Day Two: All Day Rain

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Autumn is harvest season in Ontario. Yesterday we shopped for Kamut flour, and found Bob’s Mill Kamut flour at the grocery store, very, very, very expensive. But I want to try it to make sure I like bread made with it, before we buy any in bulk. While wandering the store, Attila spied bushels of sweet red peppers from Ontario, for $9.99 each. We had to have one of course. Then we had to preserve the peppers, of course, a bushel of peppers won’t keep fresh long enough for us to eat them all. What to do?

Last night Attila chopped onions, fresh garlic, celery, and red peppers. In a big heavy bottomed stock pot I set to work making Tomato Red Pepper Sauce, it took until bed time to get it boiled down to the correct consistency, so I left it overnight on the range and returned to the project this morning. A dozen 500 ml mason jars and lids were sterilized in boiling water, then filled with the sauce which had been boiled again this morning. We will freeze this dozen jars of Tomato Pepper Sauce, for use on homemade pizza and spaghetti dinners. We have enough peppers to make two more batches of sauce, which will yield three dozen jars of frozen Tomato Pepper Sauce. We will enjoy some lovely quick meals this winter!

When I purchased the new MacBook Air, there was an offer with the purchase for an HP printer for $19.99. I could not resist and bought the printer. I haven’t been all that happy with the Epson printer I bought a few years ago, it was difficult to configure and some of the features just will not work, like scanning via WiFi. I gave up fiddling with it, and when I need to scan I attach a small zip drive into the printer and scan files onto that, then move them from the zip drive onto my computer. This is painful at times. The new HP printer is being setup this morning and the setup is extremely easy. Time will tell if the printer works as well and the setup was simple. I have a lot of scanning to do over the next few days, so I hope it works well!

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Knowing that today would be an all-day-rain kind of day, we enjoyed a camp fire last night, the sky slowly clouding over as the stars began to wink from the heavens. With the bulk of the dead wood burned, our camp fires have become small affairs, burning gathered twigs and split cedar logs. The cedar, which last summer would not burn as each log was pulled from the pile of logs, dead trees and earth, has now dried sufficiently, in its neatly stacked rows, to burn well and relatively quickly.

We retired to Grace The Trailer early, to watch a youtube video on the computer, which was charging with electricity provided by the generator. The computer is new, a bottom of the line MacBook Air that was on sale, saving about $500 on the purchase. The purchase was reserved online, and the trip to the city was made Friday evening to pick it up, so that it could be used during our vacation. The only problem with my 2012 MacBook Air was that the battery had died completely, necessitating that the power cord be continuously connected. If the power cord became disconnected, the computer instantly died, which caused all sorts of issues that had to be addressed to get it up and going again. The cost quoted for a battery replacement was $350, with no guarantee that something else might go wrong with the aging technology. Upgrading to a 2017 model was an extra $649, clearly a better investment, which will take us through another four to six years of reliable service. It is now possible to write journal entries on the laptop while we are staying at the Rideau Camp, because it will run on the battery, which can be recharged with the new portable generator. We are getting dangerously close to glamping here, dangerously close.

Friday night was very cold, with a possibility that the temperature would dip down close to 0C. We slept at Mist Cottage on Friday night. But Saturday night was much warmer, and although we do not have a thermometer, we think it might only have dipped to 12-15C, which is lovely for sleeping.

The weather report last week warned that today would be cold and rainy. In accordance, plans have been made to visit the Middleville Museum. The museum is in a little village close to where my GGGG Grandparents took a land grant when they came here from Scotland in 1820. It will be interesting to see if there is any archival material that will help me in my research. My Grandpa told me he visited the area at the beginning of World War One, and was given a very cold reception by the family, his mother’s cousins, and possibly his father’s as well. I have wondered if this had to do with property rights and inheritance, or if it had to do with the possibility that GGG Grandpa might have been a bigamist, with a wife and family of twelve children in Parry Sound, and a wife, affluence, and property in Lanark County, it had to do with both. The bigamist theory is very unpopular with my male relatives, the females have very little trouble considering it as a possibility. There is insufficient data to either prove or disprove the theory. I am quite fond of my ancestors, regardless of their possible failings and troubles, they were brave, the line from Middleville were hard working people who hacked a living out of inhospitable bush, no small task, particularly since they were born and bred in the city of Glasgow, with no rural skills at all when they arrived on their land grants in Upper Canada.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

It is 9 a.m. and raining hard. The sky is a solid sheet of grey cloud, the forest is dripping continuously. We expect this to continue until tomorrow morning.

Quote

“The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.”
Joan Baez
1941 –

Sort of explains why people seem to prefer their cell phones and social media to actually talking to one another face-to-face.