Showing posts with label ice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ice. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Contest: Guess when the Flamingo floats

I thought a little contest would be in order! The first 4 people to guess the date the Pink Flamingo floats in the pond wins a copy of my interactive CD book on the Butterflies of the Carolinas & Virginias.

Please leave a comment with contact info or E mail me You must live in the US to win in this contest.

As of Sunday the ice in the pond was at least 4 inches thick. When will it melt and the pink flamingo end up floating? The flamingo is resting in mulch on the ice.



Hey can you believe I got Meg out on the pond on Sunday night!

Dot walking over the big cracks in the ice!


Our house as seen from the pond!

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Crazy Curling on a pond in Durham, NC

The curling match between old friends really happened today in Durham, NC. Let me tell you these were not crazy young adults, I was among friends that were around my age (early 50s) to a few years older. The pond was larger than mine and we had nine people on the pond at one time.

Did the ice crack? Yes it did and often, it took me 30 minutes to get the nerve to join them as at 240 lbs I was the heaviest person on the ice.



That is me tossing my first curl. The water jugs were just thought up before the event since we did not have granite curling rocks. The blue bucket is the goal when tossing from the other side. You play this game kind of like shuffleboard.


X was our team, note the x mark on my 'rock'.

Barney a Canadian who has actually curled in a league!

You can't curl your rock without having someone brush away the ice along with the rock.

Ken on his knees after tossing his rock, he was on my team.

That is Roger another Canadian and the only player in skates! The white pipe there is the other goal, we did lots of improvising.



This is Jon he was on my team also. He is not from Belgium!

David from Australia. I was very glad to see him well again, the pond is in his neighborhood.

Ken from the USA is action!

Roger in action once again. Our team lost because when we reached 10 points to win, the rules required us to win by two points and since they had 9 points we played on and they scored enough to win the game. We were on the ice for 2 1/2 hours playing, what a hoot. I was surprised no one stopped in to see what we were doing as a good number of cars went by.

A view of the playing field once we were finished playing! It'll be probably a decade before we can have another match like this one as it is warming up all this coming week and ice like this does not happen very often in Durham.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Randy on Ice!


Several firsts today! My image on this blog and Meg's photography of me on the blog. This morning with the temps in the teens I walked out on the pond. For those of you that are not familiar with our pond it is egg shaped and about 60-75 foot across and about 4 1/2 to 5 foot deep at the moment. We are just north of Durham, North Carolina and we are in the Southeastern United States.


The ice is pretty deep at least 8 inches maybe more. Dot was not willing to stay on the ice, maybe she 'is' smarter than I am? Meg had a hard time getting this photo as Dot would not stay still.

Near the center of the pond! The ice was very sound here.

Yikes it's cracking!!! Did I forget to mention the 30 foot long crack about 3 inches deep in the center of the pond? I saw it days ago, but it sounded like a gun shot when I stepped on it!

All the way accross, the last 15 feet was a bit faster walking after hearing the crack!


This photo shows the big crack in the ice. The red arrow on the left is where I stepped and heard the cracking. The other arrow shows a right turn in the crack.

Tomorrow I've been invited to join in on a curling match on a smaller pond in Durham. We are going to use gallon jugs filled half way with ice as curling stones. It will be an international event with the USA, Canada and Australia being present and Denmark perhaps too. In the morning it'll be 16 or 17 degrees and what looks like the end of these mornings with teen temperatures. Next week the afternoons will be pushing into 50 degrees. so I doubt we'll be walking on any more ponds.