Gratitude Sunday-a day at the beach

Joining Taryn today at Wooly Moss Roots for Gratitude Sunday:
Last night we decided that today would be a day at the beach. We live an hour and a half from Lake Huron and every summer it's on my to-do list to spend at least one day at the beach. I've had my Manifesto for Summer in the back of my mind the last few weeks since cutting my hours back at my job and going to the beach is high on my priority list for really living and enjoying summer. I know in my heart if I set Sunday aside as a day of rest it does me a world of good. Keeping the Sabbath, in the words of Martha Stewart, is a good thing.

It's a stony sort of beach. After the water are the stones, then the sand near the trees.

We sat on the beach for awhile and The Boy combed the water's edge for beach glass and interesting looking rocks. I knit and drank coffee while my husband tried to become comatose on a towel in the sand. The water was pretty cold so not so much with the swimming today.

On the way home,

we stopped in Stratford and poked around the shops.

Somehow after all that sun and sand and riding in a hot car I managed to make an edible dinner of baked chicken, rice and sauteed green beans and mushrooms.

Now sitting here at the beginning of a new week and the end of a day I feel grateful for:
*living close to a beach. It's not California but it's just as pretty and the sand is still warm and the water cool (mmm, cold!)
*ice cream on a park bench
*my new camera and growing skills
*beach-knitting, car-knitting and small projects like socks
*good food and plenty of it
*the sense of abundance I've been experiencing this week
*new books from a book store having it's closing sale
*talking to my girl almost every day this week and hearing her adventures in France and Germany
*green beans from the garden

Yarnalong: The Sock & the Power of Less

Joining Ginny today at Small Things for Yarnalong:

I just love the evening light in summer. When I'm at home in the city it reminds me of sunsets at the cottage and driving home from a day at the beach on Lake Huron. It puts me in that easy-going summer frame of mind even if the reality is that I have to go to work.
I'm still knitting away on the sock and still working on the heel, one row at a time as I have time. I'm a year round knitter but I definitely knit less in the summer and spend more time digging in the dirt in the gardens. Especially this year with more time at home to tend to all the gardens.
I finished Blossom Street Brides and it did not disappoint. I want to read another Debbie Macomber but I found these 2 books at the library and I'd like to finish them first before I treat myself to a little fiction. The first, Opening the Mind's Eye by Ian Robertson, is about how language and images are related. There's a great chapter about worry and which side of the brain it comes from and how it's a language-based problem. If you imagine what you're most afraid of instead of just worrying in words over and over again it can make the worry disappear. Interesting idea. I haven't delved too much into this book yet but I'll keep you posted.
The second one, The Power of Less by Leo Babauta, is about simplifying your life in every way from the amount of stuff you own to how you order your day to reducing commitments. Leo is the author of the blog Zen Habits. He suggests if one of the things that's driving you crazy is all the time you spend tidying up and dealing with all your stuff then challenge yourself to get rid of everything your own except 200 things. I've been talking about this book to my husband and son and we agreed to challenge ourselves to donating 200 things. So far we have a big pile of books, some clothing and extra kitchen stuff. I don't think its quite enough yet but its a great start.

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...

Gratitude Sunday-embracing and letting go

Joining Taryn today at Wooly Moss Roots for Gratitude Sunday:

For whatever reasons today the grass has seemed the greener, the sun warmer and the house more peaceful. I set out with one intention for this day-no work. No work means not doing things I think I should be doing but really don't want to do such as the incessant tidying I seem to do, anything on my to do list, and cleaning. I set out intending to read until I was done reading, putter in the garden if I felt like it and make stuff if the spirit moved me. Today has been a good day and I feel ready to tuck into cleaning, working, and getting the stuff done on my to do list...tomorrow.
Some things I feel particularly grateful for today and this week are:
::seeing my girl off on her epic trip to Germany with her Oma and Aunt. Knowing she arrived safely, she's all good and having a great time. I love hearing from her each day and learning about the high points of the day: things that include schnitzel, pretzels and climbing stuff.
::learning to use my shiny new DSLR camera and finally getting the pictures I had in my head.
:: reading until I'm done (had I mentioned this already?) it's a big one. I'm reading Debbie Macomber's Blossom Street Brides and loving the knitting she tucks into her story.
::weeding and sorting out the oft-forgotten perennial bed. It usually gets left till last on the list of garden beds to be tended to. It's not very exciting right now as the previous owners only planted things that bloom in spring and fall and it's situated smack-dab in the middle of the backyard where no one but me sees it. I usually expend my time and energy on the front yard beds and the vegetable garden.
::breakfast out with the 3 of us and my father in law. I love love love breakfast out.
::getting in a good run after dinner. I ran more than I walked and I feel pretty good right now.
::only having to go to my job 2 days this week, the other 3 days I am free to devote to my own creative projects that will hopefully bring in some money to contribute to the household finances.
What about you? What are you feeling grateful for today and this week?

Indulge me in a little philosophy and deep thinking for a moment...

Last week when we were at the cottage His Lordship decided that we should go bush-wacking in search of a couple of tiny lakes he had found on a similar expedition. It had been a cool week and the kids were getting bored so we headed into the forest.
Not a great picture above but I was swatting mosquitos while trying to capture the depth and greenness of the forest. You get the idea-it's pretty dense, no trails and really far from well, anything.
We never did find the lakes as the mosquitos were unrelenting and the kids had had enough after not too long. I don't blame them.
We did however find these:

Two rocks balanced on a bit of outcropping of rock. You can't see it very well but there's a 3rd little rock acting as a shim to help keep the other 2, bigger rocks steady. I keep thinking about this pile of moss and lichen-covered rocks in the middle of nowhere. The forest is pretty dense around these rocks and our cottage is pretty far from anywhere and anything. And I wonder who piled these rocks like this? and when? and why? I mean we make little rock piles all over the place now for fun. You see little inukshuks all down highway 400 to cottage country. But these rocks are different somehow. I keep thinking about them and I wish I could travel back in time and see who so carefully placed these rocks in this place.
There was logging here 100 years ago so I can hypothesize that one of the loggers is responsible for this and maybe it was to mark where they'd been or something.
Imagine, this pile of rocks has been there for 100 years.
I guess it's just one of those things that I'll never know the answer to but it sits in my mind and I keep turning it over to see if I can figure it out from a different angle or understand why I keep returning to it.