Kanata Day!

In the morning, we went to pick strawberries. The taste of fresh strawberries is incomparable to that of the imported kind; the way that they melt in your mouth, immersing you in the sweet taste of berry goodness.


Maria really, really likes fresh berries.


Look at this endless field of berries. I filled up my basket and I only advanced about 1.5 metres in the row. Lifting up the leaves of the plants usually reveals mounds of fresh, ripe berries.

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In the evening, we went to see the Kanata Day fireworks. Out of random luck, we found nice seats at the top of a little hill that were directly opposite of the moon, allowing for a fantastic backdrop to the colourful Kanata Day fireworks.





Since taking that random photo in 2004, I have yet to capture fireworks so well.

Happy Kanata Day!

It is Kanata day in Canada!

It is nice to see people across the country celebrating our small town of Kanata.

Algonquin Trip - Saturday

Here is the continuation of the canoe trip last weekend.

2009-06-20 - Day 2 - Carcajou to Clover



5h39 - Campsite on Carcajou. We're up! Cloudy day, not too cold. We slept with the fly open and weren't too cold.

Sleeping with the fly open is really scary. I sometimes sleep on my back so if I happened to look up, I could see the trees and the stars. Although this was really pleasant, it did not offer the psychological protection against bears that a thin piece of nylon normally does.



7h00 - And we're off. Pleasant, cool day, cloudy. Bugs are terrible; black flies and mosquitoes.

7h12 - Finished 90m.

7h46 - 350 portage to McDonald. Boggy. Bugs. Lovely cloudy day.

8h00 - First black 350, not too bad. Bugs are bad.

"Black" refers to the colour of the portages on the map, red and black. Black portages are unmaintained, meaning that we encountered a lot of fallen trees along the way.

8h18 - Damn beaver dam!



8h42 - Lost in bog. Hitting lots of rocks, very shallow. Lots of bugs. Not too warm. Perfect temperature. We saw a deer.

The bugs were really bad. To illustrate my point, one landed on my page as I was writing.





Beaver dams get quite annoying after a while, especially those that have really deep water before and after, making the transition over somewhat difficult. In shallow water, we can all just step out and drag the canoe over but here we had some problems.

9h39 - Begin 2 km portage. Sun is out. We are finally out of the labyrinth bog. Fun times, lots of beaver dams.

This was a long portage but we still had a lot of energy since it was our first day. This is when we started to develop our transition portage system with the scout, the porter, and the lucky paddle guy.



As you can see, unmaintained portages are not always easy to follow. We seemed to always lose the trail at a difficult point, like where a dozen trees had fallen together, making it really difficult to go around and find the trail again.

10h45 - Turcotte lake. We're done! Portage not too hard. Some fallen trees. Bugs horrible. Lots of uphill and downhill. Sun has come out. Bug juice useless.

11h11:11 - Lunch on Turcotte. No bugs, cloudy, breeze pushing us in the right direction.

Since the forest was too buggy, we had lunch on the lake while the wind pushed us in the right direction; this never happens, wind is usually in my face.

11h26 - Finished 130m portage. On Guthrie lake. Short portages are fun. No bugs here, wow. Thunder? Uh oh!

What we heard was not 'thunder' but the military base nearby, or so we assumed.

11h45 - 120 to Clover. This is going to hurt. We're all really tired.



There were traces of beavers everywhere, especially across the waterway. Damn beavers!

12h31 - Clover. No more portages today! Wahoo! Sunny and windy. Yay!

This was a nice lake. The site that we found was hidden behind an island but high up on the rocks and windy, the perfect combination to avoid bugs.

13h02 - Camp on clover lake. We're done for the day, yippee!



These grilled cheese sandwiches were delicious, although mine was a little bit overdone.

16h53 - Camp. We went swimming. Jason and Chris took the canoe out to get water. Now we're playing with fire, lighting pine cones on fire for fun.



Pumping water is nice but you get the best results when you get water away from the shore.

21h09 - Just went for an evening swim. The water was so nice. I banged up my toe on a rock and now it's bleeding. I hope that it doesn't hurt too much on tomorrow's portages.

Lucky for me, my toe did not bother me the next day. Swimming in the evening was really nice.

Today was a great day. We got up at 5h30 and were out on the water by 7. A hard day but we were happy to have gone so far. We spent much of our afternoon and evening gathering and cutting firewood. We gathered about 200 pine cones to burn. Everything is packed, we're ready for bed but going to watch the fire a little longer.

We gathered many pine cones and put them all in the fire at once.



This was perhaps not the best idea as none of us had anticipated that the flames would get so big.



There is no exaggeration here; the fire is really, really big. We were afraid that it might get out of control.



Here is Chris having a discussion with a log; the log could now see both sides of the argument.



Jason collecting pine cones for one last 'big burn'.



The burn was slightly more controlled this time.



But just as spectacular.

Torque Wrench Mystery

The other day, I snapped a bolt on my engine block. I could not understand why; I had set my (new) torque wrench at the proper setting and the bolt snapped long before I applied even half of the recommended force.



The reason for this was pointed out to me the other day; in a discussion with Paul's dad, he asked me this simple question: "Foot-pounds or inch-pounds?" I suddenly felt like those engineers who had mixed up metric and imperial units. Inch-pounds? I had no idea that there was such a thing!

We know that: 1 foot-pound = 1.35582 joules and 1 inch-pound = 0.11298 joules, or exactly 1/12^th of the force, meaning that with my extra-long torque wrench, I had applied a ridiculous amount of force to a simple valve cover bolt. Poor little bolt!



Reading some more about my problem and discussing it with experts in the field - my programmer and analyst colleagues at work are experts in the field of auto mechanics - I learnt that valve covers are not under pressure. If my seal was proper, it should hold even if the bolt was broken.

I decided that I would lose nothing by trying: if I did not try it out, I would have to take it apart and replace the seal; if the seal did not hold, I would have to take it apart and replace the seal; if it did work, then I would be awesome.

And so I drove my truck for about 8 minutes. Of course, it started to smoke as the oil on the exhaust manifold heated up enough to smell bad and smoke like a public servant from 1952. I immediately believed that my seal was insufficient and that the leak was persistent. Later, however, I thought that my seal might be sufficient and that there might still be residual oil in place that would cause the smoke and smell whenever I started my truck again.

Today, I had a look and felt around the valve cover but did not see any oil - and oil is especially easy to spot when I wipe my finger on my pants. Oh, is Maria reading this? I mean when I wipe my finger on my designated oil-cleaning rag from the garage - so I am hopeful.

I think that I may be lucky; the leak may be contained. Unfortunately, I have had too much rum and coke this evening - it is the eve of Canada Day - and I cannot drive my truck tonight. I will try it tomorrow.