Monday 26 January 2009

The Golden Shovel

This weekend we dragged the kids out into the frozen tundra in sub zero (F) temperatures to watch the national Pond Hockey championships which was taking place about 15 minutes drive from our house. 250 teams gathered to play on one of the cities central lakes which had 25 rinks ploughed into it. All the teams are vying to win the Golden Shovel.

How does pond hockey differ from regular hockey, well the goals are different for one thing. In pond hockey the goals are short and wooden and have small holes to aim for. This is to discourage long range or high shots as the barriers are only about a foot high so it could otherwise be dangerous for spectators. Here is a pond hockey goal - you can also see that the ice is pretty rough and it can have big cracks on too from where the ice has expanded and contracted - all this makes the skating somewhat more challenging than in a groomed rink.

Becky the purple ninja leaps from the cover of a snow bank. Notice the small number of spectators - it was about -25C with the wind chill (and -20C without) so it really wasn't a great standing around day.
INTERLUDE
A couple of weeks back we went to the mall and found this fantastic sweet shop, check out the picture below! Can you figure out what the unusual thing is about the selection? Answers at the end of the post.Yesterday we had about 30 people over as our youth group had a social and went ice skating on our local lake and then came back to ours for some traditional British fare. As a wind up we first made some cabbage and yogurt cold soup (with red wine, rice vinegar and fish sauce) which we said was a traditional English starter and build up quite a bit (we enlisted the help of local chef and bouncer Ken Kelley to help with this - nice job Ken). Everyone should get the chance to watch a huge group of people simultaneously try something disgusting but be too polite to say anything.

We then made up for it by dishing out roast potatoes, toad in the hole and roast chicken followed by apple crumble, bread pudding and trifle (according to Andy, any fewer than 3 desserts would be letting the side down). Here are some pictures of the ice skating and yoof.





And just to prove that Dan and Becky do sometimes stop and 'play nicely together'.
And finally, what was odd about those sweets, well they are all for dogs.

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