56 thoughts on “February 8, 2014: Out on the Ice”

    1. Two, maybe two and a half feet? It's nice that the group that puts this thing on drills a lot of holes (well over a thousand), so all I have to do is chisel out the last five or six inches of the hole I came five hours early to get (and the hole that I'm saving for Linds).

      It's nice that it's not windy. It'd be very, very cold if it was. Eight below with no wind is alright.

    1. All those goals are terrible for my fantasy team since Szczesny is my keeper. The only saving grace would be if Suarez scored a few, but of course the fantasy gods have not been so kind as that. Anyone with Skrtel on their team is raking it in.

        1. still gotta show soccer!
          in fact the two early games that are usually on NBCSN were on USA.
          somewhere, Jack Donaghy is smiling.

      2. Craig Bellamy reminds me of Macklemore. Otherwise, yes they are not easy on the eyes.

  4. Okay,that whoever put that image up, that couldn't be more perfect: my favorite beer in the snow, with people ice fishing in the background.

    The internet is an oddly specific place sometimes.

      2. It's hard to tell, really, but it looks like ice fishing to me.

        I Tineyed the image and found nothing. I don't suppose that pic is OC?

  5. NBC Live Extra app on my phone works infinitely better than the in-browser version for me.

  8. So, my brother at one time had a great photo of my grandfather aboard the Swedish battleship that he was serving on, but in one of his moves he lost it. Well, apparently he found it again, because I got this sent to my phone a few days back:
    Gota
    (click to embiggen) The ship is the HSwMS Göta, the photo is from ~1900, and my grandfather is 2nd from the left in the third row.

      1. Very cool. Rhu, IIRC you're fairly big into genealogy. Any tips on free ways I can dig into my background online?

        1. two words: library card

          You can find TONS of stuff for free online, and even more through your local library. My suggestion is to be careful not to get caught up in trying to extend your tree back several centuries and instead concentrate on finding more stuff about more recent ancestors. The further back you go, the more tentative the connections can be. Start by asking your living ancestors for whatever info you can, then work through the census info (1940 is the most recent available) that the Mormons have set out for you. You can easily get copies of birth or deach certificates from MN Historical Society. Use any of the genealogy software (I used FamilyTreeMaker) and be sure to document your sources for the various items. And for God's sake, pump all your living relatives for information and stories while they're still alive!

          I used genealogy as an excuse to begin learning HTML; here's the page for my grandfather pictured above, hosted for free at Rootsweb.

          1. Thanks. I've already put a 1400+ people into my tree on Ancestry.com, but I don't have many MN relatives (my parents moved here when pregnant with me). I just wanted to know if there's some obvious stuff I didn't know about.

              1. Really, how does that work? I might need to poke around the Hennepin County Library website!

                Edited to add: looks like the access is only good on computers at a library - good thing one of them is four blocks from home.

                1. Exactly. The library here has free off-site access to HeritageQuest, which is fine, but stuff like Ancestry is free from at the library itself. I'm not sure that the library access includes everything from Ancestry (like the newspaper archives, maybe) but free is free, right?

                  I'm not a fan of Ancestry.com -- they tend to suck stuff under their umbrella and then charge for it, and their search isn't really very smart.

        2. I would suggest learning Spanish and digging through Argentine records.

          Spoiler SelectShow

          2. I had an aunt who was really into this, put a lot of time and effort into digging up data and sharing it with everyone.

            I used the link above to the LDS site and found both grandfathers circa 1940 census (my father was 4 and my mother was 1).

            I did the Roots trip to Sweden a couple years ago and found out where my grandfather had been baptized (in a small town called Virestad south of Växjö in Småland (Linneaus and Mats Wilander also from here). He had been put up for adoption so the trail goes cold from here. In the churchyard all the graves were Olssen, Larssen, Bengtsen, Swenssen, Magnussen, Anderssen, Peterssen, etc.).

            On my mom's side, my grandfather's mother (from Ukraine) had him placed for adoption, so the trail goes cold there also.

            1. I just realized that this LTE might be the source of a future relative to know any of these factoids - weird, kinda.

            2. btw, that Ukraine trail doesn't have to go cold; paternal DNA testing is an option, if there is a direct male descendant from your grandfather (an uncle from that side, maybe?). It's pretty cheap to do the test and throw the results out there for a potential match.

            3. I spent a semester in vaxjo. I miss riding my Swedish military surplus bike around the lake to the university.

              1. I remember that the local pronunciation of Växjö wasn't anything like I was expecting - it sounded something like 'Vaikwer'.

                Did you get up to Mariastad? Famous for their huge propellers. There was a cool (huge) Picasso sculpture at the edge of the lake.

  9. One time when I was home from college, I went to an ice fishing tournament just north of Park Rapids with my dad and brothers. There were a lot of people in the tournament, and it was really cold and windy.

    I owned a hibachi grill at the time and brought it with. At lunch time, I fired up the grill and cooked steaks. I don't remember if we caught any fish, but I do recall my dad being the happiest guy on the lake, eating steaks and warming his hands over the grill.

  11. GW just won the opening tip, had a player dribble once and then throw an alley-oop. I don't think I've ever seen an orchestrated "tip" play to start a game that led to an alley-oop within three seconds.

    1. Walk-on Skyler White (no idea if majoring in accounting) is not only getting some non-Shabazzian (i.e., garbage time) action but buries back-to-back 3's for GW to extend lead to 20-5.

          1. You would be wrong. Only 40% in the second half to lower it to 59% for the game. Bunch of bums.

  13. Ice Fishing tourney update: four of my group of six placed in the top 100 (including Linds) Prizes $100 a piece.

    Very, very fun times.

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