Cottage: Work

Although not really "work" as such, one of the popular activities for me at the cottage is "the project" - it's nice to have some longer-term things to do where you feel like you are accomplishing something. I guess this isn't directly related to Sophia, but I figure that as this blog expands subject material to include the little boy, it might be worthwhile to make it a family blog instead of just a baby blog. Plus, it's our blog so we can do what we like.

Anyway, there were three main projects at the cottage this year, augmented by many smaller things that needed doing. For instance, the trails needed to be inspected, the beach needed maintenance (lying on the beach is an effective way of maintaining it) and blueberries needed to be checked for quality control. But the large projects included some lumberjack-ing (including topping three birch trees close to the house and felling a few around the yard) building a picnic table, and building a bridge. There is no photographic evidence of the bridge in my photo library, unfortunately, but I can show pictures of the other two activities.

Topping a tree consisted of first putting a rope around the top of the tree (sometimes using a bow and arrow to get it up there), then securing the rope so the top will fall the right way, then climbing up and cutting. Sawing was hard work (until we put a new blade on the saw and oiled it) and once the tree was most of the way cut, we'd climb down and haul on the rope and the tree top would fall to the ground. Then we had to chop it up with a chainsaw and pile the burnable pieces near the garage. Lots of manual labour but good.







The picnic table was built from scratch (if you can call looking plans up on the internet "scratch). We bought some wood from the lumber yard, and some hardware, and had the whole thing together in a day. Again, manual labour but enjoyable seeing the thing come together from start to finish.







The third project was a bridge from the boathouse dock to the beach. Normally, when the water isn't so high, it's no problem to walk across from the dock to the beach, but in high water years, it's kind of hard, so we put together a little bridge from scraps from the nuisance yard.

Oh, I almost forgot! and this kind of makes this a Sophie post after all! The most important job at the cottage is to measure the growing contingent! There is a wall in the corner of one of the rooms where Adam and I were measured as we grew. On this same wall, Sophia is measured each time she is there. She grew something like 5 inches since she was there last year.