NEW YEAR AT FIVE ACRES

The calendar may have flipped over to 2021, but here at Five Acres, everything is much the same. Outdoors, the land is blanketed with perfectly white snow, although I notice today there are tracks of various creatures: me, the deer, coyote, and my next door neighbour Cathy's dog, Laila. Although Cathy is my next door neighbour, it's still a one kilometre drive from her place to mine. Laila covers that distance on foot in about one hot minute when she smells that something interesting has walked over my land. She's like Sherlock Holmes in black fur with a red bell around her neck. I'm not a fan of getting cold, and most of my forays outside are to bring in more firewood from the carport, but I like to look out the window and marvel at the changing scenery. Down at the boathouse, I've started insulating, but naturally I bought the wrong size insulation batts. I plan to use them anyway but I'm going to need vapour barrier to secure them in place. There's not a lot I can do down there in winter, but I thought I'd post a couple of photos, before and after, of the boathouse interior. Once the insulation is complete, I'll probably be fine working down there, and soon I'll be able to call in the electrician to install permanent light fixtures, which will make it much easier to work, because I won't need to plug in my collection of trouble lights and can use the electric outlets for plugging in power tools. Speaking of power tools, Cathy dropped by today. She's borrowing my chain saws for the remainder of the winter. It was so strange to be talking to another human face to face. We were outside in the carport, masked, gloved and distanced, while she practised her chainsaw skills. She got the hang of it quite quickly and she plans to take down a couple of small pine trees tomorrow. She's a real outdoors person, and she and Laila pretty much hike the back forty every day. Here's a photo of the boathouse interior, facing west, taken the day I started working on it.

And here's a photo of the boathouse interior, facing east, the day before I started insulating. This may illustrate why I'm totally comfortable being in the boathouse now, and why it creeped me right out at first. Three and a half months from now, I'll have lived here for two years. It's been an excellent experience, and I was reminding my nephew Philippe the other day how I came to be here. He played a significant part in that and I'm always grateful to him for his wisdom.