Disndat

Being Home: we've been home from the cottage for a week now, and I notice that I've only posted once. What's up with that? Getting away is good, but life is all about living well where you are most of the time. So, there was joy in our return.



Birthday Boy: although the actual day is still a week away, guess who will be having his first birthday party this weekend? No silly, it's the little guy on the left.



Growing: Nikki Dee has been able to say all her letters for a long time now and to direct them to the right spot on the board. Fitting them in used to be a problem. Not so now — easy peasy. I try hold letters upside down to fool her but she calls them correctly regardless and puts them directly in their places.



Blogging: in the past I have sometimes mentioned Doris, particularly with regard to her photos. Well, she recently began her own blog. She's a working girl, so I don't expect her to be an everyday blogger, but she now has more than a half dozen postings to her credit, so I invite you to drop in to Thoughts and things and say hello. Doris and I were friends as kids and haven't seen each other in more than forty years but we're still friends. Her two most recent posts are about honesty and it's costs (sort of). To entice you, here's one of her photos.

Winter from the Cottage

I posted a rather lengthy and tedious, narrated tour of the cottage after a visit last March, and I'm sure that no one, including me, could manage to sit through a sort of repeat, so I'll just share a few photos with short notes, this time around. Both then and now, however, I begin at the gate looking toward the house. I must take this picture on every visit in every season, and that is pretty well true for the rest of the photos too.



A plough has knocked the sign somewhat askew this winter, but you can see that the place has been named, Riverwood, which is certainly appropriate as a river forms the eastern boundary, and there are acres of woods throughout.



Looking southward: on a typical winter day, we'll stack our snowshoes in the space between the house and the shed. The remainder of the photos are more or less taken from that same space.



I turn from facing southward to northward, and see a gate beyond which a slope leads up to the woods. Our quaint snowshoe tracks lead off in that direction although they really represent out reutrn route in our treks of this last visit.



The snow was falling when I took the next photo just to the right of the one above. It's the garage/workshop.



To the right of the (almost looking east now) is a little shed that isn't really used for anything but always waits patiently and contentedly to lure the next amateur photographer into its picturesque snare. In this case it catches the low morning light.



The next photo looks southward from behind the house, across the backyard, toward the field that was possibly ploughed or at least grazed a few times in days of yore. There has been frost in the trees that morning, and there is still some remaining on the little trees in the middle of the photo (which you might see if you click through to the larger version).



Panning a little right from the above photo in a more southwesterly direction we see some of the backyard, including a red humming bird feeder, which, for some strange reason, was not attracting too many hummers last week.



Maybe I'll post another set further from the homestead in the next few days.

Faces in the Woods

Here are a few pictures from our snowshoe tromps through the woods. I expect I will be posting more in the next few days.



I see faces in a lot of places. Sometimes others see them just as easily as is probably true for the photo above as well as the one directly below. In both cases snow has accumulated on stumps, and the face is in the snow itself.



But I'm not sure if this next one would be as apparent to some as it is to me. I've outlined a sort of gnomish face in red. The snow is the hat and the lower part the beard. I think you can work it out from there. Would you have seen it if I hadn't pointed it out, or are you more blessedly normal?

The Missing Photo

We're home! You may recall that the first post from the cottage was supposed to have a photo included. It didn't, but when I got home, I checked Google's Photos (or Picasa Web Albums), and sure enough, it was there. I know that some of you have recently experienced difficulty in posting photos, but when you upload to Blogger, they also get stored in an album. They may still be there if you check. From the album, you can grab the code and embed it back into a blog post. Which is what I have just done. It shows Cuppa and her sister warming by the stove while the furnace was valiantly trying to bring the cottage back up to a habitable temperature. It was fun. Really. But it's good to be home.

One of Life's Mysteries

Since I know that the previous email post worked, here's another little postcard from the cottage before we return to the land of telly and internet sometime tomorrow. I also know that the subject line of the email will become the title that Blogger uses, so here's my mystery.

 

I want to know why the same rigorously controlled temperature can seem wonderfully warm and comfy sometimes and so cold at others. We have been keeping the thermostat steady for the past few days, and for the most part I have been quite comfy womfy, but right now my hands are dreadfully cold, and I am almost shivering under my multiple layers of clothing. So, that's the mystery to which I will expect there will be a perfectly lucid explanation, perhaps several, from my brainy and distinguished colleagues in blognotdumb.

Reading and Snowshoeing at the Cottage

I said that I would experiment with emailing a post, and since I like to think of myself as a man of my word, here I be.

 

There's a whole different pace (or lack of same) to cottage life, let me tell ya. Aside from email, I am pretty well without internet (which I prefer not to capitalize -- I mean to say it's not truly a proper place like Belgium or Botswana). So, I am reading more, to the point of beginning a book last evening and finishing it around noon today. When Cuppa and I browsed the local library prior to this little hiatus, my eyes happened to spy a new (for me) British mystery writer: Simon Brett, whom I found quite palatable if not as gripping as Peter Robinson or Elizabeth George, for example.

 

In point of fact, I can't recall the last piece of fiction that I read. I did give Dan Brown's latest the old college try but wasn't exactly rivetted. Actually, I put it down before Christmas and forgot that I had been reading it. However, I dusted it off for this vacation, cracked it open, and found that it was more interesting as I neared the climax. Interesting, but too macabre for my taste as having a guy locked in a box being slowly filled with water isn't my idea of pleasant reading. So, I gave it up for good and turned to Brett who unfolded an interesting but sedate whodunit sans frantic chase scenes (although I have to admit that someone did get shut up in a fairly tight space -- thankfully, just not quite that tight!).

 

We'll soon head out for another snowshoe trek through the woods. Although there has been recent melting, there is still about a foot of snow in the woods, so the shoeing is pretty good. There even remains snow on some branches from past falls, which is pleasant to the eyes. Also, we have had some pretty flurries today, which have ceased for the moment. Although temperatures haven't been frigid (hovering around freezing), you'd think it would be cold enough not to sweat too very much whilst on a snowshoeing excursion ... but you'd be wrong. We both returned drenched yesterday, and I've concluded that if one could and would snowshoe for an hour per day, one would soon become relatively fit. Hmmm ... maybe I should spend the rest of the winter here.

 

Now, let's see if this posts.

A Near Disaster in Cottage Country

We’re at the cottage shortly after noon on Monday. We arrived at about this time on Friday to a disaster … or what could have been a disaster. Inside was colder than outside and everything was frozen, by which I mean the taps and the toilet, and by toilet, I mean that the water was frozen solid, both in the bowl and the tank. And … the furnace wouldn’t fire-up, which, of course, was why the place was ice-locked in the first place.

Having no clue as to what to do, and it not being our place, we drove to the nearby small village where there is quite a decent little restaurant and waited for the owners to arrive. They found that there was oil in the drum and that the furnace simply needed resetting. Meanwhile, we gathered around the cooker to try to get warm as the thermostat began the climb. It soon reached the freezing point and within about two hours was up to 50F/10C.

(I am hoping to insert a photo here of Cuppa and her sister sitting around the stove, but with this internet connect, I don’t know if it will work.)

SIL found a hair dryer and used it to hasten the thawing of the toilet, and by about 10 PM, it had worked: mercifully, as relieving oneself in a local snowbank is not the most desirable accommodation – particularly for the ladies and for anyone in the middle of the night (such as unowho) for that matter. Somewhat miraculously, there were no burst pipes or taps, and all has been well ever since.

Meanwhile, forgive me for not reading your blogs for another few days; the connection is simply too problematic.

(Note: Apparently the photo didn't upload although it said it did. It has been quite a process to do this much. There is a way to email posts; I may experiment with that later this week, but I suppose that, if it works it will only apply to text.)