Mary, Mary, quite contrary...

...how does your garden grow?

Wildly, thank you very much for asking!

And stop calling me Mary.

The early tomatoes we spotted last time have been knicked and devoured by the saber-toothed chipmunks knuckling around the island.

 We have a new batch of fruit growing that I hope we'll be able to see ripen. Crossing fingers, toes, and eyes.

The carrots are starting to look more carrot-like. I thinned them out a bit to make room for them to grow, and the ones I pulled were about 1/4" thick and maybe 2-3" long.

The cucumbers have outgrown their awkward "pickle" stage, and are now looking like bonafide cucumbers. We'll be able to start harvesting some of them fairly soon. They're about 6" long right now.

And the Swiss Chard and Onions, too, will be ready in another week or two. Yummy!

I just need to keep the critters out. I've contemplating surrounding the garden with chicken wire, but the wee beggars - I mean vicious brutes - will just dig in from underneath, so it's somewhat pointless. Maybe I should've lined the beds with chicken wire before I filled them with dirt/seaweed as I had initially intended?!

BolaBall

To reward the kids for getting excellent grades on their report cards, Mum and Dad gave them a BolaBall game to play at the cottage.

What's BolaBall?

Uhm... it's this:

The frames are set up in the grass about 20' apart. The object is to whip your balls-on-a-string and wrap them around the dowels: 3 points for the top dowel, 2 points for the middle, 1 point for the bottom. The first person to reach 21 points wins, however you have to get exactly 21 points. If you go over 21, you deduct the number of points earned from your score (i.e. you have 19. You hang your bola on the top rung giving you 22, instead of 22, you end up with 16 points)! Yikes!

But it would be dead easy to make this game yourself! All you'd need is four 2x2 boards, six 1/2" dowels, and some spray paint (optional). I've also heard about people who have made these out of PVC tubing. I've also heard that you can make your own BolaBalls by drilling into golf balls and threading rope through them, but that smacks of effort when you can just buy buy replacement packs of BolaBalls, $10 for a pack of 3 (you need 6 altogether). They're kinda like 2" indian rubber balls on strings.

You can play 2- or 4-player games.

 The kids love it and are wildly competitive.

You just have to be careful not to park your frame near a tree (or, I guess, a window) lest you lose your bola.

Water toys!

To reward the kids for their very excellent report cards, we picked up a towable for the boat!

It's an "AIRHEAD HYDRO SHOT", and we picked it up at Canadian Tire for around $100. The price was pretty good, considering all the other towables I had looked at were around $250.

The wee lad couldn't wait to use it, as evidenced by his willingly doing work (gasp!) to inflate it.

Both kids hopped on it like a fat kid on a Smartie.

They did a couple of fun passes around the lake when we discovered the design flaw in the tube: If you tow it at the wrong speed (faster than slow, but not fast enough to get it to plane on the water), the front connection starts to dive beneath the water and within seconds the whole tube is being dragged a foot beneath the waves!

If you have a rookie tuber on board who doesn't know to let go, they have a very NOT FUN ride.

Note the soggy pigtails.

She was very not happy, and didn't trust the tube after that.

Note the death grip.

It was with good reason that she didn't trust it, because it started to dive again.

And then she hated tubing and that was pretty much the end of that.

I give the Airhead Hydro shot 5/10. It's great when you're going fast, but if you have a chicken little behind the boat, it's really terrible.

Photo recovery software

Calloo Callay I have wonderful news!

I was able to recover my lost photos from the borked SD card that was in my camera. Woo! I'm tickled so pink I'm almost purple.

I ended up using the TestDisk application by CGSecurity. I found it and downloaded it from CNET. Typically I would never do this because the security risks of installing unproven software are great, but - well - I guess I was getting a little desperate.

The good new is that it works. It's a DOS-based utility which makes it a little clunky if the black DOS window frightens you. It's also not intuitive as far as identifying your drive or choosing which type of drive it is, but once you figure that out, you just have to change the file options to look for .jpg files, and you're off to the races. It downloads all the files to a folder you specify (accept the default setting - it'll show up in a folder called "recup_dir" in the same folder where the software was installed.).

I'm just beyond thrilled; I really thought they were gone for good!

I have a couple of retroactive post updates for you:

Pushing a Rock

White-washed pine ceiling

Please revisit those, as I've posted new photos to embellish the reports.

Thanks!

Buying a water-access cottage

I've been thinking about the reluctance most people show to buy a cottage that is water-access only. I've never fully understood this, so I thought I'd explore some of the pros and cons that we've encountered.

Pro

• In our neck of the woods, water-access properties are often $50,000-$100,000 cheaper than their road-access neighbours. This is huge.
• Our boat trip to the island is relatively short. It takes less than 5 minutes to reach the cottage from the Marina. I think if it were longer than 10 minutes that might annoy me, particularly if it were raining or very windy and the lake was rough.
• We're able to fit everything we need for the weekend into a cooler, a Rubbermaid bin or two, and a few baja (watertight) bags, which fit easily into the boat. Even supplies for a week are manageable with a single trip.
• Once you've moved in and are settled at the cottage, there's very little to cart back/forth. The first year can be rough with larger-than-usual trips as the junk leaves and new items appear.
• You're less likely to "pop in to town for something" on a whim, so you're forced to stay put and relax.
• No unexpected guests. Except chipmunks.
• If you're especially hardy folk, you can over-winter on the island by stockpiling supplies and hunkering down during ice-in and ice-out. 
• The quiet on the island during the week is heavenly. (At least it is for us - we have lots of neighbours. If you're remote, you'd have quiet weekends too!)
• In all other respects, having a water-access cottage is just like having a road-access cottage. It's all a question of how to you get there.

 Con

• If you need to move something large (lumber, mattress, couch, fridge, table), you're kind of hosed unless you enlist the help of someone with a pontoon boat or rent a barge to carry your big/heavy things. That said, just this weekend we saw a fridge crossing on a pontoon, and a sectional sofa crossing on a motor boat. We've even seen a small cement mixer and bags of cement cross in an aluminum boat with about 2 inches of freeboard! (what happens if it gets wet!?!)
• If you're doing MAJOR reno's that require heavy machinery (well, septic, levelling the cottage with new I-beams, etc.) you've got to get that equipment/crew onto the island, which will cost you more than the same job on land. Ditto for having your septic emptied.
• If your boat breaks down, you're stranded. Learn the number for a water taxi in your area, keep a battery charger on the property, and have a jerry can of gas as back up, just in case.
• You typically have to pay for a slip at a marina to store your boat/park your car.
• You're not easily accessible in the event of a medical emergency.
• You need to plan more thoroughly for your weekend, because heading back and forth to pick up forgotten items is a nuisance.
• You can't easily get there in winter (though if you have a 3-season cottage, I doubt you'd want to. Brrr!!! Some people will cross the lake in winter, but I'm chicken.
• You're more at the mercy of the weather. You watch forecasts/radar maps a lot more carefully because you don't want to be leaving during a thunderstorm. (Zot!) Suddenly you're all too aware of the difference between 15 km/h winds and 30 km/h winds.
• Resale can be tough, because people balk at water-access properties (silly, silly people).

Pushing a rock

There are many big rocks along our shoreline.

This is a good thing! If they weren't there, the barrage of waves would erode our side of the island until the Hodge Podge Lodge tipped over and fell into the drink.

There's one big rock that's in the way, though. Handy Dad thought it would be a good idea to be able to winch the Pedal Boat up the slope at the shore to get it out of the way, but the rock was smack in the middle of its path.

Handy Dad and the captain set about moving the big rock. It was easily 32°C, which makes me a little suspicious of their motives behind spending the afternoon in the lake "moving a rock". But, they moved it! They shifted it out from shore and away from the dock about 3 feet in both directions.

I think they weren't best pleased with me when I pointed out that it was now preventing the pedal boat from travelling from the dock around Dad's boat.

So they moved the rock again.

At some point, the captain must have had his finger caught under the rock, because the next day, he happened to glance at his wedding ring (no doubt thinking what an excellent choice he'd made in a wife...) and it was mashed flat around his finger! I don't know how it took him that long to figure it out, but he had to use a pair of pliers to squeeze it back open enough to get it off of his finger.

It now looks like this (imagine the right side of the ring was as flat as the left, and you get an idea how squashed it was).

I had more photos of the rock moving, the ring pre-extrication, and also their efforts to level out our badly sloping lower deck (which also required them spending quite a bit of time in the water. Coincidence? I think not.), but they were swallowed up by the SD Card Failure of 2012.

2012-07-11, UPDATE: Photos recovered!!

 
Here's the captain discovering the squashed ring on his finger. It took him a day before he even noticed it was like that. I'm surprised it wasn't cutting off the circulation in his finger!

It was really, really squashed!

He wrapped it in a rubberband (so it wouldn't get badly scratched)

and pinched it with pliers to reshape it enough to get it off of his hand.

I helped by taking pictures. (-;

And here are the boys hard at work (in the water) trying to level out the lower deck.

It's still sloping, but nowhere near as badly as it was originally.

That little jack of Dad's is handy!

White-washed pine ceiling

I had taken hundreds of photos from our week at the cottage and was hoping to share some of them with you. Imagine my horror on Thursday when I went to review some of them AND THEY WERE GONE!

As near as I can tell, 215 photos up and vanished. I don't know why. I don't know how. It's not like the whole card is emptied... just the photos from this week. I suspect my SD card is corrupt somehow. I know the photos were there, because I was going over them showing my mum some of the sunset photos I had taken.

*SOB*

So, I have a lot fewer prospective posts for you, but I will bravely try to keep you interested with the few remaining photos I have (thank heavens I had another SD card I could switch to. And thank my lucky stars these photos weren't something irreplaceable, like a wedding! EEP!!)

I had taken tonnes of photos of the progress of our living room ceiling installation: photos of me individually painting the boards, photos of the guys on their ladders installing each frustrating plank. But, alas, they are gone.*  I can at least show you the finished product.

This is the view from the kitchen towards the living room (Yes, I know they're all one big room. Kindly grant my my little delusions.)

Isn't it so much better than the soffit? (WHO PUTS SOFFIT ON THE CEILING!?! A madman, That's who.)

Here's looking up from living room towards the kitchen (delusional!). I also painted the beige flanges of the pot lights white so they'd be less conspicuous against the white of the ceiling.

And this is how it looks with the princess sitting in the kitchen. It's clean. It's bright. It doesn't allow spiders to creep thru the holes.

We're not yet completely done. We still need to cut and paint some boards to add around the edge as trim to hid the cut edges. I think it's going to look absolutely smashing when it's all done. It's already a million times better than it used to be.

Thanks so much to Dad and the Captain for the days they spent up on ladders getting this beast of a ceiling installed!

*2012-07-11 UPDATE: PHOTOS FOUND!! 

I found my photos! Woo Woo! Here are some of the other views that I wanted to show you:

This is the painting station outdoors, where each individual 3" plank was painted. (All 114 of them!) I just used our leftover white KILLZ primer for the boards. I was ok if the coverage wasn't 100% because I was hoping to still see some of the grain thru the paint. The KILLZ would also seal in the knots in the knotty pine so they wouldn't bleed thru (in theory, at least) and it was a flat white, which was perfect for the ceiling. There was never any question though: the boards needed to be painted. Natural wood panelling is a little too "70's rec-room" for my liking.
 Here's Sewing Mom adopting her alter-ego "Painting Mom" for the day. She'll probably kill me for posting a photo of her in her 'painting clothes' but it can't be helped.

The first board is nailed into place! The captain got a nailgun for Father's day. This was essential for the ceiling project. AND I get to build lots of fun things with it afterwards, too. Win-win! There was actually a bit of a delay between painting and nailing because we forgot to bring brads for the nail gun so Dad and the Captain had to head into town to pick some up.

Three rows up.

And a few more rows done.

Halfway!

Working on the final row.

Tacking the very last board in place.

Two VERY happy fellas, relieved that the job is finally at an end.