Whoever Draws The Sword...

As I write this, Ottawa is hit with its first significant snow of winter. After as green a Christmas as I can recall ever witnessing, we've got a solid foot of snow, if not more, coming down out there.

I rarely have the week between Christmas and new year's off, but this year I do, and judging from the chaos outside, I picked a good one to have off. As I recall, a co-worker of mine named Gail (Hi Gail!!) was emphatic that I should request it this year, to the point where I feared I would face physical violence. And so here I am, drinking red wine by the fireplace, listening to blues, and updating my little blog.

Making me feel more clever still is that my dad and I rode out to Crow Lake yesterday before snowmageddon hit. We dropped off a load of wood, took a peek in the bunkie in preparation for reno work there in the spring and made sure everything was where it was supposed to be. On the way in, we stopped in the Perth Home Hardware which inspired a few more decoration/renovation ideas and on the way back, we stopped at The Maples in Sharbot Lake for a delightful lunch.

I felt a little less clever when my pappy spotted something that required a little explanation. Last year, I posted about recreating Stonehenge using a concrete slab from the dock ramp and a couple of logs.

Well this year I inadvertently recreated Excalibur using another log and my wood splitter.

We were running a little short on firewood. That was one of the remaining logs from when a dead tree was cut prior to our taking possession of the cottage.

I thought I saw a crack across the top that had...potential. My goal, obviously, was to widen it and eventually cause the whole thing to split down the middle.

I was hammering away but seemingly getting nowhere until I heard a loud crack and my momentum damn near caused me to face-plant. After a moment to think "Finally!" I realized I wasn't as successful as I'd thought.

Thor would just shake his head at this shameful display. "Verily, thou art a dipstick", he would say.

Ah, crap...Well, still better than my wrists!

And now I can't get the splitter out. So screw it, that log has become decorative in our "Little Ol' England" spot alongside mini-Stonehenge. Yeah. I just thought of that now and I think we should keep it.

Christine was far more successful that weekend. Not only did she and Kathy combine to whip up some good Thanksgiving eats...

...But she whipped up this clever little swinging gate to prevent the wiener tots from running off the deck (well, one end of it for now, at least).

Ain't that something? I think the whole thing is built from wood we'd had laying around the place, much of it from our dismantled floating dock. Fantastic. Only three more of those and we can finally keep some control over the sausages.

We make such a great team. She builds stuff, I break things...We complement one another extremely well!

Kicking Off Our (First) Vacation for 2015

We were on vacation from July 27th to the 31st but we did not leave for Crow Lake on the previous Friday as usual because I had tickets to the Stampeders/RedBlacks game. I even made my way onto the team's official photography!

See the third player from the left, wearing his helmet?  I'm one of the pixels in the row directly above his head. Pretty wild, eh? Great game, great time with friends, and a fine way to start a vacation.

We didn't go on Saturday morning, either. Instead, we made an appearance at Wiener-Paw-Looza.

There's no way to express this without sounding like we're stating the obvious but...The place was crawling with wiener dogs! And we got there just as the event started! You'll see the occasional walking sausage strutting around town, but to see them all "en masse" like that is pretty jarring. Got to watch your step!

I didn't take a lot of pictures while we were there, but the folks running the show sure did, so those of you on Facebook can take a gander at those here. The races must have been a blast.

THEN we left for Crow Lake.  And got busy shortly after arrival.

Even with a light across the street, the lower part of our property can get pretty dark in some areas at night so for a while now I've wanted to add solar lights in the more high-traffic areas. Nothing can take the romance out of a late, lakeside evening by the fire than a tumble down a flight of stairs, right? That little project has begun.

Made in China, and as we know, the Chinese ALWAYS make good st...No, wait...They actually don't. But so far so good with these. 

I quite like that picture, if I do say so myself, and it's my blog, so I do.

The first four are up, but in preparation for the completion of that project I've gone around and removed a bunch of the rounded knobs that were placed at the ends of all the railings.

Of course, that couldn't be as simple as it sounds. Some were screwed in, some were glued down, some were stapled, some were nailed...Gadzooks...It shouldn't have required six tools to accomplish, but there you have it.

We did a little shopping early in the week before guest began to arrive. I'll get to that next.

Oh Yeah...Birthday Week!

We finally did get around to painting the deck that week. Two coats, of course, each board done both by hand and by roller.  I believe we calculated that from clearing the crap out from between the boards to washing the deck and painting it twice, we put in about 12 hours worth of work each.

We kind of felt rushed at the end of coat two because it looked fairly certain that there was a storm coming, but damned if it didn't pass overhead.  So we got a bit of a break there.  And when it was finally done (except for the railing, obviously) it looked a little something like this.

A lot more clean looking.  It no longer looks natural, of course.  There's no question that it's been painted.  But you can still see the grain show through so we're pleased with that.  Here's a better before/after view against the as-yet-unpainted stairs.

Sacrificing the "natural" look was really a no-brainer.  A weathered appearance is nice but we were getting uncomfortably close to a point of no return there, and the last thing we need is to start replacing decks.

We're now tossing around ideas for the railing as well as trying to determine if we want to use different colours or shades for the other decks.  There's small comfort in knowing, at least, that the biggest job is done.

And now a couple of odds and ends to wrap this up (didn't think it would take me nearly a month)...

Project MK ULTRA is a success!  I first wrote about getting a small light house for one of the nooks in the dining room last November.  Kathy (if that's her real name) came through!

To be clear, I didn't anticipate receiving this prior to her return anyway.  And it would have been quite all right if she'd forgotten about it in the months in between.

As it it, she actually delivered it in person a while before our week off, but I had difficulty with my cameras and I only downloaded the shot recently.  Kathy is actually here as I write this (Hi Kath!!) so I was reminded to finally follow through and post about it.

I had bought a smaller light house in Westport a few weeks before in the meantime but it's been moved to the living room so now I have a coast-to-coast thing going on with my lighthouses. Mission accomplished!

Support for the local economy:  We bought the small picture below during that week.

A couple of kids down the road were selling trinkets and cookies (chocolate chip!  Also purchased!) so that one of them could invest in a chicken coop.  Is that "small town" enough for ya?  How do you not support that?  So now it's hung above the entrance to the dining room, right as you walk into the cottage.  Good luck, kid!

Real geese too!:  There was one aspect of the week that I found particularly memorable; For several days, right until our departure, there was a family of geese swimming from rest spot to rest spot.  We believe that it was the same group that visited (and marked) our territory in June.

Our evidence is a little dubious; we base ourselves on the fact that there were 16 of them, just like two months ago.  But in terms of age and size variety, it seems like a safe bet.

And speaking of evidence...They didn't visit our property as such this time, just swam around.  So we didn't need to deal with the fall out (in a very literal way).

We did get to have a giggle at the expense of the folks who arrived to find out that 16 geese had spent a couple of afternoons at their crib away from the crib.  It may sound lousy on our part to see humour in their dejection upon arrival, but those guys have probably told the story a dozen times already.  All part of the experience, player!

So whenever there was a quiet moment, I'd grab the binoculars and look around the lake for "my" geese.  We haven't seen them since, unfortunately, but I like to think they just found a slightly quieter area to gather their breath in preparation for a long flight.

Still, just one more time this year would be nice...

Oh, and I saw Harper at a football game.

That's about it.

2014 Birthday Week Part 1 of a Few

We really only had one goal during birthday week and that was to get the sun room deck painted.  Anything more would have been vegetarian gravy.

The weather forecast was not promising.  Checking it on the Friday that we left (July 25th), it seemed like most days had about a 40% chance of thundershowers.  So just enough to not feel real confident about forging ahead, but not enough to cancel plans altogether either.  Needing three days between deck scrubbing and actual painting, we circled Christine's birthday as scrub day, mine as paint day.

We dedicated a fair amount of time on Saturday to scraping out the crap between the deck boards, using a butter knife (since discarded, so worry not, visitors) and a scraper. Lonely work...

We went back to Ottawa on the Sunday because the weather looked to be awful in Crow Lake that day anyway.  At home, we caught up with our respective sports addictions and returned Monday morning, eager (?) to start cleaning some deck!  Yeah!

But before we get into those days, we must digress.

On the way home on Sunday, Christine remembered something we'd been meaning to do for a spell.  The black TV stand always seemed out of place in the living room at the cottage (*creepy reflection warning*).

We had a similarly-sized piece of furniture in the garage that looked like it might be more appropriate.  Christine couldn't quite recall its history, but things cleared up real quick when I tried (and failed) to fit it into the trunk of the car and saw this:

It says "To Paul From Dad" for those of you who don't want to flip your computer monitors upside down.

So a perfect cottage fit on several levels.  Isn't this much better, my creepy reflection notwithstanding?  Of course it is.

With that taken care of, we set out to clean the deck.  It took nearly three hours in a constant drizzle which was actually helpful to clear the icky brown goop that we were creating with the brushes.  But it did clean it, and now I'm curious as to what the other decks around the place would look like with a proper scrub.  I might have found a productive way to pass the time the next time we get a steady rain.  But probably not.

Does the Pope Crap In The Woods?

I have no idea, but apparently some large beast saw fit to do that very thing in our driveway.

Good Lord...Glad Chris spotted it before getting out of the car.

The first thought was that it had been left there by a bear, or perhaps the wooly mammoth.  It's certainly not an Oscar leftover since it probably weighed as much as he did (there's only so far I'm willing to go to ensure factual accuracy, mind you).

We did recall seeing a young girl go by on a horse once last summer.  Christine speculated that perhaps someone riding by on horseback took a moment to use our driveway as a lookout point, and the horse used it for something else altogether.

Awesome.  If ever I find out who the perpetrator of the crime is, I might be tempted to return the favour on his or her front porch.

Anyway, we'll let mother nature take care of that.  We were there to complete a specific project which began the previous weekend.

This is what the main entrance looked like.

Those containers are handy, but...not very attractive and somewhat space-consuming.  And if the couch-shaped one looks filthy, that's because it is.

The other one is just your standard plastic bin. We thought the space could be opened up, made more attractive, and those containers put to better use.

We recently came across a pretty good sale on similar containers and picked one up that we prefer. We put it together last weekend and though we took about five times as long to do it as we should have, it came out relatively unscathed.

Eh.  I should probably have removed the broom...there's always something...

So what about the two bins that were there before?  The one that was on the right was moved to the garden side for Christine to store some of her tools for easy access rather than having to haul it all from the shed.

The "couch" was moved to the lower level.  The original idea was to place it near where the canoe is stored and fill it with firewood but Christine wants to start planting in that general area as well.  So we went the other way.

What the hell, right?  Not the most attractive "furniture" but certainly functional.  We'll give it a good hosing at some point.  Toss a couple of (nicer) seat cushions on there and it's actually quite comfortable.  Besides, even filled with wood it can be moved around easily for anyone who wants to face the water, fire, whatever. With the lake (instead of ice) and the white cone flowers as a backdrop, it might end up looking all right but either way it's at least practical.

For size perspective, here's our model/mascot earning his keep...

In light of his recent heart issues, he had a great little day, sniffing, digging and getting into every nook and cranny he could find.  If nothing else had been accomplished, it would have been worth the trip on that basis alone.

And that scratches off an item from the projects list for the first time this year!

Unrelated to this specific topic, I've added a photography page at the top, under the banner.  For the time being, I've only uploaded a handful of the pictures that Rob and Deb took during their first (I believe) visit.  I'll add more from them and/or from anyone else who took some that we particularly like over time in no set order, rhyme or reason.