Sunset View from the Cottage Shoreline

Never waste any amount of time doing anything important when there is a sunset outside that you should be sitting under! 

                                                                   ~C. JoyBell C

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Fall in the Raised Bed Gardens

Welcome!

We have a little raised bed garden on the side of the cottage. It is a bit of a learning curve for us but we are having a lot of fun with it. The climate at the cottage tends to be quite variable and we are not always there to water it or protect it from chipmunks and possibly beavers.

One bed is mainly herbs and we also tried for garlic but that just didn't work out. We have been using the herbs a bit but, more often than not, I forget that that is a cooking option out here! The herbs actually do pretty spectacularly. We put them pretty close together and the Parsley and Cilantro kind of crowded the other herbs but they still did fine.

I tried adding some lettuce seeds, purchased at Dollarama, to the spot where the garlic didn't grow.  I keep reading about how you can have two crops a year of  spring types of plants so I thought I would experiment.  They have popped up and look cute but really, it could freeze any night now.

This is our poor little squash which is still making efforts even though it is too late for this year. 

 Not even one flower was sucessful this year!

Here we have the beginnings of a delicious pasta sauce at the Lake Cottage!

Fall on the Porch

I wanted to take these pictures because of the fantastic light that streams into the porch. I love to sit in this chair and read, have a cup of tea and just relax.

Jasper has his special place on the porch too.

The Tiny Tree

Persistence:

Continuing firmly or obstinately in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.

When my oldest was just tiny she became attached to a tiny little sprig of a spruce tree that was growing in a small crack in the big rock that is at the front of our cottage. We never thought the tree would make it but bit by bit the tree has grown. It has forced the crack in the giant rock to get bigger and bigger. The crack gathers bits of moss, the lake washes over the crack and bits of material collect in the depression feeding and watering the tree.
It is exposed to the snow ice and winds  and sometimes in storms the lake washes completely over the rock with great force but that tree, still grows taller every year.

Our Fall Bedroom

Welcome to our Bedroom in the Fall. Here is what our bedroom is looking like this year.

We have family pics on the wall, my fall quilt and pillow shams on the bed.

The window looks out onto the screen porch.. 

Here is my side of the bed. The 3 pics on the wall are some of Bob’s nature Photography. 

The small dresser was in left in the cottage when we took possession. I love the round mirror and the dresser is the perfect size to fit between the closet wall and the open door.
My kids each stained a wooden candle sticks for me 25 years ago for my birthday. There is a .Battery powered candle , fall floral in a vase I got when we were first married. 

Last is that little copper bowl has a few pinecones and a red fleece heart ❤️ my 10 year old grand daughter sewed just for me when she was at the cottage this past August!

Jasper says Hi!

Jasper, our Samoyed dog, enjoys roaming around our little island. This type of dog is not too enthusiastic about swimming so he can't wander very far away and therefore he is free to go wherever  he likes when we are at the lake cottage. When he comes back into the cottage he has a look as if he is glad to see us and that he wants to find out what he was missing.  This is just a quick snap with the cell phone but I love his expression and how he is backlit from the doorway.

He really wished we would stay outside with him and help him hunt frogs, splash in the lake, crawl under the cottage, bark at Canadian Geese, and talk to that chatty echo dog that seems to be across the water on calm days.

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. ~Ogden Nash

Arriving at the cottage

 

 

 

When we approach the cottage we slow down and do a little bit of maneuvering to get lined up at our island dock. I must admit my heart does a bit of a pit-a-pat when we get near, I love this view of the island and the cottage.  Maybe it is not because of the look of this spot but more the memories it evokes.

 

See that white building? That is the cottage peaking out from the trees.

 

 There is  Ol' Blue.. our old boat taking up one spot on our dock. You can see Bob's flag and flag pole by the dock and the ladder coming down from the dock when we can climb down for a little swim or to catch crayfish. The huge rock out front of the cottage is a pretty amazing feature too.  There are enough levels and layers that it is easy to climb down to the water and when you reach the water you realize there are more layers hidden under the surface just right for wading.

 

You can see the shore line behind the dock wrap over to a rock wall that is part of the reason our dock is in such a nice calm tiny little harbour.  You can see sensational views of the lake from the top of that rocky out cropping.

 

This is the point of our trip to the lake when I have a sense of coming home. 

 

Black Eyed Susan

Earth laughs in flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My Lake Bedroom

My bed pillow out on the porch

Last year we decided it was time to brighten up our bedroom at the cottage. The walls were old and yucky - brown fake woodgrain 70's style press board paneling. A paint job did wonders. It is so much brighter and happier a place now and I even find it a more relaxing place to be. We bought a new quilt set in fresh colors, and I sewed window drapes and a fabric cover for the closet opening out of a nice sage green color.

The old dresser and a few special things

Bob's parents old anniversary clock, glass candlesticks I got as a present years ago, and a picture of trolls my daughter brought back to us from Norway this year.

Sea glass glows in the light

I have sea glass in an old rose bowl on our window sill behind the bed.
We actually have a tea light in the middle of it and it gives off such a great glow at night.

Bob's side of the bed

Yes, really, I can't sleep if we change sides.

We have just put new pictures on the wall with photos of our family at the cottage. It was hard to decide on only a few favorites to frame.

Linda's side of the bed

We are trying out 3 larger frames on the wall and soon we are going to pick out some large pictures of berries found growing on the island. We are going to get rid of the existing matting and cut a matt with only one picture per frame. How to pick just three photos? Decisions, decisions.

Apples

Apples on the Porch



A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. ~Welsh Proverb

Wildflowers in a Mug

Wildflowers on my Windowsill

Dragonfly

Deep in the sun-searched growths, the dragonfly hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky.

~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Silent Noon

The Flag

We now have a flag pole.

A pole was kicking around the cottage from before we owned the place and we decided it was time to get rid of it. We hauled it down to the dock and seeing it there Bob realized it would fit nicely into one of the support poles of our dock. Next thing I knew Bob was telling me to look out front and see what was different.

Yup, a big flag pole and a flag too.

The Chair Part 2

The chair we found a few weeks ago is all ours and fixed up now. We are fondly calling it our "drift wood chair" because we believe it was drifting in the water and someone fishing nearby got it out of the water and threw in on the dock to get it out of the way of the boats.

Bob worked hard at sanding down the roughest, most beat up spots but it really could not just be stained so it we were going to paint it we went all out with a vibrant blue. I love it! I keep finding myself plopping down on the chair in the backyard of the cottage. It seems that I always really wanted a comfy chair back there and never even knew it.

"Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs".
~Fran Lebowitz

The Lost Chair

We arrived at our island dock to find a chair sitting there. It is an an Adirondack chair or Muskoka Chair depending on your point of view.

We were a little worried at first.. was someone on the island? Was the cottage still secure? We wondered if the chair was left behind by someone who had been fishing off of our dock recently. Perhaps the chair has been floating around the lake for a while and someone fished it out and threw it on the dock to keep it out of the way of unsuspecting boaters.

I left it right where we found it on the dock this week. Perhaps it's owner will come back and claim it. However, just in case it isn't gone by next week, we will take out a sander, and some stain and I plan to be ready to make this old lost chair one of our own.

We will probably never know the whole story behind this beat up old chair, but maybe we will provide it with a future.