Kyle Thomas

The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)

A Winters Afternoon in Yellowknife

This past Saturday was what I would consider a good productive winters day in Yellowknife. It was an equal mix of pleasure and chores.

Like a typical Saturday the day started at the Yellowknife Dump. For those that doesn’t know; the Yellowknife Dump is one of the last dumps in Canada that you can still salvage at. The reason being is because Yellowknifers like there dump and the treasures.

My find this week at the dump was a big one. One that I’m sure you’ll probably question. It is a couch. A nice couch though. On a side note this is not the first time I have brought home furniture from the dump. The office chair I use in my home office was a dump find 6 years ago… it still works. The key to getting furniture at the dump is to: 1) make sure it is semi clean, 2) Leave it outside in the freezing cold and kill anything that might be alive and 3) clean it with a big combination of upholstery cleaner and Frebreeze.

After the dump, friends and I wandered the highway in search for some wildlife. In finding what looked to be an animal trail, turned out to be a trapline of sort. It was a well packed trail done by snowshoes. The area was really beautiful despite seeing no animals.

Adventures in the Bush    Adventures in the Bush

Adventures in the Bush

Adventures in the Bush    Adventures in the Bush

Adventures in the Bush    Adventures in the Bush

After getting home from the hike and tending to the bread that was rising in my kitchen I ventured back out to do some yard work. Mainly digging out my trailer. I hadn’t moved it since the fall and I needed to put new, bigger, tires on it. Ones that would allow me to pull it through the bush better when getting firewood. It was a lot of shovelling.

I then took it to my parent house where I put the new tires on.

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New mini jumbo tires.

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At about 10pm last night we went out looking for the Auror but thanks to the snow we didn’t see any.

What did you do?

Wood Cutting outside of Yellowknife

I think I have said it before but the heat of a wood stove is my favourite type of heating in the cold winter nights but to be able to do that you have to get the wood somewhere.

My Dad and I went out past Behchoko, NWT yesterday morning to the spot he often frequents. I was testing out a new little trailer I got and we managed over a cord of wood in it. Driving into the bush to accomplish something is for more enjoyable to me that just going for a hike nowadays. The idea of driving through a forest of dead standing trees and cutting your way through is pretty exciting.

Wood Cutting Excursion

Wood Cutting Excursion

Wood Cutting Excursion

Wood Cutting Excursion Wood Cutting Excursion

Now is the part where I get a little nostalgic. Since coming back to Yellowknife in January 2012 my relationship with my dad has grown to one I’m truly happy with. I now have my own life, house, vehicle, career, so that aside him and I can be friends and I can’t ask for anything better.

I admire this man. He is a machine. For a guy who has had two open heart surgeries, half a dozen seizure in the last decade and broken his neck, he still keeps going. I’m proud he is my dad, despite his quarks.

Wood Cutting Excursion

Wood Cutting Excursion

Wood Cutting Excursion

The funny part about this excursion was that it took us 3 hours to drive out to this spot and back but only an hour and a half to actually lay down, length and load the cord of wood. If we go out

Click the image to see full Panorama
Click the image to see full Panorama

A Truly Northern Weekend

I have no pictures, because this was a working weekend. Rather, it was a northern weekend. One without electronics, especially considering I lost my iPhone.

Saturday was a busy day. If you were me, along with family and friends, you would have driven 150km out of Yellowknife, past Rae-Edzo (Behchoko). The reason for such a drive was to cut down standing dead, also known as firewood.

Kyle snowmobile

We, and I say this with a grain of salt, because I am only there to help, get a cutting permit for the season so we can heat our houses with our wood stoves.

Leaving town at about 9am, we arrived at our cutting area (the location which is top-secret), break trail in with snow, cut for a couple of hours, haul it all back to the trailer, load it up and drive back to town.

It seems like an easy thing to do, but it does drain your energy. I’m also certainly not going to complain about the amazing -1ºC it was out there, but I certainly got wet and heated up quickly. I prefer this job in -20ºC. I think my gloves and boots are still soaking wet.

Now fast forward to Sunday morning. I’m up at the crack of dawn, you know about 8:30am here in the north and ready to go back out.

I fill our sled toboggan full of firewood and drag it to the front of the house and proceed to stock it up inside the house next to our wood stove. I brought in enough wood to keep us going for the week, burning only in the evening to kill the chill at night.

My next task was kindling. Kindling is also an annoying part of wood burning, because it seems you are always running out. Fear not I fill a milk crate, so again, we should be good until the next weekend.

The last thing I did this weekend was move snow. On a side note did you know this Hay River, NT company will make you snow. No thanks, I got lots. So much so I needed to remove it from the deck on our house. Otherwise in the spring water would be everywhere around the house.

If you have ever shovelled snow, you will know how straining it is. Now imagine 4ft deep snow on a deck 12ft in the air. I had to throw that snow so far.

I enjoyed every minute of this weekend, including my afternoon cooking and baking. My one regret for of the weekend is that come Monday morning I am going to be tired! Instead of being tired though, I’m going to be awesome.

Oh yeah I also blew a cylinder in my snowmobile, rendering it useless and lost my iPhone.

UPDATE: Fire in the Apartment

Well this is interesting. 12:20am on Thursday I wake up to a fire alarm going off in my apartment. Time to evacuate.

I’m sitting in my truck, on my computer, waiting to see what is going on.

UPDATE: Okay Time for the whole story, since it is 1 AM in the morning now. This evening I decided to stay at work, and finish projects I was doing. This wasn’t totally unusual, but I haven’t done in a while. I didn’t actually arrive at home until about 11 o’clock. At which point I wanted to do a little more work and watch couple videos, while falling asleep. So then comes 12:20 AM, where I’m half asleep.

I see flashing, if there is one thing I am sensitive to it is light, and I start to wake up. as I start to wake up, thank you the noise. It is the noise of an annoying fire alarm.  At first I don’t take it seriously, I sit up, I think about it, and I realize I can hear other people moving outside. That’s when I jumped up and put on a shirt, and pants. And I think, by the way I’m being a really bad example for this, should I take my computer? Well of course, so I quickly grabbed my computer bag which already had my computer in and left the building. First thing I do, jump in the truck and jumped onto twitter.

In about 15 min. 2 fire trucks, fire rescue vehicle, three RCMP and one ambulance were on scene. People were wandering around everywhere wondering what was going on. I sat my truck, blogging and twittering.

Eventually after 20 min. of watching the firefighters go up and down the stairs and through apartments they let everyone go back in. As I was walking back in, I asked one of the firefighters what it was. Turns out someone forgot they were cooking stove and it was a cooking fire. I would like to stress the point that it was 12 midnight, when most are either ready for bed or are at work.

So thanks to some other people in this apartment, I’m now going to be extra tired tomorrow. Good night.

UPDATE 2: According to EnergeticCity.ca the alarm was triggered by someone who forgot about their hot dogs on the stove.

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Getting Firewood for the House

If there is one thing I miss about not living in this home is the woodstove. The heat from a woodstove is like no other. It is nice and warm and comforting. Furnace heat is nothing like it.

So while I’m here in Yellowknife for a couple weeks I keep the stove going all the time, which means I’m going through a lot more wood than normal, therefore have to bring in more on a daily basis.