Mission Result Today

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Snow Flurry

Here's the best picture I've been able to get so far of the sparkly snow falling. This is just outside our control shelter this morning. It snowed pretty much all day, never less than in this picture and sometimes a lot more.

Road Sign?

Can anyone tell me what this road sign means?

There are lots of them around. This one is on the east side of the paved part of the road that goes to the range. It is on the Northeast corner of a intersection of a minor road that goes west and a driveway to a farm.

The yellow and black checkerboard is a recurring motif, and there are signs with just the checkerboard and no <---> in the middle.

Ouch! Update

I thought I would take a picture of the injury, but there is no polite way to photograph it.

What happened is this: I was down at the control shelter getting it ready for the mission today. For these missions we typically have some of the folks who will be the operators and users when we have finished with the installation watch us as we track the tests. So I did a general clean up, booted the stations, etc. I was coming back to bring a thermos of coffee down there as sometimes there is a long wait for the aircraft to get in position. The coffee pot and thermos are upstairs in our main building (tour post to come later) and I basically hustled up the stairs right in from outside, got the thermos (and some sweet n' low, but not for me) and was coming back down the stairs when I slipped on a wet spot either from my boots or ice/snow still on them and sat down hard on my left hip and bounced down about 7 stairs. Hurt like the dickens, but didn't break the thermos.

Now there is an ugly, unphotographable bruise and a long lump at the the top of my leg bone. I am going to soak in a hot bath for a while. Maybe I'll post more tonight. It was an interesting mission.

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Ouch!

That's going to leave a mark!

First ice/snow related fall. More tonight.

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Listen to What I'm Listening To

CJXK, K-Rock, is the station we listen to the most here in Cold Lake. The studios are right across from the Hotel in a little strip mall. You can see in at night and watch the DJ leaning toward the microphone and staring into space.

Why it reminds me of when I was 17 and a DJ for WQMV, FM 98.7 in Vicksburg, MS. But I out grew that.

Click on the picture to hear K-Rock streaming in your computer all the way from Cold Lake, Alberta. They have a pretty good playlist. I like it, anyway.

Birds and Coyote Update

In the parking lot of Tri-City Mall I caught a couple of Ravens. I've seen these a lot up here and I can't help but wonder what they eat to get so huge.

The only other birds I have seen so far are very small things that I think are Chickadees from some half remembered book from my childhood.

A while back we had spotted an animal on our drive back down the hill that I thought was a wolf but the other occupants in the car insisted was a coyote. Seeing no RoadRunners around I assumed that this was not the climate for coyotes and that they were pulling my leg. Apparently not. I researched this and find that the animal with the largest numbers in the dog family in Alberta Province is the Coyote. Meep! Meep!

Update:Blogger Problems

Blogger is not letting me post multiple pictures in a single post tonight. Neither will it let me upload some HTML I was going to use to improve the site a little. So two posts I had hoped to upload tonight, or at least this week will have to wait until blogger is more cooperative.

Instead I will bring you the weakest post I have left in the blog's backlog of photos I wanted to post and blog on aboot.

Here are my glasses, not my sunglasses, my regular glasses. It seems that the cold here is tough on many things, I think I have already posted that my camera doesn't not like the cold one bit. My glasses also complain. They are the type that darken in the sun and then fade when I am back inside. Well this picture is after 5 minutes outside and 20 minutes inside.

When I come into our control room from outside I have to take these off because they are too dark to allow me to do my work for several minutes. This is a real drawback when tracking small distant objects nearly always requires me to keep watching the screen.

Frozen Waves

Here's another phenomena that has proven difficult to capture.

Primrose Lake is frozen solid, I am told reliably that that means a 4 foot thick ice layer covers the lake. The only exception is where the First Nations have drilled holes for ice fishing, which they did Saturday or Sunday. But I didn't have time to get a picture of that.

However, on top of the ice is another layer, also 4 foot thick or so, of snow. Most of it loosely packed and very powdery. I've already posted pictures of the sparkly snow here, so I think you probably have a picture of the loose, powdery snow. If not scroll down a couple of pictures.

Well, when you get a good wind that powder snow piles up in drifts on the land and, as I never suspected, also on the lake. So when you look at the lake you see these piles of snow, which look from the distance like small white-caps and so it looks like waves were frozen into the lake. As I said this is very hard to capture with my camera and photographic skills, but here is my best shot so far.
The brown vegetation marks the original bank of the lake. And you may have to squint, but take my word it is very impressive to see in person. I wonder if TaraEliz sees this on Lake Champlain near her home.

Results

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Trouble with Blogger

Having a little trouble with blogger tonight. Will try again on one or two more posts, but if it doesn't clear up soon I'll just add to the backlog.

Sunset

This was the sunset we got tonight, coming down the hill.
I was trying to get the beam coming out of the top of the sun, which was pretty impressive. I tried different zoom levels and exposures with my little frozen digital camera, but this is the best I could do.

I am not sure what causes that, but I bet it has something to do with the ice crystals in the air.

I bet this never happened to you

I got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator upstairs and went to walk to
the control shelter about 50 yards from our main building. The water was
cold in my hand inside the building, but warmer than the air temperature
when walking between the buildings. It was weird. Then, inside the control
room, it tasted as cool as you might expect. Often we just use the Cold
Lake Refrigeration system, but more on that later.

Light Snow all day

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Big Day, eh

Big backlog of posts. Hope I get some time.

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Miracle

I have been served Grits at a Diner in Western Canada. I will try to get some pictures.

Dave, awesome MOAC. 'preciate it. I told your story about overflight of Arkansas to everybody here.

RKW, Chuckles discussed the Waffle House grits and runny eggs with Shirly and Pat.

Late night on Range, big mission tomorrow, be patient with your Blog Master.

Monday Morning Catch-Update

*whew* yesterday's MOAU really took it out of me.

Grits plan phase 3 worked to perfection. There is now a diner on the Western
Canadian Prairie that serves grits for breakfast.

Dave, thanks for the MOAC. I'll add them to the blog tonight. It won't let
me add in the comments remotely. Get some zzzz's.

-10C and lite snow

7-11, then up the hill

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Grits

Phase 2 of my master plan to bring Grits to the western Canadian Prairie has been accomplished.

Stand by for Phase 3.

Alert

Tylenol PM is not sold in Canada.

I talked to a pharmacist today and no drugstores in Canada, according to him, sell Tylenol PM. I asked why and he told me that he really did not know, but that Benadryl, the part that makes you drowsy is really a decongestant that the Tylenol people were just marketing a side effect.

Funny thing is, that is exactly what my Doctor, Dr. Russel, back in Fort Walton (I'm from there I think) told me once when I discussed with him that I was having problems sleeping.

Sunday in the Coffee Shop

Small Joys
Today's soup was "Cream of Vegetable" and it tasted like the wonderful "Golden Vegetable" that I used to have in England that was the real life saver of Lent. I cannot express how great it was to find that soup today. Unfortunately, Pat tells me they don't sell it in the grocery store. Still, I'll check for myself, later.

Language
Another thing that is unique to Canada is that everything is labeled in both English and French. You get used to it after a while and you stop noticing that butter in French is buere, garlic in French is ail, cholesterol in French is cholesterol, except that the e has a ' on top of it. But I noticed today that the French word for Cracker is "Biscuit". The same thing crackers were called in England, I wonder if the English are aware of that.

Mullets
I saw an awesome Canadian Passport today. Apparently the Canadian Passport requires a ball cap as an accessory. I wish I had gotten a picture, but left camera in room.

Vicki told me to go for a walk today and the room still isn't made up, so off I go.

MOAU 8 Guide to the Mother of All Updates (MOAU)

This is the last post this morning. I'm going for lunch and to let Housekeeping make up the room.

I have given you 7 posts this morning, mostly covering yesterday and Friday. There were also two posts on Saturday, which was a very long day.

Thank you for posting comments and for reading this rather self-indulgent blog. Please keep posting and letting me know you are reading.

Thanks to a suggestion from flingylingy I have put up my e-mail address if you would rather leave a note there.

Thanks to another suggestion from flingylingy I plan to learn some more HTML skills and put up an automatic e-mail button but I don't think it will be today.

I'll be back with more posts about people here, places (maybe a tour of our main building) and events in Cold Lake. Enjoy!

MOAU 7 Saturday Sunset

Yesterday was the first that we stayed to sunset up at the range. Given the snowy and possibly icy conditions it may not have been the wisest decision. We were coming down the hill tired and grumpy and with no support, usually at least two trucks leave at the same time and we can support each other in case one goes off into a snow bank (this has happened at least once, before I got here). Yesterday, however, one of the trucks had a problem that required service so it went down early and the other truck left before sunset as well.

Happily, we made it down that dark, snowy, partially unpaved road safely and I can bring you a couple of pictures of the sunset we saw while calibrating our telescopes by the stars.

MOAU 6 Heavens Above

Click on the logo to the left to go to Heavens Above website. This is an astronomy website from a German company that has a lot of very interesting and well explained stuff about satellites and sky charts, comets, etc.

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MOAU 5 Ice Fog

This is what our drive in yesterday looked like. No, the picture is not out of focus or fuzzy, that is what it actually looked like out of our windshield as we drove in.

This is ice fog. This is what you get when the air temperature matches the dew point temperature and that temperature is below zero. More accurately it should be called the frost point, more on the results of that below, but the Weather Network always calls it the dew point so I will here.

I had seen this once before, in England where it results in "black ice" on the roads in areas where they don't often get snow fall or ice storms. In Cold Lake they are prepared for that for the most part and scrape and salt the roads to prevent ice build up.

This, of course lead to a scarier than normal drive in, because after the snow storm on Friday the paved road had been plowed, but the unpaved had not. Here's what driving on the snow covered unpaved 20 km section looked like. Notice the fresh coverage of snow on the evergreens. These would have been pretty to see, except for the deep snow on the road (we were following the tracks of the commissionaires trucks from their shift change) and the ice fog.

But the range had been mostly plowed and we only had to navigate about 20km under the worst conditions. The salt on the paved road helped a lot. Since it is sunny today conditions tomorrow for the start of the mission should be good.

What about other effects of the ice fog? Well, it is called hoar frost and it coats the branches of the trees with a white ice that looks very interesting to me. Below are some pictures of what hoar frost does to our previously dreary surroundings. Also it really helped with the sun (now I remember!) burned off the fog and and we got a bright (in England they would have said brilliant) day.

I think blogger compresses the pictures where you can't really see the fresh snow sparkling, but it is and it helped make yesterday a kind of a magical day. I should have made snow angels.

MOAU 4 Church

Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada

The province of Alberta has parishes from several jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church in North America. Parishes from the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Toronto are here, as are OCA Parishes, Antiochian Parishes, Russian (ROCOR, I think) Parishes and Ukrainian. By far the most numerous are the Ukrainian. All the others are in Edmonton or Calgary, too far away, only the Ukrainians are nearby. In fact one of their districts is Headquartered in Lak La Biche, about 150 km from here.

So, if I can get to church, I'll be going to a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Bonneyville, about 60 km or so from Cold Lake.

I want to call and talk to the priest there, first, and I didn't get to because we were up at the range until late last night, too late to call on the night before liturgy. This is what I normally do before going to Liturgy in a community other than my home and I am sure I will be able to borrow the vehicle on a Sunday morning, but next week the mission may require Sunday work, I'll pray not.

MOAU 3 People - Canadians

This post is a promised follow up to introduce you to some of the people we see everyday (or nearly) here in Cold Lake.

First up is Pat. She is in charge at the coffee shop downstairs in the Hotel. We see her or Rochelle (who's picture I didn't get yet) every single morning of the week while having coffee or break fast. She is very nice and chats with us a little when they are not busy. She helped us find an alternative for the breakfast potatoes that come with every breakfast selection except the grilled cinnamon roll (which is pretty good). Tommy and Chuck tried to find other breakfast places, maybe one that had hash browns instead of breakfast fries, but the place that had "hash browns" on their menu just brought out the same old breakfast fries.

The lady on the right is Sandy. I'm pretty sure she is the day manager for the Lakeland Inn because she is always running around behind the counter with huge wads of cash that she never has time to count or whatever she does with it because the phone is always ringing. We get our newspapers (either the Edmonton Sun or the Edmonton Journal, more about them in another post) from her. Also she is the one who takes in our laundry when we send it out and negotiates the room rates. For some reason she laughs every time we come through the door. I didn't catch the name of the lady on the left, but I think she is either the assistant manager or runs the liquor store in the lobby.

On the post about how people in general treat us as Americans I mentioned that I asked the clerks at the 7-11. Well there is fall out from that. Now whenever we walk in to the 7-11 (really the ESSO station, and there is a short post there, probably not today) they greet us as "the aliens". Since we get gas there every other day and coffee and other stuff (snack of the day for me) every morning we are going to hear that a lot. I don't know their names, but I think the dark-haired one is the morning manager. Their uniforms look like they came from Star Trek:The Next Generation.

Other than these the only real interaction is with the staff of Taps, the sportsbar attached to the hotel (which we go to mainly because you can reach it from outside). Our normal server there is Meghan and I'm afraid to take her picture because she is big and mean and probably should be playing Hockey for one of the more brutal teams of the NHL. Maybe someday I'll work up the courage, if for no other reason than she is the only Canadian we see regularly that isn't smiling and happy most of the time.

I will post on my coworkers, 2 of whom are Canadians that live here in Cold Lake, in one case for the last 18 years, at another time.

MOAU 2 Aside

To flingylingy:

I have acceded to your request, although I am not sure it is a good idea. In return I have the following request for you. Please continue to post comments. Say hello to all the LMCO folks for me at Hurlburt and also those from Zone Alarm. Final favor request. Please pass this blog address to those folks at Warner Robins that remember me. Say Pink, Shania, Carol, Tracy, Les, Woodhouse, etc., etc. If you run into Gary sometimes let him know, too.

Hope you have a good time and hit Yamato's. That would be very welcome here in the land of fried haddock and white vinegar.

MOAU 1 Places

Cold Lake Marina

We had Dinner Friday night at Clark's General store in the Cold Lake Marina which is the center of the North Cold Lake Area.

Here's what the picture from the Marina Website says it looks like. I guess that was taken during the summer/fall, those 2 days in August. I continue to fervently hope that we get finished and that winter is the only season I see in

Here is what it looked like Friday Night. The brick sidewalk was pretty cool and reminded me of some of the older areas of Vicksburg.

It was pretty good, but with the normal very slow service that we've come to expect. The menu is Cold Lake standard, with a few twists that made it nice. The Cold Lake standard menu has shrimp, fish 'n chips, steaks, 'french dip' - type sandwiches and burgers. What made this special (believe it or not), was that they had malt vinegar for the fish 'n chips (every other place I've seen this so far has regular white vinegar). And they had blue cheese dressing for the salads. We had come to assume that blue cheese was banned in Canada. Fries are very good here. And they have them with every meal. The salad always comes on your plate with you main course, never before unless a salad is your meal. I find this annoying.

Here is a (not very good) picture of the inside of the restaurant and our server.
She had the Bo Derek braids going, which you can't see in the picture, but which seemed odd on someone her age and size. But she was nice and like every server we've met so far pleasant to talk to and far busier that she ought to be give how long the service takes.

I was going to make her part of the upcoming people post, but we've only seen her once.

The inside of Clarks really is the old General store, which was established in 1931. The building itself is one of the oldest in the area having been built in 1922. The lunch counter in the picture was taken from the Lakeview hotel which was established in 1925 and burned down in 1993. The chrome stools at the lunch counter are also from there, also originally from the 20's, but I couldn't get a good picture. They were pretty busy that night and I guess it is fairly unusual for an American with a camera to be prowling around this time of year.

Temp Differential

It is about 6 degrees C colder out here than in town. We are driving through
Ice Fog. I'll try to post a picture of this tonight.

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Sparkles

I'll go ahead post this tonight. I wanted to make sure it blogger had enough resolution. I should have expected it, after all snow flakes are crystals, but it was amazing to me that the fresh snow sparkled. I guess this is the "wonderland" part of winter, and I can see why some people find freshly fallen snow magical.

It sparkled all day in the sunlight, but the daylight pictures didn't capture it well. So as we were packing up to leave (after dark is very unusual for us, as it is much safer to leave before sunset) I got beside a snow bank and snapped a few hoping the sparkles would come out and this is the best I got. Not as good as the real thing but at least I can share it this way without any of ya'll freezing. And yes, I did fall into the snow bank right after I took this one.

You can see the part of the pit I made in the lower right of this picture.

Long Day after Snow Day

I'll bet you can guess what Canadians do the day after a big snow storm. Here's a picture of me doing it, too. It really isn't smart to wear tennis shoes on the day after a snowstorm.We had a very eventful day (at work for 14 hours if you count drive time, and I do, guess that made up a little for yesterday) and I took lots of pictures so if you'll just let me off the hook for tonight, I promise the Mother Of All Updates (MOAU) tomorrow, with lots of pictures and some words. Goodnight now.

Snow Day III

The area of "North Cold Lake" is north of the centre of town (formerly Grand Centre, but that's another post) and is right on the lake. When it finally stopped snowing today, 3 of us went to dinner at a restaurant in that area. We parked right near the marina, but couldn't see any boats.

It turns out that even if your boots go up over your calf it is possible to walk through snow higher than that. You don't want to get snow in your boots, ever.

I notice that I have several subjects on which I had planned to post by now and on which I have yet to post. I spent a good part of today photographing some of the people we interact with on a daily basis while promising to put them on the internet. I have a shot or two from dinner tonight that will make a standalone post. I haven't said a word about the people I am working with and I still owe Maria a post on all the clothes I put on to make the Canadian Burkha.

Please stay tuned and leave comments about what you like or hate or would like to know about my stay up here.


Tomorrow we'll be back at the range and should have a nice sunny day. We've been told that the military has cleared our roads late today and we should be back in business.

Goodnight now.

Snow Angels

More than a week now. Snow everywhere. 1 total snow angel. I should have
taken a picture of it while I was on the ski lift.

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Snow Day II

Sitting in hotel room watching the Weather Network, Canada's version of the Weather Channel. No Jim Cantore, though. If you click on their logo you will get the weather page for Cold Lake.

We got snowed out today, lots of snow fell here last night, as much as 20cm. And it is still falling. When we got to the unpaved section of the range road, which isn't plowed except by the military, we found it was up to the bottom of the vehicle. Knowing that the situation was likely to be worse on the range itself, since it was obvious no snow plows had been out yet, and that snow was continuing to fall, we turned back. It is possible that the military snow plows won't run until Monday (almost certain if they don't run today, I imagine they have their hands full with the base and the runways), and therefore if we were able to get in this morning, we might not be able to get back out until Monday.

Note that unlike certain people I know in Vermont, we at least tried to get to work in these conditions.

Meeting the snow plow on the way out toward the range.
Behind the snow plow at the turn onto the highway back to Cold Lake.Current view out of my hotel window. The flakes are getting big and wet.

Snow Day

Snow is too deep and unpaved roads not plowed. Forced to turn back after we
got about half way up to the range. That area got about 20cm of snow and
wind is blowing drifts at about 30 km/hour. Pictures later, when I get back
to room.

Gratuitous Photo of Lucky the Range Dog

Grits

Within the next week I have a plan to introduce grits to the Great White North.

Speaking of breakfast, the bacon that comes with breakfast here is just regular "streaky" bacon like we have back home. Why isn't the bacon in Canada Canadian Bacon?

Control

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Missed!

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TIVO Worked

Both yesterday and today. Someday I'll explain that.

1 Week Anniversary

I have now been in Cold Lake for a whole week. It would be great if I could say the time has just flown by, but it is more like the drive into the range we take every morning; long, repetitive and tedious.

It is about a 45km drive in every morning. It should only take a half hour, but as you can see the roads are sometimes a little hard to navigate. Luckily for us there is very little traffic at 7am in the other direction. Just kilometers after kilometers of the same view.

Of course there are some strange and unusual sites. Like this road sign for instance. I've never seen one like it and there are plenty of places like that where I grew up in Mississippi and in Navarre now. And the pavement does end, exactly 20km from the turn off from the main road. That road goes almost straight north from the highway, skirting between Marie and Cold Lakes and into the range. 20km paved, 20 km gravel and then you end up at the guard gate I showed you yesterday. There are some other strange road signs but I haven't caught them with the camera, yet.

There have also been wildlife along the road. Two days ago a Moose and her calf were just standing right at the tree line. However, we were past them before I could get the camera. Yesterday a wolf crossed the road in front of us as fast as a deer. I guess he was a little camera shy. One of the people in the car said it was a coyote, but I don't think they roam this far north.

10 cm

The forecast is for 10 cm of snow overnight. By the time we get here in the
morning there will be about 4 inches of snow over everything.

More pictures coming tonight.

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Early morning mission

Saw a big orange ball of fire near the horizon this morning. It was soon
behind the clouds, so I think it was the sun, but it has been so long I am
not sure.

At the range it is -18C, wind chill is -22. -18C is roughly -1F.

UnderArmour is the bomb diggity.

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Good Intentions

I intended to post more tonight, but having to work on the project books prevented me. Maybe tomorrow. By then we will know if the TIVO worked.

I wonder if anyone is still reading this.

I've been in Cold Lake too long

Coming down from the range today the outside thermometer was reading -12C (I'm going to learn enough HTML to make the degree sign one of these days). I was thinking how nice it was that it was warming up to that.

Then I remembered that -12C is about equivalent to 8F, which is the coldest temperature I can remember ever being in before this trip. And that was so cold at the time I couldn't stand it. Today I was walking around without even a coat on.

Tracking

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Lucky

Here is a picture of Lucky the range dog. Next to him is the "commisionairre", who mans (or womans, in this case) the guard gate at the range.

Notice the East German
style red gate on the left of the picture. Just like in the old spy movies set at the Berlin wall she has to physically push her end down to raise the gate for us to enter or leave the range. The yellow box on the right was the automatic system they had, but it didn't even last a day in the cold.


Lucky doesn't like to have his picture taken so I had to get the commisionairre to get him in position for this picture. He's a pretty laid back dog and doesn't seem bothered by the cold or snow. Apparently his predecessor as range dog ran with a dangerous crowd, wolves. But Lucky isn't like that, the only bad crowd he hangs around with are Range engineers.

Day 7

Starting Temperature this morning is -19c. About -5F.

Dressing and heading out to start the systems.

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Other Questions from your comments

In answer to a question or two about snow bunnies, in the near future there will be a picture of Lucky the Range dog and one of the commisionaires who guard the range.

In regard to the questions about the technology there will be a post, probably on the weekend about the system we delivered and how it works. I will try to keep the tech talk to a minimum and still give a good idea of why it is so good.

Even though we look like Arabs in Burkhas when we dress for work, there don't appear to be many Lebanese around here, so no kibee. Anyway this province had one of the Canadian Mad Cow cases so maybe raw beef isn't the best bet in these parts.

When will I get to come home? That is a good question. There are 5 guys who have been here since the first of January. They are each 'rotating' home for a week to a week and a half (because it takes 2 days to get here [I think there are not a whole lot of places in North America for which that is true]) and I will be staying at least until they all have rotated home. That puts me in mid-March getting home but probably coming right back because there are activities in April here that demand my presence.

Meanwhile, I am staying warm most of the time.

How are we treated as Americans in Canada?

In the comments the question was asked about how the Canadians treat us as Americans in their country. I struggled for a long time with this because most of the Canadians we interact with are either involved with the project (in which case we've been working together for so long that the question isn't meaningful), work at the range, or are in the service industry either at the hotel or in the restaurants.

The folks who work at the range treat us like co-workers and maybe a little better. Nothing any more unusual than say working at a new area at Eglin. They really make us feel like one of the guys.

The service industry folks mostly treat us like customers, although I think since we are so long term they are a little friendlier than you might expect. It probably doesn't hurt that we tip fairly well.

The people near us in the restaurants and bars treat us like other patrons in the bars, no one has gotten into any political or national debates or even teasing. Most of the other patrons in those places work in the oil industry and seem to be mostly loners. No one is concerned that we aren't interested in Hockey or Curling. For the most part they don't seem to be either.

So this morning I asked the girls who were running the 7-11 where we stop for gas and coffee every morning what they thought of having a bunch of Americans coming in their place every morning, what did they think of Americans in general. They said they didn't think much about us at all and that we were just normal people to them, except when we wanted a hunting or fishing license, then they said in that case we would be aliens. Then one of them asked me if I had any state quarters because she was missing one of the 2006 states from her collection.

Since it is tempting to think of Canadians as cheerful Americans with that funny U.P. accent, I think they may think of us the same way. All Canadians have been to Florida.

One New Picture for Tonight

The latest in exotic Arab fashions is the male burkha. It makes you wonder why Arabs aren't cold weather people, since they already know how to dress like this.

This is how I dress before going out to open up the optical tracking stations. As I mentioned before, it is a 2 man job (I would say 2 person, but there are only us guys on the project up at the range), and we strive to do everything to start the systems with no more than 20 minutes exposure per site. Most of the time we can do it.

Today I operated a tracking station for the first time with an aircraft flying overhead. I failed miserably. I guess when I was playing Guitar Hero on the PS2 I should have been playing a game that taught me how to use a joystick. Well, tomorrow is another day.

Can you tell that those gloves are 20 years old?

I will try and do a couple of more posts tonight to answer some specific questions from the comments for everyone to see.

GPS Coordinates

This will be a light posting night because we were at work until late on the range and I ended up leaving the camera there.

I have read all the comments for today and I will eventually answer all your questions. For now, because I am late for dinner and very hungry I will just give you the GPS coordinates.

N 54 degrees, 44.754'
W110 degrees 02.493'
El 2326

Those will put you in the parking lot of the building we work out of on the range. But google earth dis not have high res images of the range last time I checked.

Google earth does have high res images of the town of Cold Lake and the nearby Canadian Forces Base, which you can get to by typing "T9M 1P3" into the search box. That puts you very near the town centre for Cold Lake.

I'll post again later tonight.

Comments

Thank you to everyone who has commented. Please note that you have to look at the comments under each post to see your comment and my reply (I have replied to several) so please be sure to revisit some of the posts and view the comments sections.

Since I got permission

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Strange Snack Foods

One of the joys of international travel is that you get the chance to taste new and exotic snacks that will never be sold in the U.S. Today's example is Tandoori DoritosThe first thing to say is that these taste nothing like Tandoori Indian food, which is generally pretty good. This is mostly like the old Taco flavor that Doritos quit making in the U.S. years ago. I guess the demographics are good now for the Tandoori name, but I don't think the flavor will make these "hot" sellers.

Lakeland Hotel

How about an exterior shot of the hotel.

This from the 7-11 where I buy oddly flavored chips. I'll post on those at another time.

Permission

Original post removed by request.

Breakfast Quirks

Most days we eat breakfast in the coffee shop of the hotel. Here is what they bring out when you order, water, coffee, jams and ketchup. But they always bring the ketchup out without the top.

At first I was insulted, didn't they think we could keep from losing a ketchup bottle cap? Finally I asked and the server told me they always bring it out like that, no top. I checked a few other restaurants and they bring out capped bottles. Strange.

Monday Morning

Well, I expected the skiing to verify my age and it did. Probably not the smartest thing to have done before a work day, but with only one day off, you do what you can.

Here's a picture of me on the ski lift.


It turns out that photograde glasses don't like the cold much. They turn really dark outside and it seems to take forever to clear back up. I am having to take them off when it gets overcast or I go back into a building.

Update on the CrackBerry: It is unreliable for posting as I tried to post with it on the ski lift right after I took this photo, but the post appears to be lost somewhere in Cyberspace.

To Breakfast.

Woops

I had to take down the photos I took on the range. I will restore them once I receive permission (that I should have gotten BEFORE I put them up) to use them.

Kinosoo Ridge Map

Bleg

When you beg for something on a blog it is called a bleg.

Thank you Paul and Rick for the comments. Would some more of ya'll please comment? I don't know who sees this if you don't comment. Some of you sent e-mails, but comments work better, so please answer my bleg and let me know you read some of these posts.

If I get enough comments I might try to learn HTML to jazz the blog up a little.

Ski Kinosoo Ridge

Went skiing at a ski area about 10 klicks east (I think) of Cold Lake. It is called Kinosoo Ridge and it is spread over a series of hills at Frenchman's Bay on Cold Lake. There were very few skiers, even though a Canadian F-18 pilot we met said it was as busy as he had every seen it, and he and his son had season passes.
This a view up the main hill from the parking area. Notice the snow banks are higher than the top of the cab of the truck on the left.
Anyway none of the runs were very high, although they had a few runs labeled "Black Diamond" and since I was so rusty, I did not try any of those. Maybe next time.
I didn't fall until the last ride up the lift of the day. I fell going uphill on a cross-country part (there were a lot of areas where there was no way to generate enough speed to get up on hill or past a flat part, I think this is probably typical of ridge ski areas) onto my right side. Caught my ski pole under me and couldn't get up. I felt like a turtle on its back. After I had finally gotten the pole out from under me, a nice man and his son came by and the man gave me a hand up.
We skied for about 3 and a half hours all told, short lift lines meant lots of runs so after a few more pictures I am going to go soak in the tub.
This is the bottom of most of the runs I took. The orange fenced area to the left is a children's play area. Most of the children I saw, even 2 years old or so, were skiing or snow blading (I don't really know what this is), although some of them were wearing leashes that their parents were holding.

Here's the hardest trail I skied today. No, not the black diamond to the left, the blue square to the right. Notice that to get to the Black Diamond run you had to go even further uphill and this is where my momentum stopped and just about everyone else I saw there.
It is also the place where I fell. You had to go up hill to get to this point so one of the times I just stopped where I ran out of momentum and took this picture. When I fell I was using my poles to try to keep going and I crossed my skis when I had almost no speed and *plop* over on my side I went!

Test

Parts of this post Original post removed by request.

Update 16:54
Here's Mickey at the Lodge. We made it and my next post will be about skiing.
Mickey will probably get to go back to Fort Walton in about 2 to 3 weeks. I'll post more about the guys I'm here with (I was tempted to say working, but I haven't worked like them, yet) later on.

Saturday Snowfall

The snow was not falling very heavily on Saturday, but it was steady.

Even a slow snowfall obscures visibility across the lake.

This is important because our system is optical and a snowfall like this means we can't operate the telescopes and I can't get my operator training.

Duffel

This is my new duffel bag. It is very important to have something like this at the remote location where we are installing our system. Let me explain.

In this duffel is all of my insulated arctic gear, boots, gloves, face cover, hat, parka with hood and bib overalls. These cannot be worn inside for very long, including inside the car. Now we never go out alone, we are always in pairs, but there exists the possibility that we could get stranded. Since the range is more than 45 kilometers from the nearest town and from the main airbase, it could be quite a while before any help can get to you. We have radios, and there are guards (they are called 'commisionaires'), but given bad weather and that parts of the range are even more remote, maybe 20 or more kilometers from the guard shack, you have to have your gear with you in order to survive. A few hours exposed in -40f (or c, they are the same at -40) is deadly and it could be the car and your gear are your only survival tools.

I have only had to wear all this gear once, so far. We had to reset the limit switches on one of our pedestal positioners and that takes about 25 minutes lying on the cold metal floor of the system trailer.

But the weather is good today.

Hotel Room

Here are a couple of views of my hotel room. Reasonably comfortable, but it could really use a comfortable chair. It probably won't look this nice again until I leave (whenever that is).

I have a refigerator, but no microwave. The inability to cook and lack of a car as well as limited selections in the restaurants around here are making Lenten Fasting difficult to say the least. I tried very hard during cheesfare week, but the work and timing and need to take my meals with the guys I work with is going to ensure that I can't keep the fast very well.

TV is the only entertainment option other than my computer (and this blog), but I haven't turned it on, yet. Tonight is Battlestar Galactica, so that streak will end, too.

The hotel has two restaurants, one is a coffee shop and the other is a nicer, more formal dining room. The had brunch in there this morning. I was reading in the lobby while they made up the room and I could smell all the brunch stuff. The coffee and breakfast bar had to suffice, though. There is also a "lounge" which is just a bar and a sports bar next door that we can get to without going outside. Apparently the law here is that there is no smoking in restaurants, but it may be mandatory in bars.