It's hot, damn hot

Ontario at this time of year is pretty warm and it's warmer earlier this year than the locals remember. Over 40 today when you include the humidity, or the humidex rating (the opposite of the wind chill rating in winter. The ambient air temp was actually around 33 today but the humidity was giving a Queensland summer a run for it's money so it felt more like 41. The central air-con has been on for the last 36 hours or so and we wont be thinking of turning it off until mid-day tomorrow when a storm is due through and temps should drop to low 20's.

We think that our rental situation will be resolved in a day or so. IBM has been great and will come to the party to increase our rent allowance so we can stay where we are and the kids can continue to go to the same school. 'The Donald', our landlord, had better not show his face around here again, I'm not sure what either of us will do if we get a face-to-face with that scum bag. Anyways, stress on that front should decrease and we can enjoy our summer.

The kids are madly anticipating their summer break, Cam only has tomorrow to go and he's a kinder kid no more, straight into Grade 1 in September. North American school has two years of kinder, junior and senior or JK and SK for short. So while it looks like he's moving from kinder he's really finished Prep and ready for Grade 1. When all the kdis come back they are likely to be 6 months ahead of home in the school year but I'm sure that the levels of achievement are pretty similar between Aus and Canada so no major transitional dramas are likely.

Canada Day is this weekend and, like Australia Day, is a big holiday weekend here, it usually marks the start of summer holidays. We will be traveling to the lake cottage we've rented on Monday and should miss most of the traffic as people return from their weekend away and we head into a week with the bugs. Before that though we have a big weekend planned, soccer of course, then a barbie with our good friends the Andrews on Saturday night (they're good people to get bent out of shape with), then Sunday is a round-robin and BBQ at the Bronte Tennis Club followed by an evening with another great set of friends the Doe's and hopefully some fireworks to celebrate the countries big day. We have a wad of explosives which we bought for the last major holiday but didn't get around to letting off so we should be lighting up the night on Sunday. Sadly there are no rockets, looks like the powers-that-be are discouraging them, perhaps due to tar roofs being set on fire. So all our fireworks are ground-based but hopefully still decent.

Speaking of rockets we finally set of Cam's model rocket last weekend and it was a hoot. The first engine we used was the small one, a B4, short burn and not much power. But there was some wind so I wanted to see what the thing could do before we popped a bigger engine in the tail pipe. The B4 was a good first shot, with the gantry angled slightly into the wind the rocket perhaps made it 250 feet up before blowing it's nose-cone, popping it's parachute and floating back down within 20 meters down wind of the launch pad. Feeling pretty good about ourselves Garry and I loaded up the C6 motor, a much bigger unit, and without waiting for a proper countdown Cam hit the big red button sending the projectile out of sight, well over 500 feet up and several streets into the wind, down range.

The nose-cone doesn't have a parachute, just a red streamer and a spongy rubber nose. The main body, supported by the parachute dropped quite a bit further away than the first shot, maybe 50 meters up wind. Finding the body was easy but we figured that we had lost the nose-cone, including it's cute digital accelerometer which tells you the rockets maximum speed in both miles and k's per hour when you retrieve it. As luck would have it we found the little bugger in some mugs front yard, several houses and at least two back yards away. Silly me had forgotten to turn the switch on so we don't know how fast the little bugger went. Luckily we have 3 more C6 motors... I love the smell of rockets in the morning.

Andy, out.