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Christmas turkey

Well what do you do when you’re stuck in a strange foreign land on Christmas day? You have a Christmas orphans dinner that’s what! Gregor and I bought a turkey, got a bunch of other foreigners (Gregor’s from Oz) and then we deep fried the little bugger – the turkey, not the foreigners!

The locals seemed to think it was some sort of weird Aussie/Kiwi tradition to deep fry a turkey, but of course it’s not. It was just a crazy idea of Gregor’s which turned out to be lots of fun. We also deep fried brocoli, carrots, cauliflower, Moro bars and other assorted goodies 🙂

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The photo below is of me standing on our rink with my Possum Bourne beanie and Speights T-shirt that my mum sent me. Of course the deep fryer was right in front of me so I couldn’t play hockey that day, but it made for a nice photo 🙂

December 25, 2004
Toboganning

My roommate (flatmate in Kiwi speak) and I went tobogganing. Of course those crazy Canadian kids decided it would be a good idea to build a nice ramp exactly where the natural flow of the hill goes so you end up going backwards at full speed over a ridiculously steep jump! We had a scary fast purple flying saucer style sled and a suicidal magic carpet to risk our lives and limbs on. We had lots of fun though, albeit we were the oldest kids on the hill 😛

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November 28, 2004
Skating at Olympic Plaza

Ice skating at the Olympic Plaza in Calgary, Canada.

November 27, 2004
Front yard rink

Well what else do you do when it’s -15 degrees outside and you have an itch to play hockey? The idea of the rink came about one day when my roommate (flatmate) Gregor and I were sitting round talking about how his old roommate had built a rink in their backyard. So I was like “dammit, I’m buildin’ us a rink today!”, so I googled as many things as I could on rink building to figure out the best plan of attack. You can build them by building a snow wall and spraying water directly on to the ground, but this apparently messes up the lawn and takes longer to freeze, so I headed to Walmart and picked up a rink liner for $10 (big sheet of plastic) and filled it up with water. A day and a bit later and we had a fully functioning ice rink in our front yard 🙂

Getting the ice surface smooth is no easy task. I tried leaving hose on it for a while, but it just created a nice big lump on one side of the rink 🙁 Buckets of hot water did the trick, but it took quite a few to cover it.

November 12, 2004
Anna visits 🙂

Anna Williams came to visit me in Calgary 🙂 Unfortunately she wont let me put any photos of her online 🙁 But here’s a photo of the beautiful sunset we experienced while walking back from the Calgary zoo.

November 7, 2004
Chemistry Halloween

Halloween party with chemists in Calgary.

November 1, 2004
Calgary Hitmen

Mike Boyle took me to see a Western Hockey League (WHL) game featuring the Calgary Hitmen at the Saddledome in Calgary. The game was very exciting, lots of big hits, lots of skill and a WAY higher level of hockey than I’d seen before. Unfortunately the NHL lockout was on at the time so I couldn’t see any NHL games so this was the next best thing.

October 30, 2004
Halloween pumpkins

I carved my very first halloween pumpkin 🙂 They sell specially grown pumpkins for the purpose over here. I was very stoked with my effort and proudly displayed on my front door step.

After going to a halloween party with a bunch of fellow chemists, I realised that mine wasn’t quite in the same league as the locals efforts …

October 29, 2004
Calgary lab

After a lot of trips with trolleys, moving some massive fridges and packing way too much glassware into too few draws and cupboards, we finally moved into our new lab in the basement of Science B at the University of Calgary.

Here’s a photo of my boss Mike Benn. I stole the photo of the University of Calgary website – hopefully they don’t mind.

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October 1, 2004
Pool party

30 degrees celcius, blazing sun and a ridiculously cold winter approaching … so what better reason than to have a pool party 🙂 We found a scungy inflatable pool in our shed, got someone to bring along a slip n slide and setup a web cam in our window to catch all the action.

Unfortunately the web cam also caught me bobbing round in the pool before everyone arrived. My attempts to hover in the middle of the pool without stabilising myself failed. The motion detector in the camera triggered just as I hit the water 😛

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The slip n slide was very popular, I can be seen bobbing in the pool on the left, this time with my feet firmly planted on the bottom of the pool 🙂 Thanks to Yeye for the video.

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August 17, 2004