Jan 9 - Snowed In

While the city recovers from about 30cm of snow, we decided to make something of it in the back yard - our very own snow hill!

Pictures is a modified photo of the steps leading to the hill (the modifications being correcting the light levels..  the picture was taken in the late afternoon on my Blackberry).

The hill was put in front of the deck, facing towards the garage.  This spot worked well, since it's where I dump snow from the deck.  We had considered putting it on the West fence, but I noticed that the wind tends to scrape away the snow from that side, so decided it probably wouldn't work out in the end.

I had some left over plywood and lumber from building the garage, so I put a narrow piece in the snow, vertically, to make a front of a step.  I packed some snow in behind the vertical plywood, then put a short piece of ply on top to make a step.  Do that once more to make a second step, then a final top step to launch from.  I had to reinforce the second step a bit with 2x4 (what you see in the picture) since it seemed to displace more under the weight of my step.  Not a big deal in the end.

The bottom of the hill ends a bit before the garden, so I broke up some of the fallen snow and packed it in a bit so that it would make a soft barrier to stop the sled.

Riley has seen the hill, but hasn't had a chance to play on it yet.  He's been out a few times this year to Dinosaur Hill (old garbage heap behind a school in Sherwood Park) with Grandpa, so he's pretty comfortable with sledding.

Other than building a sledding hill, I've been digging out my sidewalk, digging out the neighbours cars, digging out the back alley, and trying to run 16km today, which really turned out to be a 11km run through drifts and wind.  I'm glad I went, and especially glad it's over.

I'm currently downloading WoW Cataclysm to demo...  thinking I may have time to play it casually,  We'll see - I still have some nations to beat in Civ.

The Windows 7 rollout fires up in full swing at work this week.  I think I have 8 upgrades to do this week...  so we'll see how it goes.

Until tomorrow!