So after coming home from yesterday morning’s Pinewood Derby, I spent most of the afternoon assembling the backyard ice rink. I picked a new location from last year, since the yard is so unlevel in that spot; this year’s location so far seems much better. So, it was pretty cold yesterday afternoon (it was -6 F yesterday morning) and since the boards had been sitting outside for the past year they were pretty well frozen, which made them a bit heavier and harder to drill the decking screws to attach them together, but by around 5:00PM the rink was assembled. At that point I did not want to put in the tarp and start filling it up, since I wasn’t really sure how long filling would take, and since I was essentially frozen myself at that point I did not want to hang outside anymore. I put in the tarp and called it a day.
I knew that there was a chance of snow last night, and sure enough when I took a blurry look sans glasses out the window this morning at the backyard on my way downstairs there was about 2 inches of snow in the rink. I finally got around to setting up the hose and filling the rink today. I put much less water in this year, as I think last year’s rink never froze solid enough for us to use because it never really got cold enough to freeze so much water. I really wish that I had setup the rink earlier, since it has really been such a cold winter thusfar, but we’ll see what happens this year. Also, using a white tarp would reflect much more sunlight than the blue one that I use, but that will need to be an improvement for next year. I did finally try out my homemade rink rake just to make sure water flows through it as expected (it does) to use as a little handheld zamboni for surface repairs.
My work is now done – 10 minutes until the NFC Championship game… go Eagles!