more to go before I take a break.  We took two days off to go to the music festival in East Coulee back in early May... but other that I have worked every day... partially at the office and the rest of the time on cottage stuff.
Despite the warm days, it still gets pretty cold at night out in the mountains.  It got pretty chilly in the cottage at night with no heat.  The girls had the extension cord strung into the garage to run the small portable electric heaters, and to watch DVD's on their laptop, which left Margarit and I with no power.  On Monday morning I got up early and went outside.  I made some coffee and stirred the fire to life to warm up.  The thermometer showed a temperature of only +2C.

First Night in the new Cottage

On the weekend of May 12 and 13 Margarit and I spent our first night at the new cottage.  It is far from finished, but we had an air mattress set up in one of the bedrooms.  The cottage is still just a shell, drywalled, ready for paint.  There is power outside on a temporary panel, and we had an extension cord strung in to the building.  It was a warm weekend, which was a good thing because we had no heat.  It got a little chilly early in the morning, but wasn't too bad.  We also had no running water, just a jug we brought along.  We had a cooler with some food, and cooked on the BBQ.  So, needless to say it was kind of a rustic weekend.

It was a weekend of another first as well.  We decided to leave all three of our girls at home in the city on their own, for the first time.  They had the house stocked up with a bunch of food, and they had a list of chores what they were supposed to work on while we were gone.

Margarit and I had the truck loaded completely full of stuff, and had one of the ATV's behind us on the utility trailer.  When we arrived in Nordegg about 1:00 on Saturday we set about unloading and unpacking everything.  This included our food and sleeping stuff.  It also included a whole bunch of tools and materials for the cottage.  We had 13 gallons of paint, enough to hopefully put two coats on all the new drywall.  We worked Saturday until evening, and then most of the day on Sunday.  We managed to get about 4-1/2 gallons put on by the end of the weekend.  It was slow going because we are using three different colors, and there are at least two colors in every room.  This required a lot of brush work to cut in the corners and at the upper edges where the walls meet textured ceiling.  But we got two coats put on the three bedrooms, plus a single coat put on the living room.  We also got a start on the stairway, the entry, the bathroom and the bay window.  As with the insulation and vapor barrier we left all the high walls until last, so this will take longer.  Whenever we get out there again we hope to get about the next third of the painting done.  This should see us finished and ready for flooring and other work sometime in June.

While we were out there we took a short ATV ride around the subdivision.  There were deer all over the place and we saw four of five groups of three or more during that short evening ride.  We also rode up to the old quarry and picked through all the rock debris up there.  We found a bunch of thin slabs that will work as a floor under our wood stove.  We brought a load back to the cottage in the ATV and next time we're out we'll grab another one.  That should provide us enough material to finish the job.

There were a few people out at the cottages in the subdivision but it was extremely quiet.  Everyone just kind of kept to themselves and there was very little traffic.  We really enjoyed the peace and tranquility and had our first fire of the season going in our fire pit.  We set up two new Adirondack chairs that we brought out.  We had our morning coffee there on Sunday morning and really enjoyed how calm and relaxing it was.  Although there wasn't any large wildlife hanging around our property this time, there were a lot of birds.  Robins, Chickadees, Juncos and some Hairy woodpeckers were drumming on dead trees throughout the subdivision, probably a territorial courtship display.  In the past we never noticed that many birds around... just the ever present Ravens.  Now that so many of the lots have had building sites cleared the birds seem to be attracted to the mix of dense woods and open clearing.  Hopefully we see a population increase in the coming years.

Back to Dorothy

On Sunday morning, after the Springfest, we all slept in for a while.  Then it was a late, rather lazy breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns and coffee.  It was a big communal affair with all ten of us hanging around.  Later we decided to take a drive down the valley to Dorothy.  The girls and I used to camp out in Dorothy all the time.  It was a ghost town, rather abandoned and forgetten and a nice quiet place to stay.  More recently it has been somewhat developed.  The cook shelter in the park has been replaced.  The park is now fenced so you can't just drive in with a trailer.  And the two old churches, the photographic highlights of the ghost town, have now been restored.  The old grain elevator suffered some serious storm damage a couple of years ago and probably will not remain stable for much longer.  Ever since we bought the shop in East Coulee, we just haven't been back here camping.  

The girls explored the old nostalgic playground, and we wandered around for a while checking out the old buildings and the ant highway.  By late afternoon we headed back to the shop, packed up all the stuff from the trailer, and got ready for the drive back to the city.  It was about 6:00 before we got all the girls and pets and stuff packed back into the vehicles and hit the road.  We made an ice cream stop along the way and made it back to the city around 9:30.  

The first camping weekend of the summer, if you can call it that.  I'm not sure that staying in a trailer, parked in a warehouse, really qualifies as camping.  But we really enjoyed the weekend and look forward to getting out again.

This is a shot that I took in Dorothy 20 years ago.  I shot this with my Sinar F1 4" x 5" view camera on Kodak High Speed Infrared Film.  It was taken in July of 1998.  At that time the old United Church was in a state of abandonment.  The new house and yard had not yet been built beside it.  A couple of years later I proposed to Margarit in that very church, and she foolishly accepted.  This image was included in the Procession West Gallery Exhibition that toured western Canada for several years.  It is one of my best selling prints.  Today, the place doesn't look much the way it did twenty years ago...

East Coulee Spring Fest 2018

I took Friday afternoon [May 4th] off and we left the city at about 2:00PM.  We needed to travel with two vehicles as the girls brought their menagerie with them.  We were travelling with two rabbits, two skinny pigs [hairless guinea pigs] and two dogs, plus all the paraphernalia of cages, bedding, food, etc.  My Mom also came along with us, so there were six of us.  After our stop in Stettler to photograph the old sign, we continued on to Drumheller, and eventually made it down to East Coulee by about 6:00PM.  Our trailer had been in storage there in our building, since last fall.  I forget that I had left it rather dirty and disorganized when I put it away at the end of the season.  So we needed to sweep things out and plug in, so that we could unpack and start the fridges.  By the time we got everyone settled down and everything put away, it was after 7:00PM.  The Springfest music festival had started that night at 6:00 and was going until about 10:00.  By this time we decided it was too late to bother buying any tickets for the evening.  My brother-in-law Shawn and his girlfriend Donna showed up later that evening and we just visited for a while before eventually turning in for the night.

The next morning we were up moderately early and had a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon.  We realized that we forgot our coffee maker which had been taken out of the trailer in the fall.  We borrowed the one in the shop, and jump started the morning.

The music festival got going at noon and we were over there relatively soon after it started.  We saw Lothar the Magician, and then a whole bunch of the bands.  We saw Suit Jacket Society, Little Bow and the Bluesland Horn Band before we took a bit of a break.  Unfortunately we missed Black Cherry Perry's Mississippi Medicine Show, which I'm told was one of the highlights of the festival.  Later we saw Glen Brown and Spur Crazy, The Barrel Dogs, The James Band, Give Em Hell Boys and the Beautiful Scars.  There were others that we missed and I kind of wanted to check out, but there is just too much to absorb in one day and you sort of have to pick and choose.  We all really enjoyed the event again this year and will be back again.  I'm not sure how long this has been going on now... I think it is about 20 years, and I've been in attendance at the last four of five of them.

Frank and Chris came out in the afternoon and joined us.  Frank had just picked up his new Harley Davidson in Calgary that morning and rode it out to East Coulee.  They stayed in their trailer at the shop as well, so when the music stopped we all sat around and visited into the wee hours.  I think it was about 2:00AM before I finally crawled into the trailer and went to sleep.

The girls saw a couple of the bands but the two young ones mostly hung out at the building with their pets, and watched movies on their electronics.  Hailey was a little more ambitious and was with us to see a number of the bands.  Mom seemed to enjoy herself and although she avoided some of the louder, heavier stuff, she saw many of the acts as well.  This is only the second time that Margarit made it out to the festival.  In the past it was often in conflict with dance competitions and recitals.  But this year the girls opted out of dance, so they were all able to join the gang at the festival.

I had my digital camera with me the entire time and took photographs of all of the bands that we saw.  This type of subject matter is not suited to large format film photography, so the big camera stayed in the shop.