Slowing Down in a Speeded up World

I finally got the pictures downloaded (uploaded?) from my camera today. I've only had this camera for a few weeks but I'm slowly learning to use it's plethera of features. I am so pleased with the shots I am getting thus far.

This is the back of our cottage and my canoe. We heat with wood (as you can see by the pile of logs), cook with a propane stove and all our power comes from a bank of solar panels. There's no running water but we do have an old-fashioned hand pump. I love washing dishes here as you can't beat the view of the lake from the kitchen window. Usually everyone takes off after dinner to avoid having to help with dishes so on top of the great view I get silence and an empty cottage as my reward. We have a record player powered off the solar panels and a pretty awesome record collection thanks to my brother and his friends. When the mood strikes me I can scrub crusty egg off the breakfast dishes to the sounds of Bob Marley, Abba, the Flashdance soundtrack or Frank Sinatra.

Snorkelling is what we do when hurling one's self off the dock gets old. It's no Fiji but it's still a neat perspective seeing everything under the water and definitely a bonus when someone spots a crayfish or a treasure of some sort. We had a campfire one night complete with hotdogs and s'mores. 

One night the sunset reflected off the clouds in a line on the edge and was all pinky on their fluffy undersides. The sky looked as if it was on fire underneath the clouds.

We found this little guy near the edge of the water. 

When I was a kid our little island was covered in wild blueberries. My mom would pick blueberries for the entire 2 weeks we spent up there every summer. She would make pancakes, cobblers, muffins and cakes with the blueberries and still come home with an ice cream tub full. Now that the trees have grown so much bigger there isn't as much sun now and it's rare to find more than a dozen berries on the island. The infestation of gypsy moths and their caterpillars isn't helping the situation either as they've decimated the bushes. This is the down-side of living in nature I guess. You have to take the good with the bad just like everything in life.

My favourite place to sit is on the stoop outside the kitchen. I can stare out at that lake and the far shore for hours if I had the time. This is where I took the sunset picture above. I like to think of myself as a liberated feminist with the best of them but here I relish the time to nurture my inner domestic. Washing dishes and clothes and hanging them up to dry and listening to kids' stories of what creature they saw is totally my cup of tea when I'm on our little island. If I could bottle this I would be rich...