Pano - Jan 27, 2007

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

It was a beautiful winter day, so we walked around the lake. This pano was taken from the other side of the lake. The worst part about walking around the lake in the winter is that Tawny keeps running into the forests surrounding the lake, and sometimes it takes several minutes of calling that rascally dog before she comes running back. The best part is that she is always exhausted after all this running, and has a really good sleep afterwards!

Pano - Jan 25, 2007

January 25, 2007

A cold winter day.

Web site for Heating Degree Days

I discovered a cool website. I was looking for a source of information for Heating Degree Days (standard metric used by gas companies, etc).

Calculating Heating Degree-Days
HDDs are calculated simply by subtracting the mean daily temperature (C°) from 18° C. The daily mean temperature is arrived at by averaging the maximum and minimum temperatures for the day. Where the daily mean temperature is above 18° C no degree-days are counted. These daily values are then added together to obtain a cumulative total for the period of record (i.e., week, month, year).

Not surprisingly, it turns out that Environment Canada has a website that provides this information. It is quite interesting, actually.

Go the Environment Canada Canadian Climate Data web site, enter your search criteria (province, city, daily/monthly/etc), to get the data in a table form. You can click a little chart symbol to see the information in a chart, or click to download the data in CSV or XML format.

Pano - Jan 11, 2007

Thursday January 11th, 2007

I took photos for two panoramas today, one from the usual location and one from the area by the stone bench. As you can see (perhaps only if you click on the photo to see the large version), this is the one by the stone bench. For some reason, the pano from the usual location had a large amount of fuzziness to it.

As of Thursday evening, the snow is all gone again.

I smell a deer!!!

Tawny had just sniffed out the deer trails, and is now looking intently, trying to find the deer and stare them into submission with her patented Labrador Retriever Thousand-Yard Stare....

Pano - Jan 4, 2007

January 4th, 2007

It's mild again. Most of the snow we had between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve melted on New Year's Day.

I am quite pleased with this panoramic shot (first time!). This panoramic shot was composed of 16 separate photos, and the area of interest was not obscured at all with any black areas.

Pano - Dec 29,2006

Panorama view from across the lake.

We had just finished clearing up some deadfall from last year. We weren't confident that the ice was thick enough to bear our weight, so we left the part of the tree that had fallen into the lake for a bit later.

Snow plow

You're probably wondering - what's the big deal about a snow plow?

The big deal is that the city told me in November that they wouldn't be coming down the road to plow it and we would have to get a private contractor. We did, but if the city is going to plow the road then we won't have to do that next year.

Pano - Dec 28, 2006

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

We have had quite mild weather in December. The snowfall that we had in early December had completely disappeared, and the ice covering the lake had started to recede. It got cold again on Monday (Christmas Day), and we had a bit of snow overnight. The colder weather meant the lake started to refreeze, and is now completely covered with a thin film of ice, as evidenced by the snow that we got over night (only about 1/2 cm).

Propane refill

We use propane for heating the water for the radiant floors as well as domestic hot water (with the same boiler). We also have a propane stove, fireplace and dryer. This means if there is a long power outage (like the ice storm in 1998 that left some people in the coutry without power for over two weeks), we can live mostly normally with heat, water, and cooking and laundry facilities, etc. (We wouldn't be able to run an electric range with a small generator.)