Cottage!

[przed]

Finally have time to post about the cottage trip, starting with the tree! Here it is, the hunk of wood that briefly stranded us in the cottage, and the two lovely neighbours who chainsawed it to bits. (The Sweetie and I had a mad scheme to go at it with axes in the morning if we had to, but man, that would have taken a long time.)


Here are the three of us on the patio just outside the cottage. You can see the treehouse behind us that was the reason Ros insisted we had to rent this cottage. Alas, it turned out there was a wasp nest under the tree house, so it and the tire swing ended up being off limits. But there was still a cool swing and trampoline for the girls to play on, when the bugs weren't horrible.


Ros in the kids' kayak that came with the place. It was a lot of fun to tool around in. I had it out a couple of times. Ros had to wear a bathing cap at camp, and decided she liked it. Apart from keeping her hair dry, it also staved off the horse flies that would periodically try to take chunks out of us. (There were deer flies in the forest, horse flies on the river, and mosquitos everywhere. If we rent this cottage again, we're going for end of summer when the bugs have died off more.)


The cottage was on the Moon River, near Bala, Ont. This was the dock where we hung out a lot.


And here's the view from the dock up the river, along with the canoe the cottage came with.


Apart from swimming, paddling and fishing, we also brought up a ton of board games for the evenings. We managed three games of Pandemic, won one by the skin of our teeth, won one handily, and lost one really, really fast when we had a cascading series of outbreaks near the start of the game. And we're still playing with only four epidemic cards. We also brought up Risk, and played a game with each of Ros' friends. Ros and her friends played as teams, and managed to take out me and the Sweetie easily both times. Here's the first team of world conquerors. Don't let the smiles fool you! They're sharks!


And here's our second team of cute overlords.


At the end of the vacation, we went into Bala and visited the Balacade, a little arcade that has a dock out back you can drive your boat to. The games are all a bit past their prime, but they're still fun. Don and I traded off on pinball while the girls played all the ticket games and had a blast.


The arcade also had an ancient jukebox that had actual scratchy 45s in it. Including this Canadian classic, Gowan's Criminal Mind.


If you've never heard this masterpiece of Canuck '80s cheeze, you should give it a listen. You're welcome. *g*

All in all, it was an unexpectedly lovely vacation. I've usually preferred the sort of trips where you go to a city and explore the culture and do a lot of stuff. I wasn't quite sure I was up for just hanging out for a week, but I have to say it was really refreshing. I didn't get quite as much reading or writing done as I was hoping, since we were usually supervising the kids down at the river and by the time they went to bed I was ready to pass out myself, but that was okay. It was a nice recharge of the batteries, and I'm viewing it as a fallow period that'll help me get back into the writing, now that I'm not training all the time

Comments

[przed.livejournal.com]

It was absolutely splendid! Apart from the insects, and they were mostly easy enough to avoid.

I figured there wouldn't be much reading/writing, but I did a bit, including a short (very short) Pros story for the BistoCon zine.

And the cottage owners had left a spectacular basket of books that were a huge cut above the usual crappy paperbacks one usually finds the cabins of northern Ontario. I dug into the first two hundred pages of a book I'd been wanting to read for ages:Far From the Tree. It's a massive book about parents who have children with what he calls "horizontal identities," which is to say conditions or identities that are different from their own. I got through the chapters on parents with deaf children and dwarf children, and they're brilliant. The writer, who is a psychiatry lecturer with his own horizontal identities (he has dyslexia, which his parents were sympathetic in dealing with, and gay, which they weren't), doesn't pathologize the children or parents at all, does very sympathetic interviews with everyone involved, and is compassionate in looking at the various choices that parents and children can make in choosing to navigate their identities and the world that is frequently not very sympathetic to them. The historical overview of the development of sign language and how its acceptance in the greater world ebbs and flows was fascinating. Okay, that was longer than I'd planned, but I really, really liked it and think you might, too!

[halotolerant.livejournal.com]

That does sound really interesting, I've tracked it down on amazon to put on my pile of 'to read' that I have there *g* Actually when I was about 12 I loved reading books from the 'help for parents' section of the children's part of my local library, which included a book called "Deaf Like Me' which was a father's memoir of his daughter's deafness and the way they were sort of forced to try to make her speak, but eventually realised that this was wrong and that they needed to teach her to sign. Obviously I didn't appreciate the complexities on every level then, but it's always stayed with me, and this sounds in the same vein. Thanks for the tip! *g*

[przed.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we had similar tastes as kids. When I was about the same age, one of my favourite books was "19 Steps Up the Mountain," about a family that adopted 14 kids on top of their biological ones, many of whom had special needs or were transracially adopted. You can see the influence of that on my life. *g*