It’s the worst closing the cottage weather ever! There’s lots of rain and the water is at its highest point in years – well over a foot higher than two weeks ago when I was up. We are probably a little over a foot from being at the high water mark. The island dock is three inches underwater and to get to the mainland from the cottagers’ dock, you have to go in thigh / almost waist deep water. It isn’t pretty. The good side – the water is much warmer than the air. I’ve only been here 12 hours so far and I already feel like a dirty cottager. I think I’ll go bathe in the big waves in a bit.
Even with this crazy weather, Mr. Pants found a place to enjoy the outside. Pretty much all day he has been hanging out by the clothesline in the partial sun. The only good part about this weather is that with the 40+ kph wind gusts, the clothes have been drying pretty quickly.
The rain and gross weather don’t seem to be stopping. Today was extremely windy and the water was really rough. Not even the birds wanted to be out in this weather. Here are some ducks and a lone heron staying by the dock for protection.
It always amazes me how our bodies get used to certain temperatures. Victoria now lives in the South and anytime it gets below 60 degrees, she considers it to be cold. If it’s below 40F, it feels like the start of a new ice age to her. It goes the same way with me and the warm temps up here though. After having a fairly hot summer, these days where the high is not even 70, feels freezing. With this wind especially, it’s hard to get warm. Today I’m wearing four layers (including two sweaters), but when I have to go out in weather like this, I’m still freezing. The winds have really brought the water up on the beach. The home office is four inches under water. As for the other side of the island, the waves are making the boat fly all over the place. I don’t think I’ll be making it to the mainland to run errands today.
Uh oh… We got A LOT of rain the other afternoon. Actually, “a lot” doesn’t properly describe it. We had a ridiculous amount of rain. The paths looked like lakes, the run off from the roof was a perpetual drinking fountain for Mr. Pants, the outhouse flooded (just the seating area, not the holes) and places in the house that never leak started leaking. No fun.
There is a light and it sometimes goes out. That might not be how the song goes, but it’s how our lights certainly are acting. This year has been the year of solar here at the cottage. Earlier on in the season, we installed a panel, one outlet and a light on the back porch. This week, Husbandman installed a light in the kitchen. We have a 12 volt system and we installed 12 volt CFL bulbs in the light that we bought online. It worked! Well, it DID work, but within 10 minutes the center bulb burned out and within two hours, the rest of them had burned out too. We checked the wiring, how many volts were going through the wires and how many volts were coming out of each of the light sockets. It was all correct.
We went to the solar store in town, they seem to think that we got bad bulbs. They were out of what we needed, so we tried Home Depot. No luck at Home Depot and they didn’t seem to think that we could use a regular household lighting fixture with a 12 volt system at all. The voltage going through the system and into the sockets is perfect though, so in theory this should work. We made one final stop at the building supply store – alas, they did have the 12 volt CFL bulbs! We popped them in the fixture when we got back to the cottage and they all worked. Within an hour the center one burned out, but the rest are still going strong. We still aren’t sure why we are having bad luck with the center light, but it’s definitely better than nothing.
We were supposed to go on the MV Chippewa tonight for the sunset cocktail cruise. We ended up deciding to just have a nice dinner on the island instead. I think we made the right decision. The Chippewa went past before the sun actually set so who knows what they ended up seeing and our view looked pretty good from the cottage.
I’m amazed that no one has thought of this earlier, but we have a new workout here at the cottage. It’s called the Tim Horton’s workout. All you need to do is take the boat to the mainland, then run to the closest Tim Horton’s. Then you run back to the boat with a dozen donuts. It might not be the best workout, but it sure is the tastiest.
We have a new room with a view here at Action Island. My roommate is up for the week and he brought a new hammock! It has a nice view of the water and it even has a bug screen, so he’s been able to sleep outside these past few nights.
The view looking up:
and the view looking out to the water:
It’s seriously time for a new stove. We really mean it this time. We have put off getting a new one for years, but I think it will actually happen at the start of next summer. We even priced the new one at the local propane company. Propane stoves really haven’t changed much since we got our old one in the early 1960s, but the old one has been slowly falling apart for a good while now. For the last 15 years or so, we’ve had to light one side of the stove manually because the place for the pilot on that side had rusted shut. The knobs have been getting harder and harder to turn over the years and we’re starting to break the knobs because of it. Now the oven’s pilot goes out randomly and won’t turn back on unless you light the stove by hand. That all sounds fine and dandy, but any time you light the oven by hand to relight the pilot, you feel like you’re going to burn your arm off.
Getting a new one will fix all of these problems. That’s not the best part though. The best part is that we are going to get a 24 inch apartment size stove. Our current one is only 20 inches, which means that you can’t actually fit four pans on the stove when cooking even though it has four burners. This means that you have to do a balancing act with the pans, with some only half on the burners. Because of that, we sometimes have amazing cooking accidents. This is the great coffee grind disaster of last week.
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