Below the Rink - Sept 13th 2011



Official Univ Portrait

 Have you ever wondered what's below the ice rink? Well I found out today while sitting in my office, reading the paper over lunch. Yes...I have an office now. I'm teaching at the university! This is the job I've always wanted - to mold young minds, steering them along their engineering path to going and doing something, while I continue to steer. (There was no sarcasm in that sentence whatsoever). The photo to the right is the official one they took. I included it only because for some reason, every time I look at it, I laugh.

Sorry for that side note...The second part of that sentence that may shock you is that yes...I read the paper now. I even subscribe. I'm trying my best to be a full grown adult and read the paper everyday. Since I am rarely full grown, I lapse and try to catch up on previous news articles during lunch.

This paper is a bit different than the one you may receive in your fancy big towns. There were 5 articles over the last two weeks about a missing life-sized paper mache Elvis. Yup. That's right, a home made elvis. The first article was that it was stolen, the next was a plea from the owner to return it, next was a continued plea to the community to return it, followed by an announcement of a fire where blue suede shoes and a wig were found next to the rubble, and finally a nice piece on an Elvis impersonator donating a number of items to the family who no long have a paper mache Elvis. Now to be fair, the Elvis belonged to a man who made it for his adult handicapped son who is a big fan of the King, so I have to believe that is why so much attention was brought to the saga.

Nonetheless, I was riveted over the last few days to try to keep up to date on the events. In each of those editions, there was also a paragraph or two on the fires in Texas and a whole article on Libya, so they do cover world events, but special attention is given to those sweet pieces and local charm that often get overlooked by those big city papers. They used to list all of the crimes that were committed within the city, including every burglary offence, but that recently stopped. I read an article the other day about a 'battered woman' who's man was given a suspended sentence because although he never hit her, he did pull her hair in one heated argument. I love this town where that mild offence (though still really really bad) is news!

Okay back to my original story - today, while eating lunch and reading the paper, one of the other prof's came in and said he was going to get a tour of the hockey rink and pool heat exchange system. He was planning on taking his students there later in the week and wanted a pre-tour. If you take out the engineering lingo, this means, tour the ice rink....down below! I quite literally skipped along to see what goes on down there. It was really neat. There were a lot of pipes and I was surprised to learn that they use ammonia, brine water, and heated city water to make the ice. At the same underground location, they heat the swimming pool. They use this neat exchange system to simultaneously heat one and cool the other. Okay, this is the reason I started to write the blog and clearly I had more to say about the newspaper, but nonetheless, I got an unexpected tour today, and some some dorky fun!