The Lake

We left early on Friday to avoid the traffic. But in a city that's more sprawl than anything else, that's getting increasingly hard to do. Driving along back roads that used to be simply farm land, with nothing around but fields and the faint smell of "natural" fertilizer, and seeing complex after complex of cookie cutter houses and depressing strip malls made me want to escape the gerbil tendencies of this modern life forever.

All tolled, it took us about five hours to complete the trip. Considering it's only about 2.5 hours to get up north, I was tired, frustrated and sad when I got there. My grandmother's cottage was full of mouse poo, and we immediately started vacuuming, washing and washing some more.

After a good night's sleep, we got up and I started to tackle other things that needed cleaning. Cobwebs on the outside boards, cobwebs inside on the windows, cleaning up the bedrooms, vacuuming some more. Then, my RRBF and my brother patched the roof where it was leaking. There's something utterly fulfilling in a day of hard work where you feel good about cleaning up the mouse house in the dresser drawer. Feel like the building appreciates it when you wash out the floors with bleach and get rid of the dusty mould from a long winter of closed windows. And it makes me think that modern life caters too much to people having time for careers building on nothing more than virtual jobs in a virtual world.

The weather was luscious. A perfect mixture of sunshine and crisp wind. A wonderful combination of heat and cool breeze. There was a lot to do, and I'm glad we got a good start.

Then, by the time we got home I had broken out in some sort of strange rash. Who knows what it is, maybe poison ivy, but considering I've never had that in my life, and grew up at the cottage, I've got no idea what it actually is. Sigh. Can nothing in life be in balance?