Thinking about Stuff

I don’t usually spend much time on YouTube, but this week found me watching George Carlin’s routine on Stuff. I couldn’t help but laugh when he said that we have so much stuff that we even rent storage space for some of it. Oh dear. That’s exactly what we have been working on the last week or so. Finding a place to store our stuff.

There is a good reason for it though.

When we first came up to the cabin in July, we had in the back of our minds the thought that we might have to return “home” for the winter.  Or might want to.  But Rob and I soon agreed that our decision to move here was the right one, and it was time to deal with the house and put it up for sale. There was no point keeping it through the winter, so with a good referral for a realtor from my super sis Lynne, we put our home of 35 plus years on the market. Not without a little preparation of course.  Rob did an amazing job of taking care of a few of those pesky chores that just never seemed to get done, when we were always so busy taking care of the business instead. After a short but rather intense period of time and hard work, he had the house in reasonable shape, cleaned and ready for showing. It sold quickly, with a very short closing time, so we suddenly found ourselves having to deal with all of our “stuff”.  Now we had already gone through a lot of areas of the house last winter, knowing we were about to make some changes, and cleaned out quite a few items. Still, we have been there for a long time, and our varying interests over the years have produced a lot of things we don’t really want to get rid of.  Printmaking, airbrushing, woodworking, clothes embellishing – well it just requires a lot of “stuff”. So we needed to deal with it.

Of course, we also closed our business in April, and that already had added some more items to our inventory. Some of which will be very useful in our new house, but the problem is, we don’t have one yet! The cabin here is 800 square feet with one closet, and 2 chests of drawers. Nonetheless, some of our stuff has already come to the cabin. You don’t want to put food items, liquids, or anything that can’t tolerate freezing into storage.

Rob laughed this week when I said that I think I needed an intervention for my spice collection. And he assured me that yes, he had attached the kitchen cabinets properly and they would not fall down from the weight of my spice containers. (However, there are no cabinet doors on them, so you can see that I have tucked them everywhere!)

Now there is a lot of stuff I will gladly part with, but dried chiles and spices are not one of them. Back in May and June too, while Rob was on two timber framing courses I also made purees out of a lot of my whole chile peppers and froze them, so now our refrigerator freezer is also full of chile pastes. The trick will be to use them up, and not just hang on to them all, knowing how hard it is to get good dried chiles anywhere. (Hey, maybe we could start our own business…. no, no, no just kidding)

Needless to say, preparing the house for selling, and then being in a period of limbo while we waited for it to sell, and then the scramble to empty it, has disrupted our plans here somewhat. We are both anxious for the final closing date, and looking forward to both of us being here, with only this property and cabin to worry about. It will be the first time in a long time that we haven’t maintained a store, a warehouse, a house, and a cabin.

Not that there will be a long period of idleness. We still have a lot of pre-winter preparation to do here. But already we are talking of curling up and reading, researching, cooking, planning, and enjoying this little cabin through the fall and winter months. 

Along with the house selling distractions, the weather has also been rather wet and dreary, so I haven’t been out with my camera too much. We did have one unseasonably warm and dry day, and Rob took the opportunity to caulk up some of the old screw holes on the shed. It is pretty much ready now for when he starts working on the timbers in the spring!

 

 

I did have a couple of surprise visitors the other morning. Just when I was feeding Jet his breakfast, a small fawn walked past the kitchen window. I distracted Jet until it had gone past, then lowered the blinds so that he wouldn’t see it and get too excited. But then I realized I couldn’t watch either, or take any photos! I put my eye to the small glass panes at the front door, and there was the adult doe looking right back at me! Sweet.

 

I waited about half an hour, and then cautiously took Jet out on leash, but they were gone. Which was good, as we always have an off-leash play time, and I didn’t want any deer chasing to go on.

The Blue Heron is still around, and I heard the Kingfisher again this week. But the geese are flying, and I guess it won’t be long before all the migrating birds are gone. The woods are a bit quieter without the bird song. Luckily the blue jays and chickadees and woodpeckers and ravens all hang around for the winter, and will make sure it doesn’t get too quiet around here!  We have a great book on building bird houses and nesting platforms, so Rob made sure not to pack it away with the storage items, and is hoping to have a chance to read it this winter.  Of course, if you watched George Carlin, you know that the only reason you have a house is so that you have a place to keep your stuff, and I’m pretty sure birds don’t have any stuff. Which is why they can migrate every year so easily. These days that has a certain amount of appeal!

 

 

 

Some things come full circle

These days I have the feeling that a lot of things in our lives have come full circle. During the ice storm of ’98, I remember two guys showing up to install our new gas furnace. Natural gas had just arrived in the village, and we had somewhat reluctantly decided to get a furnace installed. We had been heating the house with a big Jotul wood stove for 20 years or more, but we were in the midst of plans to open a store and knew from experience that the long days required in a store would make it difficult to keep the house warm during the winter.  We were all too familiar with coming home late at night to a cold house, with not enough time to get the wood stove going properly before it was bedtime.  So there we were, in the middle of an ice storm, with no power, and the two guys showed up to install a furnace (luckily with chainsaws as so many branches had fallen that they blocked the entrance to our house) Somehow they still managed to get most of the install done too!

Before long, the gas furnace became a nice convenience, thanks to a programmable thermostat, and we woke up to a warm house, and came home at night to a warm one.  A flick of the switch when we were chilly was all that it took to warm us up.

I guess over time I forgot what it was like to heat with wood.  But I sure remembered last week, when the colder nights hit, and the frosts arrived. Suddenly we are back to getting up and getting dressed rather quickly. Our morning routine now includes coaxing the wood stove to life, and that chilly interim period when the house is still cold, before some warmth comes out of the stove. We have to make sure we have papers and kindling on hand to start it. And wood to burn.  This week Rob and I spent time gathering up some of the wood from the trees that we cut down when we put the road in.  There is lots of poplar and birch, and a bit of maple that will be useful.  Some of the logs are dry enough, but some are too wet, and will have to be left to dry ready for next year. We are back to choosing a location to stack it – close enough to the house that it isn’t a chore in the winter to get to it, but not too close that it will cause problems with critters and insects.  I’ve had to re-learn how to stack it properly so it doesn’t all fall over. Rob had a stack that he had cut sometime earlier, and it all needed to be split, so he was soon back into a good splitting rhythm.  We will still have to order some firewood to be delivered though. In future years we can probably pull a lot out of the forest, but for this year we will have to order some, as we need good dry hardwood.

As we plan for the new house, a lot of our discussions will be about heating systems. If we go off-grid it will get even more interesting. This winter will see us do a lot of research on heating systems.  While we are curled up in front of this nice wood stove no doubt.

 

 

Now that the nights are colder, we are suddenly loading on the bedding too. We have a lovely quilt that was made by Rob’s Mom.  We once all spent an amazing Christmas here, Rob, his Mom and myself.  The quilt was our gift from her that year and this is a photo from that Christmas, when she was still working on it! Some people say you shouldn’t use a handmade quilt, you should keep it tucked away as a memento, but I feel that it was made to be used, and to enjoy.   So it is on the top of our bed;  it sure keeps us warm, and it’s such a pleasure to see it back in the cabin. And we always say “Thanks Mom!” when we snuggle up under it.

It washes up beautifully too, and here it is out on the clothes line earlier in the summer. Isn't it gorgeous?

 

We have also reconnected with an old friend, Bob, who lived with Rob just before I met him. We have seen each other off and on over the years, but now we get together more often, as he lives in a lovely log cabin about a half hour drive from here.  He has been in the area a long time, so can help us when we are trying to locate specific items. As well, we all enjoy hiking and have been on a great hike together, which I wrote about here in the blog. We all went on a Studio Tour in September, and this is one of the pieces I picked up at Tim Storey’s studio.  (I posted a photo of his teapot earlier in the blog) I bought this thinking it would make a nice gift, but it was quickly put on our kitchen shelf, so I guess it was a gift for us. It is a beautiful mortar and pestle, and I love it. 

 

 

We went and  visited some of the off-the-grid houses that are in the area as well that day. It’s good to reconnect, and we seem to all share a lot of the same interests.  Funny  that we both ended up in the same area, it just took Rob and I a lot longer to get here!

We had snowflakes and ice pellets in the air last week, so most of our week was spent looking after things that had to be done before it got much colder out. Nothing like a little snow to get you thinking about winter.  I didn’t see much of the chipmunks or red squirrels last week, so obviously they prepared themselves much earlier than we did ! We still need to get a lot more firewood in. We also need to address the issue of coming into the house through the kitchen. In the winter we will pull too much cold air and snow in, and have nowhere to put wet boots or hang winter coats. Rob is thinking of building a small temporary insulated area on the porch, so that we can use the porch entrance instead.  We should be able to let our boots and coats dry off there, and it may cut down a bit on the blasts of cold air coming into the house. 

We’ve also been going through boxes of stuff, trying to get ourselves organised a bit. We seem to have a bit more time to do things inside the house now. The days are suddenly shorter, and we are finding that the outside activities start later and end earlier. We don’t have a fenced in yard here, so we need to make sure that we have played with Jet while it is still light out. We don’t want to lose him in the woods!

On the weekend we went to the Taste of the Valley event in nearby Cobden. It was packed, both with visitors and vendors. There were all sorts of crafts, preserves, and local produce. I was pleased to see one of our favourite vendors there - Moonlight Crofter's Farm - so I was able to pick up some of their organic garlic, potatoes, and stewing beef.  Their beef is, I believe, Scottish Highland, and very lean. Later, I cooked up a huge pot of chili with it, using up some of my stash of guajillo paste and chile powders.  Delicious. We froze some of it for later in the season.

Well, Jet is getting restless. That usually means that Rob is coming down the road with the truck and trailer. Jet hears him long, long before I do of course.   Time to think about dinner, and get ready for tomorrow's adventures. I am supposed to go to my first yoga class tomorrow. The last time I took yoga, I was 14 years old, and went with my mom, when we lived in England. I guess that little circle took a while....

 

 

 

Thanksgiving weekend

This week has had me thinking a lot about sound. One day I could hear music pretty clearly INSIDE our cabin, but coming from somewhere outside. I thought someone was on our nearby shoreline, so set out to see, and was surprised that it was actually one of our neighbours up the river, playing their radio. Now it was playing pretty loud, but it made me realise how much the sound travels here, and how I can't always tell what direction it is really coming from.  I also think I could hear the radio because it wasn't competing with a lot of other sounds. Although we can hear a bit of traffic from the road that runs on the other side of the river, there isn't a lot of other noise here. I can hear the wind, the river, the birdsong, and this week I was actually startled by the sounds of the leaves falling. When a good wind comes up and shakes off the loose leaves, it actually makes quite a bit of (lovely) noise. I don't think I've ever really noticed the sound of leaves falling before! 

The cold wet weather last weekend seemed to give us a bit of a "push" this week to get some things done. We've made new to-do lists, and are trying to figure out what our real priority is every day. The work on the shed is nearing completion, but as always the last few jobs are time consuming, and weather dependent. Rob needs to caulk some of the pinholes in the shed roof, and needs a nice warm and dry day for that. Today we are being teased by brilliant sunshine, followed by high winds and rainfall. Not a good day to be on a metal roof. So instead, he is busy filling in some of the gaps along the roof line, to make sure it will be nicely sealed for the winter. The door is in, but the windows still have to be installed. This week he also spread some of the stone around the concrete pad so that he can now drive right up and over it.

I am really starting to get a feel for how this is going to work, and that Rob will be able to easily handle the large timbers here.

This week my native wildflower seeds arrived in the mail. I chose ones that could be planted in the fall, so spent a few hours at the side of our new road, clambering up the newly exposed sides and poking little holes everywhere and hoping my plan will work.  I'm hoping the new plants will prevent erosion, and add a little colour here and there.  Hopefully they won't all just get washed down the steep bank! If they do grow, I should be able to collect more seeds from them, and continue down the road and plant more each year. It was lovely to be out digging in the earth, listening to the sounds in the woods, watching the leaves fall. I was pleased to notice that the wild strawberries and ferns are already slowly coming back in at the tops of the banks, so maybe they will also spread down the banks a little bit.  I also collected some seeds from the local asters and scattered them here and there.

Despite the feeling that we urgently need to get some things done before the snow flies (and the talk in town this week is that we may get snow next week) we did agree to take some time off if the weather was good. On Friday we were promised some sunshine and above normal temperatures, so we went for a drive in the afternoon to take in some of the fall splendour. Years ago we remember driving through a place called Wolfe, and that the view there was spectacular and we wanted to go back there again. It is no longer on any of the maps, but we were able to find the road, and then eventually the church that used to mark Wolfe's existence.  Just before we got there though, we spotted a pretty little lake at the side of the road and stopped for a photo.

When we arrived at Wolfe, we pulled into the church parking lot, and took a little stroll around the church and graveyard. This area is so lovely - rolling hills, stone walls, and lakes on either side of the road.

We continued on through Quadeville, Palmer's Rapids and on to Combermere, following the same route we had taken many, many years ago.  We try to get all the tourist brochures for this area as there are always interesting events going on in these little towns, so it was great to travel to a few and get a feel for where they are.  There is supposed to be a very good Farmer's Market in Combermere, but this is the last weekend for farmer's markets so we will have to go next year.
In Combermere we saw a sign for "the historic crooked slide" so made a little detour to go check it out.  It was a pretty little park area, with trails around, and a restored "log chute" that we learned was once used to get the logs through the rapids of the river.

We would both love to someday pick up a couple of small kayaks, and this looks like it would be a great area to explore by kayak. We will have to keep an eye out next year for a good kayak sale!

 

We walked around a little bit of the trail, but didn't really have time to go off exploring.

 

Rather than retrace our route back, we decided to continue to Barry's Bay, and rather than take the main road, we stayed on the back roads. It was the right choice, as we were treated to a narrow windy road, with glimpses of rivers and lakes, small cottages, and stunning fall colours everywhere we looked. In Barry's Bay, just by chance, the farmer's market was still running, and we could not resist stopping for a quick look.  Right. In truth, we knew that the most magnificent home made donuts could be found there!  And this was the last day of the season, so we had to stop to pick some up.

 

This is the line up for the donut and baked goods stall.

 

 

 

 



We were pretty worried as the people in front of us were buying dozens of donuts (and bread rolls and everything else! ) at a time. I guess this stall was extra popular, not just because everything is so delicious, but it's Thanksgiving weekend and everyone seemed to be buying for their Thanksgiving dinners. We were sure they would run out before we got to the table, but they did not, and we left with 4 lovely donuts (yes - 4 - not 4 dozen!) and a pumpkin pie.

We drove back along the scenic Opeongo Road, and took a little detour down through Cormac.  This photo is a bit blurry as our windshield is none too clean! The trees were so beautiful that we decided to go back up through one of our other favourite roads - and down around Lake Clear before heading home.

Today the wind is pretty gusty and the leaves are flying off the trees. We are so glad we took the time yesterday to get out into the Valley and tour around, as I think we probably caught the trees at their absolute peak of colour. Already around the cabin, the sumac is beginning to fade, and the road is covered now with leaves and pine needles.

The cabin smells like pumpkin pie (and I didn't have to try to bake one!) We have a tiny little 6 lb. turkey defrosting, and are looking forward to having our first Thanksgiving here. Hopefully next year we will be able to share it with some family or friends.

For this year, we will be hanging out with our feathered friends at the river.