Damn Safari! Problem solved.

Turns out the browser was the problem. Firefox solved it. Anyway, here are the posts and photos I tried to post last time. All is well here. John leaves for Austin with Graeme tomorrow and then we'll be all girls all the time at the cottage for the next week. A lot of estrogen.

I just realized I haven't heard news, read a paper or scanned the internet in two weeks. I love it. Unplugging is one of the newest best things about the cottage for me. Ignorance really is bliss at times.

July 4

The final week of the Cleanse

I’m sitting here drinking what will be the last smoothie I will have, most likely, for a long time. I’m about to swallow the last supplements.

Tonight is the last night of the Cleanse.

The last few days have been a little more challenging. Being at the cottage means Loeb isn’t a 50minute car ride or 10-minute bike. We’re 20 minutes from a grocery store. I have had to shop carefully.

The cottage also means ice cream, cookies, a lot of fruit, treats brought by visitors, a steaming cup of coffee on the dock in the morning, a late afternoon glass of wine in the speckled sunlight.

The coffee and wine start tomorrow. I plan to keep my sweets-consumption very low and my vegetable intake very high because I really like how I feel after eating mainly vegetables for three weeks.

I also know that I will keep my portions much smaller. The reality is that I was consistently eating too much, or at least too much of the wrong things.

The other thing I know is this: tomorrow is Day 1-Post Cleanse and it will start with a cup of decaf, freshly ground and a warm piece of bakery-fresh multigrain toast covered in peanut butter and homemade strawberry jam. Tomorrow morning I’m celebrating me.

With just one piece though.

July 9, 2008

Grand plans gone sour on Mary Lake

Remember how I told you I’d keep writing posts and just upload a bunch every few days? Yah, that hasn’t happened. The post above is the only one I’ve written besides this one I’m writing on the fly right now.

I’ve been having fun. A lot of fun. No time or desire to sit at a computer or scribble things down by hand. It means I’m missing some good stuff for the blog but I’m living the good stuff without many worries or stresses or pressure on myself.

First, the morning after the post above I had grand plans to sip my coffee and eat my toast while watching the mist burn off the lake. Instead, Hope woke up at 6:00 and my day took off from there. I had my coffee and toast in a hurry between demands/requests and really only thought much about it after the last bite was gone. It was anti-climactic.

During our first week (last week), John’s mum joined us for a couple of days. The girls loved playg with her and I loved the short break it gave me. The evenings were spent playing a long forgotten game – Probe. It isn’t as intrusive as it sounds.

The day Omi left kicked off a few days of visits to other cottages nearby: Dad and Donna’s, Steve and Sue’s (John’s sister and BIL), and the Henkelman’s (Beth’s husband’s family’s cottage). Emily loves visiting other people at their cottages. It was all fun but I was really happy to be done driving all over God’s Green Earth and just stay put right here.

The day Omi left was also the day John went back to Ottawa for a few days. By the time he got back, I was spent. I’ve been a single parent on and off again enough during the last month. I’ll be glad to put an end to it soon. I still have one more week though starting Saturday when John flies to Austin for a week of exploration about his sabbatical.

Beth, Graeme and Kate joined us here on Sunday. The girls are having so much fun with Kate and she seems to tolerate them well.


I’m so happy to be with Beth. We’re having a great time. Yesterday we hiked up The Rock, as we’ve always called it and found a huge amount of wild blueberries. Lots had already been found by deer and bears but we still came home with a good amount. I was picking the last section of bushes when I heard a buzzing sound. I kept looking around for a hive but didn’t see one. I pulled up the bush to get at another clump o berries and found the hive. The bees swarmed up at me. Beth yelled: run! Not that I needed any instructions at that point. I started to run but slipped on the wet rocks. I managed to hold onto the bag of blueberries and I got away with only one small sting. I said to Beth that it felt like I had just lived a Franklin episode. She told me I was lame. She was right.


Today was a perfect cottage day. Emily, Hope and I did a short nature hike this morning collecting things that were the “colours of the rainbow” as per the instruction sheet from Emily’s JK teacher that we just received. Emily is really excited about starting school in the fall and is very keen to do the summer activities suggested by her teacher. They are all lots of fun and keep the excitement of school in her mind.

The girls played inside, swam, I put together the new barbecue, Beth vacuumed all the corners of the cottage, I knit, the girls played restaurant outside, we watched the ducks and ducklings, swam again, baked and laughed, laughed, laughed. It reminded me, or re-emphasized that we’re doing the cottage right, the way we existed here when Beth and I were kids: no fancy toys, no big store-bought water toys or playground equipment; just old pots and pans, hand-me down sand toys, a couple of water toys, old puzzles and books that have been here for ages, the old Sindy dolls that Beth and I had in the early 1980s, looking at everything outside, collecting it and talking about it, playing games, making up our own games, simple crafts on rainy days, occasional outings into town, just playing the way kids want to play. With imagination and with their parents.

Tomorrow we’re heading into town so I can finally post this, check my email, go to the Farmer’s Market and then come back and do it all over again.

I do have one teensy complaint about the cottage this year: the bugs! They are so bad this year! It’s almost mid-July there are still black flies. Hope’s head is a minefield of scabs. It’s truly unbelievable for this time of year. I could really do with a heat wave.