Types of Vanity

I must begin with a correction to the previous post.

No, it doesn't involve my recollection of events leading to the construction of the sliding door.  That was spot-on, if somewhat embellished.

It's about the mirror selfie. From additional research, it is now my understanding that such pictures are taken and posted on social media by young, attractive females, or males who wish to display their abdominal muscles. I am not female and I do not have abs. Well, I'm sure I do but they are in no way visible. And no one wants to see my hairy bellybutton so I am disqualified from taking such pictures.

It shan't happen again. I replace it with this sexy, sassy beast.

God I hate that floor now...Luckily, when I enter the cottage these days, my eye is drawn elsewhere.

In late July, on a Saturday, my dad and I worked on the baseboards, quarter round, and doorway framing while Christine was visiting Mike in B.C.  We stopped at the delightful Home Hardware in Perth on the way. The flooring that I wanted to use as a back splash in the kitchen instead was on sale, so I took advantage of that.

I didn't really expect to complete the work that day though. But with a bit of time left in our afternoon, when my dad asked if I wanted to install right then, I nearly wept.

And it came out looking rather splendid, I think.

It just makes the kitchen look...finished. It ISN'T finished by any means (oh, you just wait until you see what Christine has cooked up!) but it looks more finished.

The back splash still needs a little framing of its own but everyone who sees it comments on it almost right away. And touches it, for some reason. I'm not sure why.

Now Christine will have you believe this was her idea too.

*sigh*.

Not so. I saw the flooring at the HH (what cool people call Home Hardware) and called her over to see it because I knew she would like that style. And JUST as I was about to say it would look good as a back splash, she rattled off "OhMyGodThisWouldMakeAGreatBackSplash" super fast just so she could take credit. Ah well.

While buying it, there was some debate as to how much we would need. If I recall correctly (and my mind is computer-like), I thought there was a chance we could get away with only two boxes. But taking into account the possibility of a break or some such, I bought an extra one.

Damn good thing, too. We would have been short by about 16 inches. That would have sucked. Those things really don't stretch well.

But now I had a little over a box left instead. So what genius did *I* (not Christine) come up with?

To change the vanity in the master bedroom from this style (using the term loosely)...

To this:

I neglected to take a picture of the vanity prior to its removal because...Well, why would you want to have a picture of that thing around, unless it was to induce vomiting after accidentally ingesting poison?

The light isn't great (it's the master bedroom, we WANT it dark in there) so it gives the drawers a bluish tinge but they are actually just a plain white. At least for now they are, Christine may have plans of her own there.

She already did change the also-white knobs with the little purple flower you see at right. I admit that it's kind of cute, but only because this blog is blocked from appearing in Google search results and no one but family and close friends would ever know I said so.

The back splash part of this reno was supposed to be a surprise for Christine when she returned from BC. She had considered going to the cottage briefly on the Tuesday...but changed her mind. So I had to struggle to avoid spoiling it all the way to Friday night. Tough gig, long wait, but well worth it.

Shed Wars 2: The Sheddening

Shed Wars did not end when Christine and I pushed against the back of that monstrosity last year and caused it to collapse. Oh no. That was just part one.

We are now converting the bunkie into a shed / boat house. The notion of having a little mini-house in which people can sleep is nice, but impractical. We have a guest bedroom, the Sun Room and even a sofa bed in the living room where people can sleep and each is significantly closer to the bathroom and, perhaps more importantly, the Keurig.

Also, at some point we had a critter infestation in the bunkie. There was a staggering amount of mouse poops throughout the little building. It reached a point where I've given up on having chocolate sprinkles on ice cream going forward. We couldn't possibly ask someone to spend a night in there any longer.

So here's a touch of what I was facing.

This is after taking out the fire bowl and the lawn chairs. The place was crazy cluttered.

The priority was getting rid of the mattress and box spring in the back. We have a work bench in the garage that we want to bring down and place in that spot. Christine rented a U-Haul van on Monday and not only did we manage to get that done, but we tossed out parts of the original shed that were still laying around.

The carpet has been pulled up and...it isn't so bad under there. The plywood floor is solid, aside from one rotted corner, and there's a patch of mould to deal with. Frankly, we expected far worse.

That was a lot of work, even though I had a bit of help...

Know why George was so interested? When I moved the mattress out, a mouse popped out of the middle and scared the hell out of me. So of course I screamed like a little girl. I had no idea there might still have been a beast in there.

But George knew! He was all over it.  And that's the cushion to one of the lawn chairs above. When he got a hold of that, he was on a mission.

So that done, I hit the "off duty" switch.  Bugsy helped there too.

Settle down, Ladybug!
Good girl. 

After our visit to the dump (Gary was there!), returning the U-Haul and determined to take it easy from there on in, Christine made a pot of that Canadian Tundra stuff I posted earlier. Damn, that stuff is good...

We spent a nice, relaxing afternoon and evening. Which was good, because we woke up to this:

Huh...what?

We were there from Saturday to Tuesday. The temperature would drop to slightly below zero overnight and reach about 10 during the day. Christine had heard that snow was possible, but two inches was a bit unexpected nonetheless.

I loved it. I've long wanted to spend a relatively warm winter day at the cottage but we always held off because normally the water hose would be pulled.

Well, I got one. In April, granted, but I got one. A morning, anyway. By the time we left in mid-afternoon, most of it was gone.

More Late Season Additions

These date back to August / September or so but I deliberately held off posting them for a reason that I will get into a little later, assuming that I am able to maintain a train of thought. This is never guaranteed.

The first is a birthday gift to both the three of us from Caroline and Asley.

Dramatization. Treats Were Involved

It's a doghouse (although you might have concluded that on your own)!

Kind of a neat deal. It was assembled in no time, easily. It was, in every way, the exact opposite of Frankenshed, may it forever burn in a hell hotter than a billion suns.

It's also quite light so easy to move around while we figure out exactly where we want it. It sat across from the bunkie until the end of the season but we figure it's more likely to get traffic nearer to the fire pit and picnic table. You know, where there are people to trip and/or steal food from, both common dachshund hobbies.

Here's something we may do for kicks: We need to buy paint to...huh...paint some tiles I've added to the outside walls in a largely pointless attempt to keep a variety of critter types out of the cottage. There aren't that many tiles to paint, so maybe we'll apply what's left to the doghouse to match the actual cottage and bunkie. That might be neat.

Regardless of whether that ever happens, Caroline also suggested this as an entertainment option.

If we ever manage to winterize...Deal!

Also, being a guy, I have to admit that I've stared at it for some time and thought to myself "Bet I could fit in there". The only thing that's kept me from testing that theory is the possibility, however unlikely, that I am mistaken and that Christine would have to get me out of there by unscrewing the roof. But it will continue to tempt me, I know it. I may attempt it, but only when she is within earshot.

Now as to why I waited a bit (I did it! I remembered!) before posting about it, not long after we received that gift, we also began to serve as foster parents for this little darling.  Meet Ladybug, those of you who have yet to do so.

Long story short (a rarity in itself), she'd had a rough go of it for a while and Canadian Dachshund (the hardest word to spell, ever) Rescue needed a home for Bugs while she went through some treatment. They contacted us, we agreed to give it a shot, and she's been with us since.

I'd planned on posting about her almost right away, and about how the doghouse would make for a nice "extra bedroom" for our new visitor, but a conversation with Chris underscored that we didn't own her as such yet so I held off in case she left as quickly as she arrived. Now that we're further along, she's responding well and we're closer to making her our own, I think it's safe to include her.

Those who met her early on might be surprised to see how much weight she's lost. She was, indeed, a bit of a porker.

She's a much leaner sausage now to the point that she was referred to as being "perfect" shape (as opposed to cylindrical) when Christine took her for her a treatment recently. She seems to absolutely love walks on the trails around Crow Lake so there's more of that in her future. Assume you'll be seeing more of her (and George) here, assuming things continue to go well.

Hark! Squatters!

Not really. It was just my folks.

On Friday night, my football addiction caused me to walk, then sit, through six hours of rain to watch my team get beat by eight. Eh. So Christine and I only made out way up to Crow Lake on Saturday, but my folks took possession early the previous day.

We couldn't hear much activity when we walked in but that was because they were in the middle of a "24" marathon begun the night before as a result of said rain. No spoilers, please, people. They were only watching the first season and spoilerers are jerks.

I don't know to what degree the modified schedule affected his behaviour, but big George lost all composure when he figured out that my parents were in the living room. He was all wags and jumped up on the couch for kisses (giving) and belly rubs (receiving). Nice to see that he's adapting to the extended family nicely, since introducing Oscar to new people usually required 24 months and 15 pounds of sliced ham. Kathy dropped by for a spell too on Saturday so Georgie had plenty of visitor-based excitement.

I can't report much else from Saturday because, you know...I took quite a few naps. But I got back to work a bit on Sunday morning. With the shed now gone, we wanted to continue with the removal of the floating dock.

Remember that thing? It took on water in one side so it floated all tilted. We removed the top boards a while ago, originally considering the possibility of replacing them with something lighter, but the further along we got the more unlikely that seemed. So I went after the frame Sunday morning. After Frankenshed, taking that thing apart was no effort at all, except for the one screw that had a broken head, inevitably. But there it went.

Jack Bauer's father is actually a traitor to his country and highly placed within a Ukrainian terrorist group.

Not really, I just made that up to confuse my mum.

The piece on the right was super light so I was able to flip it over without difficulty. By process of elimination, the one of the left was the one taking on water. Christine drilled a hole in it and sure enough...

See that trickle? Lasted over an hour.  As you can imagine then, filled with that much water, this thing was some kind of heavy. I would estimate it at about 800 pounds, so most people couldn't really budge it, but you know...

Anyway, that's as good as gone now so we can remain within our property line. Most of that beach doesn't actually belong to us. The last thing we want to do is start is a Crow Lake turf war.

And hey, doesn't Scott Canoe look pretty good back there? Or maybe not "good" but at least "logical"? You know, next to a BEACH. Beats having to carry him across most of the property.

The floating dock is nearly gone, but we do have another addition. Following a visit to Nanny's last last week, Christine brought back a bird feeder that fits in rather nicely.

Though it would arguably look better and definitely be easier to see and refill nearer the cottage, from past experience Christine decided against having it up there. While various furry critters are munching on food that isn't meant for them, they also look at the cottage and decide to take residence in a structure that wasn't meant for them either. Chipmunks today have no sense of property (I blame rap music). Best to keep the food at a certain distance so as to avoid a whole other kind of squatter.

And that's it! We return on Saturday with the goal of spending the entire week. We have SO many grand plans for that time, both in terms of entertainment and cottage improvements. And we'll probably complete about all of 15% of them. We'll see how it plays out.

2015 Festival of The Maples

We'd been down to Crow Lake a couple of times in recent weeks, including overnight on the 12th, but we both took this past Monday off and planned on making a long weekend out of it. We couldn't wait to get at it so come Friday afternoon, we packed up the car and bolted ASAP.

The last weekend of April has become our target opening date. The Festival of The Maples takes place in Perth that weekend and we want in. Even if we don't have running water yet by then (though we did this year), we've figured out how to manage without it so it would take a biblical event to stop us now.

That said...We had some concerns about our boy at right. George HATES kids. To be more specific, he appears to hate toddlers. No idea why (but one can speculate).

We debated whether to leave him behind and risk that he would not react well to that, or to take him to the festival and risk that he's difficult to control around a crowd.

We took a leap of faith and brought him. And he was pretty great. He only showed aggression towards one kid but Christine was on top of it. Aside from that one brief moment, we kept to the sidewalks rather than walking down the road with the rest of crowd and that worked just fine. Good boy, George!

A few shots from the event below.

Halloween in February. Sure!

As I write this, it's -6 celsius outside and "feels like" -12.  That is the warmest day we've had in ages and so, we made good use of it.

First off, we made a stop at a Pet Value in Stittsville for a Canadian Daschund Rescue fundraiser. We'll make this a semi-regular thing when the organization holds an event nearby to take the opportunity to contribute to our pet cause (pun not intended. OK, maybe it was intended a little...)

We went to such an event in mid-December but at the time we were still getting to know George so we didn't bring him just in case he got freaked out. He came with us this time and was pretty great. He let people come up and pet him and generally ignored other dogs so no issues. We didn't really anticipate any, but it was still a bit of a relief.

In the store, out of the hundreds of toys and chewable/edible items on display, George was kind enough to latch on to something from the Halloween discount box. I think a "if you bit it, you bought it" policy is more than fair so...I bought it for him. But at least he didn't choose to lick a buffalo femur or hump a 12' X 12' memory foam bed. So, in a way, I'm grateful to him for trying to save us a few bucks.

Our karma improved, we headed off to Crow Lake. We've been dying to get George out there, make sure everything survived the harsh elements, and wanted to drop off a few things knowing full well that when the time comes to open up, the car will be crazy loaded. May as well relieve some of that pressure now.

Most of the stuff we brought with us involved electrical work that we plan on having done in the spring. The electric panel wiring looks like plate of spaghetti and some of the fuses are the wrong strength (20's where 15's should be, that sort of thing). We're not the types to leave every light on, but nonetheless, it's a bit of a back-of-your-mind concern.

We're going to get that dealt with and have a few new light fixtures put in. We have two (of three) acquired and I'll display them later, In addition to that, we're having baseboard heaters added.

** spoiler alert**

One heater is definitely going into the guest bedroom. There isn't a lot of free foot space in that room, so using a heater like Furn The Furnace is cumbersome. A baseboard heater should be more appropriate. The other one is going into either the dining room or kitchen, that's TBD.

The picture of the lamp above, by the way, has nothing to do with any of that. I just thought that a picture of a baseboard heater would suck.

Christine bought the lamp weeks ago at Wal-Mart to replace the one I broke in our bedroom when working on the floor. The other items are decorative presents that will also appear here at some point, no doubt.

After we completed our drop off, our inspection, and I dug George out of the snow bank that he got stuck in (poor beast), we headed off to the public area to see if George wanted to take a little walk. At that point, my phone read -19 celsius, but the little trooper seemed eager enough, which was a nice sign. We think he's going to end up liking his weekend home just fine.

The picnic table gets a face lift!

And, a butt tuck, sort of.

Remember this insult to snacking?

Yikes...If that thing was a horse...

You may recall that a table cloth had been stapled to it, and you'll note the plastic covering the seats.  As my dad pointed out while replacing boards, they did a smashing job of retaining moisture and promoting rot.

The original plan was to change only the five table top and four bench boards, but it turned out that the two cross boards in the frame were beginning to fall apart too.  I was willing to live with that for the time being, until we noticed that one was crawling with ants.  And ants don't tend to improve a picnic. So my pappy went to the...huh...board store and bought a couple more to replace those as well.

And man does it ever look better.

Almost qualifies as a "before/after" shot.

Seems a touch more solid, eh?

While my dad was working on that (Saturday, and he left later that afternoon), and I was contributing by trying to keep mosquitoes away from him, Christine was off getting Nanny from Kingston. Nanny stayed with us for a couple of nights, paying her way more than adequately in cinnamon buns.  Oscar seemed to enjoy the change in laps.

We're heading out again Friday night, hoping to catch a meteor shower.  That's assuming that a) the night sky is clear enough for us to see them and b) that we're able to stay up past 10:30PM regardless. The former is probably more likely than the latter.  Wish us luck!

Phase 2: Engage!

Our spring reno plan got started two weeks ago when I went up to Crow Lake with my dad.  Christine and I got started on the second part earlier today.

Now I don't want to point fingers, but a few weeks back, a non-human member of this household disrupted our 2014 plans significantly by spending four nights in the hospital.

"Who?  Me??"

Yes, you!  But just so you know, I'm going to get my money back in hugs, Princess!  And you're going to sit there and like it!

As long-time (or frequent) pet owners know, that sort of thing can be devastating to disposable income (such as it was to begin with).  So some projects have been pushed back, others have been trimmed down.

Among the latter is the living room floor.  Christine wondered whether, instead of adding vinyl flooring as we did in the master bedroom and have prepared to do in the guest room (because we love our guests), we wouldn't be better off pulling up the well-worn carpet, painting the wood floor, and throwing a rug over it similar to the one that we have in the dining room.

At first, I thought that NASCAR had finally eroded her mind to a point of no return (although her grammar is still pretty good...) but I had a look during my last visit and could kind of see what she meant.  And if it ends up looking like an atrocity, we can just return to the original plan.  There's no harm in giving it a try.

So we dropped in, bringing several bins of linens and such with us for future use, then moved the living room furniture out of the way and yanked up the carpet.

Things looked...okay...under there.  Solid, but not particularly even, which we'll have to deal with.

My dad will be the furthest thing from shocked at this revelation.  However, it can be remedied by applying baseboards instead of (or in addition to) quarter-round.  No big deal, still less work, and much reduced overall cost.


The rug seen at right was bought a little while ago.  It sat around the house for a few weeks but was among the items hauled up when dad and I visited.  It'll cover most of the floor from window to couch and while it may be hard to tell from the photography, it matches rather nicely with the couch. We're going to paint the floor a sort of rust / burgundy colour, though little of that will be visible.  One can of paint will do just fine.

I took May 12th and 13th as vacation days so we're aiming to use that weekend to complete the work in both rooms, conditions permitting.  Last year, dad and I went on the last week of April and while we had a nice time of it, the weather and temperature were largely brutal.  Hopefully those 2-3 additional weeks make all the difference.

I tell ya, as brutal as winter has been, watching the melting snow dripping off the roof on the lake side was pretty damn uplifting.  It's coming, people.  It's on its way.  Hang in there!

Oreo Cows and Crow Lake Wildlife

Moo?

These cows are not in the Crow Lake vicinity proper, but rather near a town called Franktown as we make our way out to the cottage.  We deduced, based on their unusual black-white-black pattern that these are the cows from which Oreo-dipping milk is drawn.

Chistine and I are on holidays.  We'd been at the cottage since Friday night and returned for one over-nighter today to take care of a few things (including a very important haircut for me).  We expect to head out again tomorrow late morning or early afternoon.

My folks popped by on Tuesday and stayed until this morning as well.  I spent my birthday making dinner (well, the main course, anyway) while drinking a glass of red wine and listening to Buddy Guy.  I'm not sure how I would have had it any different, but I'm damn sure I wouldn't have anticipated it a year ago.

My parents are coming again on Sunday, and Caroline and Asley will join us as well, so that should make for a nice night.  Since this week is still a work in progress, I'm going to share some of the pictures from past weeks that I didn't have the opportunity to use yet. Enjoy (hopefully)!

First, this guy:

I haven't been able to get a good shot of him (them) but that may be a blessing.  They are all over "Crow" Lake and look absolutely beautiful and majestic in flight.

And they look like hell up close.  Christine identified them as Turkey Vultures.  Ugh.  Think about it.  If I asked you to name the two ugliest birds on the planet, you would have probably chosen one, then the other.  This thing combines both.  Here's a closer look (not taken by me).

Oof.  That hurts my soul.  So let's flip that a bit.

Hummingbird!  They have been all over Christine's feeder of late.  I laid down on the deck and got that shot in about ten minutes. Caroline also got a good one, but because it may well make its way onto a wall inside the place, we'll wait until then to display it here.

Here's a fox we spotted while taking a walk on a side road.  He was way far so I couldn't get a great shot, unfortunately.

One actually scooted across the upper deck on the water side of the cottage earlier in the week.  That was a bit of a surprise.  We also saw one (my parents and I) during the drive to Westport on Wednesday morning.  Pretty cool.

We've also got turtles around...

...we saw a beaver doing its thing only once, but I was fortunate enough to be ready for him...

...and of course...

That one shows up an awful lot and constantly follows Christine around.  There is no lack of opportunity to take pictures of him.

I'm dying to get a good shot of a crow.  The one I thought would be terrific ended up blurry.  There are also raccoons around that I'd like to capture.  We'll see what happens this weekend.

Crikey!

It's the rare Oscarinus Wienericus in its predatorial state!  Be VERY careful...They won't harm you but they WILL steal your food.  And your Kleenex.  They love the Kleenex.

I'm really just testing the video upload function.  You may not be able to view it from an e-mail.  If you also can not view it from the post itself, please let me know.

Close call

About a month ago, Christine and I were talking about this little blog.

I was explaining that, back when I started it, I thought that eventually I would run out of things to talk about. At some point, visits would become routine and the place would be renovated and redecorated to our liking and that would be that.

But then, it always seems like a little something happens that we feel like sharing.  We go into every weekend expecting nothing but to enjoy the place, but the next thing you know...we see Elvis or something.

Or we have an oil spill.

We showed up on the afternoon of our anniversary to find a notice on our door.  Due to an oil spill two days earlier, lake water was not to be used for basically anything but flushing toilets. We had noticed significant damage to a few properties just down the hill, but couldn't tell what had caused it.  In fact, we didn't know any of the details until we got home and my dad had sent us this article.

A little scary to hear, but eventually we realised that the only thing we use the lake water for is washing dishes and we could still do that with the water that we haul in from Ottawa.  The lake was still a little cold to swim in at that point so nothing lost on that level.  Another encouraging sign was that it didn't seem to be bothering the wild life.

Christine went back a week later and was greeted by another notice in the door, but this time to tell us that the advisory was off and normal water usage could resume.  So all told, it lasted a week.  It did seem, based on our walk over to the public area, like the situation was being well managed so the lift didn't come as much of a surprise.

Why only bring this up now?  Well, it didn't seem very appropriate to stress over a 90L oil spill in light of the situation in Calgary at the time.

So we've been back to our usual shenanigans, including this past Canada Day weekend.  And the water is now finally warm enough to swim in.

Unintentional re-gifting, sort of.

I'm not blaming Kathy for this.  She is not responsible for my poor short-term memory.

I opened the CFB Crow Lake fridge on Friday night, internally debating what to have to drink after the drive up, and screeched gleefully like a high school girl at a Justin Bieber concert.

This.

No staging there at all...

I realise I'm talking about maple cream liqueur shortly after expressing concern at accumulating wine bottle corks, but...oh my, this is good stuff.  Nice surprise. It was handed over to me (Us?  No...me...) the previous weekend, but I'd forgotten so it was like it was being given to me all over again.  Eek!!

This WAS actually given to me this past weekend.

Great Caesar's Ghost...

I love me some Sortilège but we've wondered whether it was popular enough to remain available.  This seems like a good sign.

That bottle is not being opened until we go on the weekend of June 15th, for our anniversary.  Christine might get to sample it too.  :-)  I'd like to tell you that it took an enormous feat of will to not open it, but the upside of having very little short-term memory is that...huh...well, I'm sure it wasn't very important.

We made another trip to the Sharbot Lake Farmers' Market on a chilly Saturday morning.  Our big catch was the decadent cinnamon bun at below left, for the following morning.

It would be easy to poke a little fun at Christine and say that there's a piece missing because she just couldn't wait to dive onto that thing.  That's not the case though.  I simply forgot to take the picture before she removed her piece.  I don't recall if I've mentioned it before, but my short-term memory is terrible.

Christine's gluttony would have been justified because she spent a fair bit of the previous day working on Kathy's chunk of garden. She had already begun work on the upper left portion (where those little red and white flowers are), so Caroline and mum can arm-wrestle for the bottom left part if they want.

Look out!  The obligatory Oscar shot is next!

So that's about it for now.  We're going again this weekend, but I probably won't be able to update this blog the following week.  Not that I'm terribly concerned that you'll all feel like you have no reason tor live in the meantime, but I don't want anyone to suspect that it might be because something went wrong or some such.  Not at all the case.