Tapping Maple Trees in January

Every spring my family collects sap from maple trees and boils it until it becomes maple syrup.  The sap only flows through the tree trunks when the temperature is below freezing at night and above freezing during the day.  Normally this happens around March, but on January 26th this year the forecast was calling for overcast and +5 Celsius.  Warm enough that sap could flow, I thought to myself, but it should be at least another month before maple season.  So I dug out a few old buckets and tapped four of the maple trees in my front yard.

Tapping maple trees is fairly simple.  Find a maple tree (make sure it isn't a beech pretending to be a maple, it happens sometimes when it is a bit dark outside) drill a hole, lightly hammer a spout into the hole, hang the bucket on the hook, and top it off with a lid to keep snow and rain out of the bucket.

My guess was that each tap might produce one liter of sap by the end of the day.  That was supposed to be a conservative estimate, I have seen trees smaller than these overflow their buckets on a day with similar temperatures.  Admittedly, I was pretty excited to drink some sap straight out of a bucket in January.

By the end of the day the temperature went back down below freezing and I checked my nine buckets.  Not a drop in any of them.  Boo.  I have a few ideas about why there wasn't any sap flowing;

1. It was pretty cold the night before, so it might not have been warm enough for long enough to thaw out the trees and get the sap flowing.
2. It was overcast.  Sunlight would have warmed up the trees faster than cool air.
3. There was a chilly breeze.  I don't know if trees feel the effect of wind chill, but that gusting wind wasn't helping anything.
4. January might just be too early to be making maple syrup. 

While I was disappointed that I didn't get to drink any fresh sap, I am satisfied with my little experiment.  I know not to get to excited when the weatherman announces one warm day in a mostly cold month.  And when the warmer days do show up my front yard will be ready to go!

For those days when you just need to see a baby laughing

This is my baby boy Malcolm.  He was eight months old when I filmed this.  Apparently there was something really funny about the way I was tapping the side of his playpen.  I can't help but love the way children look at the world.

I don't like it condescension in my cereal.

Back in 2006 I spent six months in Scotland.  One of my favourite things to eat for breakfast was Weetabix.  It was sort of like a big healthy breakfast cookie made of whole wheat that went great with a bit of milk and whatever fruit was on had (or some of the maple syrup that I had brought from home).

While shopping for groceries recently I came across Weetabix in the cereal aisle.  It was a bit more expensive than the cereals I normally buy, but burst of nostalgia encouraged me to pick it up.  My brain was telling me things like "This will go great with the bananas at home, and the box says it has four simple ingredients, look!"

I started wondering what the four ingredients were.  Whole wheat was fairly obvious, and I figured there would be a binding agent of some sort as well as a sweetener.  I turned the box over to have a look at the ingredients list and found this;

That's right. Not four but seven simple ingredients.  Obviously this can mean only one of 2 things.  Option one is that the people working at this company are stupid and do not know that there is a difference between four and seven.  A company like this should not be trusted with the task of safely producing food for human consumption.  Option two is that the people at Weetabix think that their consumers are too stupid to know that there is a difference between four and seven.  A company like that does not deserve my money.

I put it back on the shelf and finished my grocery run.  On the drive home I kept thinking about Weetabix.  Do the Weetabix boxes in Scotland say the same thing?  Do they use the same recipe for the Canadian market?  I turned to the internet to look for some answers.

The Canadian product uses dehydrated cane syrup as the sweetener while the British simply list sugar but also add riboflavin (vitamin B2) and folic acid.  The organic versions do not contain any added vitamins or iron, though interestingly the organic version in the UK has more than double the sodium.

Perhaps one day the back of the box will be replaced with something less condescending.  I hope so, because I have a bit of a craving for Weetabix and blueberries.

The SnowMudder Competition

Near the end of January 2015 there was much cold weather and snow.  So much snow that Tough Mudder held a contest called SnowMudder.  The idea was for people to make short videos of their cold weather training routines.  Some examples included resistance running through deep powdery snow in shorts and a t-shirt, doing jumping jacks beside snowblowers, and other hypothermia-defying stunts.  When I saw that the prize for best video was airfare, hotel, and entry to the Tough Mudder run in Whistler, I decided to get some footage and teach myself how to edit a video.

I am rather pleased with the result, especially considering that I shot all the footage, taught myself how to use the editing software, and made the video in less than 2 days.

I'd like to quickly thank J.T. Sport for promoting the video on their Facebook page.  The chainsaw and helmet are from their store.

Painting the Nursery

Back before Malcolm was born, Allyson and I decided to paint the nursery. Allyson found a picture online of a nursery where one wall was painted like multicoloured checkerboard. I had a look at the picture, determined that it was within my abilities to recreate, bought some paint and made the room look like this:

If you are interested in seeing how it was done, click the link below and read on...