Night's Sky

This year it felt like spring lead directly into fall. Last weekend temperatures plummeted to just above freezing. Quite a shock when I remember swimming a mere two weeks ago.

With the falling temperatures came our fall tradition: getting the raft out of the pond. This year we were lucky; not only were there four people to share in the load, but we had an audience of no fewer than six! Guess word is getting around.

While there's a lot of things that I'm not looking forward to with the changing of the season, there's plenty to be excited about. It's time for hearty soup and fresh bread. Cozy fires in our wood stove are about to accompany our evenings. The sun sets early giving us hours of beautiful stars to enjoy before bed. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to get myself out of bed in time to enjoy a sunrise or two.

... and we're back!

*tap tap* Is anyone still there?

After a very long and unplanned hiatus, I've decided to revive this blog. It's become obvious that it was impractical to try to document everything that happened every weekend -- it just lead to a perpetual catch-up situation which became so demoralizing that we gave up completely. This time I'm going to focus on the most important and meaningful aspects of the time we spend up here. I've been very inspired by Tara and Tyler's fantastic blog, Going Slowly, which I recently discovered. They're going through many of the same things we've gone through. It's great to read about their adventures and be so closely reminded of many of our own.

Just look at that smile!

So much has happened in the past 2 years. My first goal is to go through the many, many photos that have accumulated since our last update and slowly post the accompanying stories that stand out in my mind.

But today I'll focus on the present. Spence and I both crashed around 9 p.m. last night and still managed to sleep until 7:30 this morning. While Spence built a fire, I grabbed a cup of coffee and came out to the pond to breathe a bit of life into Welcome to Twin Ponds. Keedo happily followed me and has been basking in the sun while I type away.

Yesterday Mark came over to give me a bit of a watercolour lesson. I have very little experience with painting, but not only is Mark extremely talented (check out his site), he's also an excellent teacher. I don't think my work is ready for the gallery just yet, but I had a great time.

Can you guess which painting belongs to whom?

Finished products

Week 15: Moving up

.:May 14/15, 2011:.

So comfy...

The weather this weekend was not that great, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that almost all of our activities during this week's visit, such as they were, were spent inside.

A bit of backstory to one of our improvements: last fall we installed new cabinets and appliances in our kitchen (our real one). The trusty old microwave was supplanted by a new overhead one and was taking up valuable space. We had been meaning to do something with it for some time. Thus it came to pass that Spencer loaded it in the car for the ride to its final resting place - the kitchen in the cabin.

Before actually doing anything with it Spencer needed to clean the area. It was pretty gross - so much so that Sim refused to even enter the kitchen unless it was a quick dash in to grab a beer from our (new and clean!) fridge. There were cobwebs in the studs, mouse droppings, insects, and other unpleasantness. As luck would have it, however, there was very little there that a shopvac couldn't deal with, so after dedicating some time and elbow grease to it, the kitchen was habitable (at least for Spencer). There was just enough space on the meagre counter to put the microwave and viola (yes, viola, as Spencer says), we had a cooking solution.

Among other things we accomplished this weekend were getting sheets for the futon from the a big box store and hooking up the DVD player (which we will likely never use, but we needed to get it out of the condo).

... and convenient

Sim's major contribution was putting said sheets on the futon. Ha!

It rained practically the whole time so we watched a fair amount of Fringe. And regrettably the weather was so poor we decided to leave first thing Sunday morning.

As an bit of a postscript, some of you dear readers may remember the film Snatch with Brad Pitt and Dennis Farina, among other notables. At the end of the movie Dennis Farina's character is returning to New York after being in the U.K. The customs officer asks him whether he has anything to declare, to which he responds, "Yeah, don't go to England!"

Well we have our own little declaration of sorts: don't go to the Tim Horton's on First Street in Orangeville. It was freezing outside and they were running their air conditioning! It made our breakfast pitstop truly pitiful (not to mention uncomfortable).

But we got home without any other incident and Aims was happy to see us.