Snow - 10:53, Thursday 8 October 2009 |
| First snow of the winter came down this afternoon, with four inches predicted for Tuesday! I thought November was early for snow last year, let alone early October. |
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Car - 01:50, Tuesday 6 October 2009 |
We finally succumbed to buying a second car recently so I don't have to take the bus to work when my girlfriend is working the late shift. We may even get around to finishing the garage interior soon too :). Oh, we're supposed to get down to -10C next week, so I guess the summer is over. Which is odd, because we were at +30C not long ago! |
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Pizza - 01:17, Thursday 28 May 2009 |
BTW, I'm not dead, I just got sent to Italy for two months for work at short notice! Though given the earthquakes were making the whole hotel shake, I'm lucky it was built a bit better than some of the other buildings in nearby towns...  P.S. Oh yeah, and eating pizza every day gets really old after the fourth week... |
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Fog - 11:19, Thursday 5 March 2009 |
| At one point this week we had a forecast of over 10cm of snow on Sunday and another 10cm on Monday, but fortunately that big snow storm seems to be heading for Manitoba instead :). So we just got the freezing fog last night and blizzard-like drifting snow tonight! Not a good time to be driving anywhere on the highways outside the cities.  That doesn't actually look too bad, but you can't even see the houses on the other side of the next road over from us; just the ones across the alleyway where the garages are. BTW, that picture is a three-second hand-held exposure, which is why it's not as sharp as it might be :). Oh, here's the snow in the back yard as of a few days ago: I don't think there's even as much as there was last year:  |
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Winter - 07:51, Sunday 1 March 2009 |
  This winter has been colder than last, but seems to have been less snowy too; probably because it's been too cold for snow!  Either way, the hamster is well prepared for the cold weather. |
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Weather and TV - 10:52, Saturday 17 January 2009 |
| Certainly been cold lately! We've had temperatures of -20C and below most days since before Christmas, and one night hit -54C with wind-chill. There's about two feet of snow in the yard, though a bit of it melted today. Aside from shovelling I've been busy building a MythTV box for recording TV by computer; with an Intel Atom CPU and WD 'green' 1TB disk it can hold about a thousand hours of TV footage and only uses about 40W of power so it can run all year round without costing much. The Atom is plenty fast enough to capture a few hours of MPEG-2 video each day, transcode it down to a better codec to save space and automatically remove the commercials; that means no more remembering to record the shows when we're not home, as the software automatically downloads the TV schedule and records them itself. This is also why I don't have any snow photos; the MythTV computer is currently using the keyboard, mouse and monitor from the Windows PC that I normally use to download pictures from the digital camera! |
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Bit windy out - 12:17, Tuesday 2 December 2008 |
| Saskatoon does seem to be quite windy; no doubt because the prairies are so flat that there's nothing much to stop it. Tonight we're up to 78km/h, which is the highest wind speed I've seen since I moved here. One of the air vents is flapping around on the outside of the house making a nasty racket; hopefully the house will still be standing in the morning! |
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Power out - 02:31, Sunday 30 November 2008 |
| So the power was out here from about 6:30 to 11pm last night; apparently someone was taking pot-shots at power lines outside town and that knocked out the power to a sizeable part of the city. Hopefully that's not going to happen too often, as the furnace won't run without it! If it wasn't wired directly into the fusebox I'd get a battery backup just in case. Fortunately the laptop can work as a light for four hours and the camcorder for eight, so we could at least see :). |
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Winter Tires - 04:44, Saturday 22 November 2008 |
| We finally decided that we should get some winter tires this year, so $1200 later we probably have a set of wheels and tires that are worth more than the rest of our 10-year-old GM sedan :). Which isn't too bad, given that's for a set of high-end snow tires (Nokian Hakkapeliitta R) and a new set of wheels for them to go on; that's about what I used to pay for a set of four tires alone for my car in the UK. Tires and fitting by themselves were about $800 including tax. I was actually surprised given the stories about winter tire shortages that we didn't have any trouble getting a set; though it was easier as we were getting wheels at the same time so they could mix-and-match wheel and tire sizes to find something that would fit. They were busy so it did take a few hours, but we just dropped the car off at 8am and picked it up late in the afternoon when it was done. Of course today the temperature is 6C and the snow has all gone, so now we're hoping we get some more soon to test them out on! I'd read some complaints about the way these tires handled on dry roads but we haven't noticed any problems so far. |
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Snow - 03:50, Sunday 9 November 2008 |
First snow of the winter just came down here; not very much, but now it's started it probably won't stop for four or five months :). |
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Winter is coming - 12:22, Monday 1 September 2008 |
| The furnace was on today for the first time in months, so that can only mean one thing! Which actually isn't too surprising as when we moved in just under a year ago I was huddling around an electric heater in the kitchen because they forgot to connect the gas up that day. I've also been getting on with the pre-winter DIY that we hadn't got around to yet, like improving the seal around the front door where we were getting a bit of a draft last year. |
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One year - 07:21, Monday 4 August 2008 |
| Well, I've been in Canada for a year now, aside from a few days back in England recently clearing out some of the junk in my parents' house and meeting up with some friends. Though it was one day less than expected because the Air Canada plane wasn't working and most of the passengers got transferred to flights the next day; at least they paid for a hotel and food, so it wasn't a total loss. I also managed to sort out the other window well over the holiday weekend, and paint the bits around the garage door, and a bunch of other things we'd been putting off since we moved in! |
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Security Clearance #3 - 12:28, Wednesday 16 July 2008 |
| Finally came through after about six months; although it's a Secret clearance, as expected I'm not cleared for 'Canadian Eyes Only' material due to not being a citizen. But it does show that only being a resident and not a citizen isn't an impediment to a clearance if the employer wants to do it and can live with restrictions. |
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Windows - 11:37, Sunday 13 July 2008 |
| When we moved into this house, the previous owners said that one day when there was heavy rain they'd had a leak from a basement window after the window well filled up; the window is roughly at ground level, so the builder put a well around it that sticks up a few inches above the ground to keep surface water away. Problem is that being cheap, all the builder did inside the well was leave the dirt level with the windowsill and throw a bit of gravel on top. From what I've been able to find out, there's supposed to be a six inch gap below the window, and then at least six inches of gravel below that, preferably with a drain tube at the bottom going down to the drains around the basement. So I've spent most of the afternoon digging out the dirt and throwing a couple of hundred kilos of gravel into the hole; we still don't have a proper drain from the well, but we don't often get really heavy rain here and water sprayed on top vanishes into the gravel and will eventually drain away from the bottom through the soil. I figure that if we get a foot of water in the window well, we'll probably have worse things to worry about! Of course this does mean that in a while I have to do the one on the other side of the house too... |
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Check Engine... - 01:25, Friday 11 July 2008 |
| So anyway, a few days ago I was driving my girlfriend's car and the 'check engine' light came on. Given it's been a bit unreliable at times, I stopped off at Canadian Tire and picked up a code reader to find out what the computer was complaining about; plugged it into the socket by the brake pedal, and out came a 440 error code. Looking that up on the web, I discovered that a 440 code in a GM vehicle means about 80% of the time that that petrol cap is loose. And lo, it was so; the guy who filled the car with petrol at the weekend can't have put it on right. So a quick tighten of the petrol cap and a reset of the error codes in the computer and the light went away and hasn't come back. Just thought I'd mention that as taking the car to the garage and paying $100 for them to tighten the petrol cap and turn off the light would have been a bit embarrassing and maybe knowing this will save someone else a few bucks :). I guess this is another example of GM's great vehicle design in North America... |
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Storms - 01:10, Wednesday 2 July 2008 |
We've had a bunch of storms lately, probably due to the hot weather we've been having for the last couple of weeks. Here's the sky as it was a couple of days ago:   And here's the thunderstorm that arrived soon after. Not as big as the one we had last week, but still quite noticeable :).   |
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Photos - 02:01, Saturday 21 June 2008 |
Hambo the hamster was going psycho chewing the bars of his cage, so while he's running around the house in his plastic ball to burn off some excess energy I thought I might as well upload some photos from my travels over the last twenty years; they'll mostly not be from Canada and almost entirely not from Saskatchewan!   My Photo Gallery |
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Painting - 01:09, Saturday 21 June 2008 |
| I'm on painting duty this weekend while my girlfriend is away; one of the bedrooms in the house came in 'Barbie Hell' pink and we've been meaning to repaint it but she didn't want to be around when I did it in case she had an allergic reaction to the paints. I think I underestimated the amount of time this takes, it's midnight and I've spent most of the evening patching up the dents and holes in the wall, cleaning off some of the pencil and crayon marks (it's amazing how much of a mess a little girl could make in the two years she lived here before we bought it) and sticking masking tape around everything that needs to stay the color it is. Looks like I'll be at this all weekend! |
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Crime - 12:58, Thursday 19 June 2008 |
| At least we don't have to worry much about crime around here; back where I lived in Surrey there was a lot of petty crime, we'd sometimes get people breaking into the office where I worked and the local chavs would set parked cars on fire in nearby residential streets for a bit of a laugh. Saskatchewan theoretically has a higher crime rate than Surrey, but around here the only crimes we've had are people stealing building supplies -- which the builders leave lying around in the open all night -- and once case of kids spraying graffiti on a sign a few months back. Most of the houses in our area have remotely-monitored security systems which 'phone home' if there's a burglary, fire, flood, etc (or, at least, most have signs outside the front door saying they do). In our case it costs about $30 a month for monitoring, but there's a discount of about $20 a month on the house insurance for having it, so after the installation it's practically free... and ours came with the house, so we didn't even need to pay for it to be installed. |
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Warm - 10:26, Wednesday 18 June 2008 |
After the freezing winter we've had a few weeks of OK temperatures and a few days of rain, and now it's starting to get hot; I'm glad I have a car on loan at the moment so I can travel to work with air conditioning, but the hamster is spending the days in the basement so he doesn't fry! Though he prefers playing in the hole he dug in the back yard. |
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