Cottage Science Projects

It was that time of the year again, time to open the cottage for the season. It's always nice to get back to the cottage again after being away for several months of winter. The weather this past weekend was so warm, it felt more like July than the end of May. Unfortunately, we are having plumbing issues and my sister wasn't able to get our pump working properly yet but we muddled through using buckets of water from the lake and large bottles of tap water that my mom brought from her house in town.

We learned that we had unwittingly conducted a couple of unplanned science projects over the winter. For one thing, we discovered that pop cans explode open and spew their contents all over the cupboard in which they are kept when left behind to freeze in an unheated cottage. Here's a picture of how the top of the can was blown almost completely off from the force of the explosion.

We also learned that mice can walk up walls, at least when there is food involved and when the wall is made out of barnboard, which probably gave them a better surface to grip onto that a regular wall would. We had hung this piece of art made out of wood and various nuts and pine cones, etc. on the wall last summer and it hadn't occurred to us in the fall that we might want to take it down and put it away for the winter when the building is unattended and the mice have free run of the place. They appear to have snacked on several of the nuts over the winter, leaving only the shells behind.

The most unpleasant lesson was learning that potatoes mistakenly left behind in a drawer rot over the course of several months, spreading a sticky liquid about that is not pleasant to clean up and leaving a horrible odour of rotted food that lingers even after you have scrubbed out the drawer several times with a bleach based product. I have a feeling that a new coat of paint will be required to restore the drawer to its past usefulness.

But these unexpected findings weren't a big deal and were vastly outweighed by the sheer joy of being back at the lake. Here's a picture of the first sunset of this year. The sun is over to the right side of the tree, as it gets this time of year. It will go even farther to the right over the next month before starting its swing back slowly to the left following the summer solstice on June 21.

We are a little wiser and a little weary after two days of cleaning, raking, dusting, scrubbing, mowing and plumbing, not to mention several trips back and forth to the hardware store, but mostly, we're very much looking forward to a long and enjoyable summer ahead at our home by the lake.